Even North Africa specialists locate the war's origins in France's
failure to live up to its liberal ideals, squandering opportunities
to fulfill promises to promote Algeria's Muslim majority from
second-class citizenship. They and their readers can then see
themselves in a better light by remembering the war as a fight to
reclaim the true France by seeing that right was done to the
Algerians. The real adversaries then were the demons in the French
psyche, which made many ready to resort to any means to hold on to
Algeria. This explains why the French take an almost prurient
interest in supposedly taboo topics like the use of torture in
interrogations, since the campaign against a "dirty war" was one they
can claim to have won by finally conceding independence to Algeria.
From this perspective, peace was a continuation by other
means--foreign aid, cultural exchanges, teachers, and technicians
performing national service in Algeria--of the only struggle ever
worth waging: for the God of Reason and the Rights of Man (or,
another version, for continued French economic and cultural
influence, part of la gloire of a reborn great power).

It is understandable then that, more than three decades later, the
French are prepared to intervene to support secular and republican
principles in their former possession, even if it means opposing the
winners of Algeria's first free elections. The military regime that
usurped this mandate must be given a chance--both Gaullists and
Socialists argue--or there will be no hope for democracy, economic
development, and (not least) continued French influence in the chaos
and intolerance that would attend an FIS victory. Whoever holds
power, Algeria's rapid population growth, inadequate resources, and
an industrial sector designed along Stalinist lines will require more
foreign trade and investment, not a rejection of all things Western.
Above all, a mass emigration of Algeria's relatively well-off,
educated elite would deprive the country of precisely those people it
most needs to surmount these problems, while causing an exodus of
biblical proportions toward southern Europe.

The French acknowledge the irony involved in backing the Algerian
military and remnants of the old revolutionary elite against a new
insurgency. What most do not realize is that supporters of another
government in Algiers forty years ago began by using these same
arguments. Though few now care to remember, these were not just
marginal figures like the European colonists, renegade army officers,
and right-wing extremists, but also numbered some of France's
foremost socialists, liberals, and former resistance fighters. Like
their contemporary counterparts, everyone from the communists to Jean
Marie Le Pen (already a voluble member of the National Assembly)
pointed to population growth and limited resources as requiring
closer connections between France and Algeria, whatever wrongs had
been committed in the past. Though the colonists came in for
criticism, all agreed that their expulsion would cripple the
country--and for very much the same reason the Algerian elite is now
judged indispensable.

However much they differed on who was to blame for the war and how
far reforms had to go to end it, both left and right agreed that the
worst course would be to yield power outright to their adversaries.
The FLN were then seen not as Algerian nationalists but as Muslim
fanatics seeking to eradicate foreign influences and form the
vanguard of an Arab world united against the West. So when the
Defense Ministry's official review--Revue Militaire
d'Information--ran a special issue on Algeria in March 1956, its
editorial asserted that the revolt was motivated by a religious
appeal--a "holy war, the terrible jihad of Islam"--and had found a
popular response as a "revenge against the crusades." Similarly, the
resident minister's first "Directive Générale" to French officers in
Algeria, dated May 19, 1956, argued that

"what is happening in Algeria is but one aspect of a gigantic world
conflict in which certain Muslim countries, before collapsing into
disorder, seek by Hitlerian methods to establish an aggressive
dictatorship over a part of the African continent."

Concessions to such implacable adversaries would therefore amount to
appeasement. This was not just a matter of military excess: In the
Foreign Ministry's briefing book on Algeria--what they called their
"bible"--the authors maintained that while, "In its official
statements and position papers directed at international public
opinion the [FLN] is careful not to appear in any way fanatical", in
its actions it "reveals its true nature as a furious wave of
fanaticism and xenophobia directed against the West." In words that
anticipated much contemporary talk about "conflicts of
civilizations", the authors concluded that this "Pan-Islamic" and
"Pan-Arab" insurrection in Algeria took on global significance as
"one part of the fight by the peoples of Africa and Asia. . .against
the West."

Liberals and conservatives alike therefore could excuse the excesses
of the army as justified by the magnitude of the danger. To American
arguments that repression was radicalizing the resistance movement
and that France should instead open a dialogue with their more
moderate opponents, they replied that continued attacks during
negotiations revealed either the bad faith of the rebels or their
inability to conclude and carry out a peace agreement. Similarly,
opponents of the FIS now drown out calls for a dialogue by claiming
that its political leadership either will not or can not control the
insurgents.

If the French today advance many of the same arguments that they made
forty years ago, it does not necessarily mean that they are all
fallacious. Indeed, one might even assert that the most die-hard
defenders of Algérie française have in some ways been proven
right--and reading conservative papers like Le Figaro one can
sometimes detect a note of bitter satisfaction. But from an
historical perspective we can see that they are right in the same way
that a stopped clock is stunningly accurate exactly twice a day,
because the underlying attitudes toward Arabs and Islam from which
many of their views arise are virtually unchanged after forty years.
Now and in the future we shall do better with an analysis that allows
for moving parts, complexity, and paradoxes.

Some arguments obviously say more about French insecurities than
their adversaries' shortcomings--like the charge that FIS members are
incorrigible xenophobes who want to turn back the clock. In the 1950s
the French said much the same thing about the FLN--at the same time
that they themselves were making a major issue of preserving
traditional French village life from the insidious influence of Coca
Cola and James Dean. As it turned out, the Algerians' headlong,
state-directed industrialization after independence showed that they
were only too eager to "modernize." Even during the war the French
were forced to admit that their opponents had a knack for exploiting
new technologies in the propaganda war--whether in Algeria itself,
with clandestine transmitters and transistor radios, or in Europe and
America, by persuading television journalists to begin filming the
first living-room war. The Islamists have also surprised observers
with their sophisticated use of electronic communications, much as
exiled Iranian mullahs made themselves heard in the 1970s with audio
tapes. Moreover, the FIS has had considerable success in recruiting
among the young, well-educated, and technically-trained. In each
case, Algerians have embraced some elements of Western "modernity"
while resisting others. Even if the FIS aimed to shut out Western
influence it would hardly be possible, since Algeria's proximity to
Europe would make it even tougher to control new means of
communications than it has been for the Iranians, whose efforts have
been thwarted by the satellite dish.

Another leitmotif in Western attitudes toward Arabs is that they are
a volatile, excitable people who need a heavy, steadying hand from
outside to maintain a semblance of order. During the Algerian War
official propaganda constantly stressed the supposed lawlessness in
Algeria before the colonial conquest began in 1830, implying that it
would quickly return to barbarism but for the French. They were not
above deliberately distorting history to make the point--as when one
official, reading a briefing paper for the French cause, complained
that it presented Algeria under Muslim rule "as a relatively
organized state, rather than the anarchic situation upon which we
really ought to insist." Nowadays many assume that Algeria will be
plunged into disorder without continued Western aid and
Western-minded elites. For the moment, they can point to the factious
state of the Islamists to support that case.

Negotiating With Insurgents

Yet if the rebels do not present a united front, neither do their
adversaries--not in Algiers, nor in Paris. Just as French moderates
were often sabotaged by military and colonialist hardliners in
attempts to settle the Algerian War, President Liamine Zeroul is
undermined by members of his own military when he tries to talk to
the FIS. When French diplomats under Alain Juppé began to favor
negotiations they were stymied by the opposition of then Interior
Minister Charles Pasqua, reprising the Foreign and Interior
Ministries' roles during the original Algerian drama. The terrorist
Secret Army Organization formed by French colonists to thwart the
1962 peace settlement may yet have its counterpart in the Algerian
death squads that are already carrying out reprisals against the
Islamists.