In this fascinating account of the french army’s elaborate strategies to maintain Algeria as part of France, Terrence Peterson, a british historian, pulls a wealth of detail from the army’s archives. The french officers tried “Pacification” in Algeria to expunge the painful colonial disaster of the Vietnamese triumph at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 where they lost 2,293 soldiers killed and nearly 11,000 captured. But forty years after they lost Algeria, one of those french officer’s writings on “Pacification” would reemerge, embraced by US General David Petraeus in his catastrophic policy which destroyed Iraq in 2007.
Victoria Brittain: What was the spark which led you into a deep study of this French colonial war and the concept of Pacification through remodelling civilian society.
Terrence Peterson: In a cliché kind of way, the person who sparked my interest in the Algerian War was Frantz Fanon. I started graduate school focused on Vichy France and the complicated ways that its anti-Jewish laws played out in North Africa. But I ended up reading Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism (L’an V de la révolution algérienne, 1959), where he recounts the really fascinating ways that Algerian women in the FLN chose to wear the veil or not at various moments to avoid suspicion and confound French security measures. I was hooked. I did some exploratory research in French archives and found that the French Army launched all sorts of social programs targeting Algerian women during the eight years of the war. But I also found all sorts of other programs aimed at young people, rural men, veterans, etc. This raised really interesting questions for me: how did these programs fit together? What was their end goal? How can we reconcile armed social work, which presents itself as humanitarian, with the notorious forms of violence that were the army’s response to the Algerian national liberation movement?
As I soon found, French officers themselves were not quite sure; they were working this out on the ground and drew on all sorts of ideas to do so. The book emerged from my own struggle to understand just what this concept of Pacification was and how it emerged and evolved over the course of the war. We think first of the most overt forms of violence like torture when we think of the Algerian War. But the archives revealed that there was a lot more going on with the French response to Algeria’s liberation movement.
Victoria Brittain: In the huge quantity of French government archives, and Algerian, which you reference, are there particularly rich seams which took you deep into the French colonial mindset. And did particular characters absorb you?
Terrence Peterson: So striking in the archival record is the sense of historicity that French colonial officials and officers felt: they seemed to understand that the FLN and the spiralling war of national liberation it had launched were something unprecedented well before it was clear Algeria would win independence. Their response was to try to sort out what was so new, so that they could rein in the forces of change. The colonial government and the French Army both launched all sorts of new experimental institutions to grapple with the “Algerian Question”—i.e. why the FLN seemed so successful at drawing support in Algeria and abroad—and the archives contain all sorts of insightful debates, reflections, fallings-out, and failed projects that help us understand the colonial mindset and how it evolved as decolonization unfolded.
These institutions were also full of all sorts of strange and colourful characters; particularly within the army’s Psychological Warfare Bureau, which became the epicentre of this effort by the mid-point of the war. One was Jean Servier, who was an ethnographer but also really just a grifter who hoped to capitalize on his knowledge of rural Algeria to make it big in policy circles. Another was Colonel Michel Goussault, a fiery anticommunist who led propaganda operations during France’s invasion of the Suez in 1956 and then became head of the Psywar Bureau in Algiers. I found these figures really intriguing not just because their ambitions produced such rich paper trails in the archives, but because their big personalities led them to clash bitterly in ways that let me read those papers trails against one another really productively.
“The defeats discredited French military doctrines”
Victoria Brittain: Can you talk about the deep schisms you found within the army. Also, please talk about the continuing impact of the 1954 French defeat at Dien Bien Phu on the former Indochina hands, including former Vietminh prisoners, recycled into another colonial war.
Terrence Peterson: Popular accounts of the Algerian War often speak of the French Army in monolithic terms, but in fact when the FLN launched its national liberation struggle in 1954 the French military establishment was already in crisis. The defeats on French soil in 1940 and then again at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 discredited dominant French military doctrines. Mid-career officers like captains and colonels felt strongly that military leaders were stuck fighting outdated kinds of wars. This sense of crisis eventually helped drive the military coups in 1958 and 1961, but throughout the war it also drove a search for new techniques and strategic frameworks. Often the officers at the forefront of this effort to hash out new military doctrines were precisely those midlevel officers: career soldiers who had fought in World War Two and then in the Malagasy Uprising or in Indochina or other colonial warzones after 1945 before arriving in Algeria.
Amidst the Algerian War, this debate erupted as the French Army struggled to gain headway against the FLN for the first few years of the war. And on top of that, there were other cultural clashes, between Indigenous or Algerian Affairs officers who embodied the traditions and culture of the Armée d’Afrique and the strike forces composed largely of Indochina veterans. Suffice to say, it made for a tumultuous and often contentious atmosphere within the army.
Victoria Brittain: Can you describe the current of thought in the military which saw global communism as the spark which lit anti-colonial nationalism across Africa, as it had, they thought, in Indochina. And also their concept which saw France, Europe, and their colonies on the fault-line of ideological struggle between the US and the Sino/Soviet bloc.
Terrence Peterson: By 1956, a strong minority consensus emerged from all this debate over doctrine and strategy. The advocates of this current of thought, which is often called the “Doctrine of Revolutionary Warfare,” argued that the wars of decolonization in Indochina and Algeria were not just similar in appearance, but were literally linked, as two fronts of one vast global assault on the west by communists who had mastered the techniques of ideological and psychological warfare. This idea that a communist conspiracy might lay behind any kind of anticolonial uprising was not new—it had roots back into the 1920s. But it took on a new power by the mid-1950s because French strategic thinkers could see how France’s position as a global hegemon was being squeezed by the Sino/Soviet bloc on one hand and America’s newfound status as global superpower on the other.
Revolutionary war theorists like Colonel Charles Lacheroy and Captain Jacques Hogard read anticolonial liberation movements as an outgrowth of this rapidly shifting geopolitical order, rather than attributing any agency or power to colonized peoples themselves. They saw the possibility that the French empire might collapse as apocalyptic: it meant not just the end of France’s global power, but perhaps even the end of France, which stood to be swallowed up by one of the rising superpowers. Their diagnosis was wrong in many ways, but it mattered because it made Algeria into an existential problem to them: France would either forge a new order capable of withstanding the pressures of a shifting global order or fade away.
“The FLN sniffed the whole thing out almost immediately”
Victoria Brittain: How can you explain Jean Servier’s surprising influence inside the military – a youngish ethnographer of no great renown? His ambitious paper on founding “a re-invigorated colonial state” with new “political elites” formed might easily have disappeared without trace. Actually that Pilote1 got off the ground is quite a surprise. Was there maybe something of a wish for something different from the violence, torture, depravity, rounding up and imprisoning entire communities etc of the old colonial normal?
Terrence Peterson: Jean Servier is such a strange character, in large part because he was not particularly innovative or talented but still came to exercise profound influence over French strategy. At the literal start of the war—November 1st, 1954—he briefly captured the media’s attention by rallying other civilians in the city of Arris against the FLN’s opening attacks, and he was a trained ethnographer who specialized in Berber languages. But his involvement with the French military command was murky. He did all kinds of odd jobs for the colonial administration, and he even popped up as part of a disastrous operation to arm a pro-French counter-maquis in Kabylie in 1956. Historian Neil MacMaster has shown pretty convincingly that there is evidence he colluded with Colonel Goussault (the head of the Psywar Bureau) to formulate the Operation Pilote plan and then sneak it past reticent colonial administrators.
That is all probably true, but I also think Servier was just a good grifter: he met Goussault in Paris at a training session on revolutionary warfare, and he filled various roles in the administration. In other words, he got around a lot, and he had his finger on the pulse of what military commanders and colonial officials wanted. And what they wanted by early 1957 was a way to mobilize Algerians themselves in an effort to rebuild the colonial order. This was not necessarily an alternative to violence, but a complement to it. I think Servier gained such a prominent role because he proposed a plan perfectly tailored to the needs of colonial administrators and military commanders. And, of course, as soon as he no longer seemed necessary, they cut him out.
Victoria Brittain: Can you describe the workings of Operation Pilote and Orleansville as planned, and the actual poor results your research shows.
Terrence Peterson: Operation Pilote, which was this test operation launched in early 1957, drew not a small amount of inspiration from the actions of the FLN itself. The idea at its core was that the French Army could create a clandestine, grassroots, pro-French political organization by coopting the traditional village councils that governed rural Algerian life, known as the djemâa. In doing so, they aimed to rebuild the colonial state from the ground up. The main agents of this action, as Servier and French military commanders envisioned it, were supposed to be secret agents recruited locally, trained by the Psychological Warfare Bureau, and then covertly reinserted into the countryside. The army sought to extend this action by targeting women through itinerant social welfare teams and by recruiting men into local self-defence militias. This looked a bit like how the FLN or even the Vietminh sought to establish revolutionary counter-states against colonial rule, so Servier and his military counterparts were convinced that this system would allow them to take control over rural Algerian society.
The operation, however, immediately ran up against the realities of rural society, which neither Servier nor the officers of the Psychological Warfare Bureau really understood. They struggled to recruit agents, the men they did recruit did not have the skills to carry out their mission, and they correctly remained quite mistrustful of what the army was trying to have them do. Djemâas relied on consensus-building and longstanding interfamily relationships, and so they could really never be coopted in the way officers envisioned. And, of course, the FLN sniffed the whole thing out almost immediately and began assassinating or kidnapping agents. In the end, this grassroots political infrastructure never materialized.
“The operation’s foundational assumptions was faulty”
Victoria Brittain: So why in 1957 did Generals Salan and Allard then order more Pilotes? Did they think the failures were just because organisation was poor and that Algérie Nouvelle was the only conceivable future? Do you think the army leaders were so remote from Algeria’s realities on the ground that they did not understand the society, or the FLN, or the French settlers?
Terrence Peterson: I think it is all these things. The conception of Operation Pilote already demonstrated just how poorly military commanders understood Algerian society, as did other operations like the ham-fisted propaganda campaign to encourage pieds noirs to “make a Muslim friend”—something that elicited only hate mail. The high command—Generals Salan and Allard—were all in Algiers, quite removed from what was happening on the ground, which meant they could not see the failings of the operation firsthand. There was a tendency for the tone of reports about the operation to get more optimistic as they moved up the chain of command, and I think military commanders had a sense of hubris that their methods were bound to work out over time, precisely because they had such a superficial view of Algerian society and grievances driving support for the FLN. The army had struggled to hash out an operational doctrine in response to the FLN for years, and now finally Salan had something that fitted all his ideological preferences. I think the other powerful factor that led Salan and others to ignore the failures of Pilote and extend it elsewhere was the infighting. French Army officers proved just as reticent as Algerians to embrace the tactics and techniques of the psywar bureau, and it was easy for Salan and the rest of the high command to blame them—rather than the operation’s faulty foundational assumptions about rural Algerian society—for its shortcomings.
Victoria Brittain: Can you talk about the relative successes of Engage in terms of the targets of Women and Youth?
Terrence Peterson: So, if the effort to covertly take over village councils fell flat, one area where Pilote and subsequent operations did seem to gain traction was in its efforts to engage women and youths. French colonial officials saw both groups as potential levers to transform Algerian society along French lines, and so they created an array of programs such as itinerant teams of doctors and social workers targeted at rural women and youth sports clubs for children and young adults. Their aim was roughly similar to that of the network of political agents envisioned for Pilote: collect intelligence, disseminate propaganda, and cultivate a local pro-French elite. The key difference was that Algerians actually interacted with these programs, and as a result the army shifted them to the centre of its Pacification strategy.
At the same time, we have to be really critical about what that engagement meant. For French officers, this participation was purely an indicator of success. Algerians, however, engaged in deeply strategic and subversive ways. Medical care, for example, was in short supply, and women seemed happy to bring themselves and their children to itinerant doctors while ignoring all the propaganda that accompanied such visits. They also performed French stereotypes right back at army personnel, claiming total ignorance of any FLN movements or presence when questioned by virtue of the fact that they were oppressed, cloistered women (which certainly was rarely the case). The war created profound hardships for Algerians: that meant not just food shortages or collapsed local economies, but for many rural communities it also meant the French Army forcibly relocated them into camps. Algerians in those situations had little choice but to rely on these scant army services for vital goods.
The archives unsurprisingly convey an almost entirely French perspective on the war, but even there you can detect a rising current of hostility on the part of Algerians who engaged with these programs. And when a wave of popular protests swept Algerian cities in December 1960, French military commanders were shocked to find that the protesters came from the same demographics and even the very same communities they targeted with these programs.
“To be harki was a means to earn a salary”
Victoria Brittain: How do you explain the successful recruitment of 56,000 harkis? What was their contribution to the French control efforts? And the impact on their society?
Terrence Peterson: This is a big question and historians like François-Xavier Hautreaux have done it much better justice than I. The short answer, however, is that Algerians joined the harkis and other units like the Self-Defense Groups for all sorts of complicated reasons, and that ideological loyalty to the colonial state most likely motivated only a small minority. The war provoked massive misery and unemployment, and often engagement as a harki was a means to earn a salary or family allowances. Sometimes it was a means to pursue intercommunal rivalries or defend one’s community from outside encroachment. Multiple ALN commanders recounted how enlisting their forces as a harka or Self-Defense Group allowed them to gain the passes they needed to move about freely from the French government.
The reality in rural Algeria for much of the war was that communities felt themselves pulled between not just the French Army and the FLN, but often an array of local strongmen courted by both, and rural Algerians had to make tough choices. And the French Army also endeavoured to mobilize as many Algerians in the struggle against the FLN as possible, both armed and unarmed. This became a central pillar of French strategy by the middle of the war, and it meant that lots of Algerians fought under the French flag, either in local defence roles or in offensive combat operations, as was the case with many harkis. Inevitably this fostered resentment and suspicion across Algerian society and helped drive violent reprisals and purges at the end of the war. Definitive numbers are difficult to establish, but it’s clear that thousands of Algerians including harkis perceived as being too close to the colonial state lost their lives, and tens of thousands more fled to France.
Victoria Brittain: Can you talk about the period of autumn 1961 when the wind down of Pacification was well underway to its January 1962 end, although there were contradictory separate decisions being made by local army commanders.
Terrence Peterson: In April 1961, Generals Raoul Salan and Maurice Challe and a group of other conspirators attempted to stage a coup from Algiers to prevent President Charles de Gaulle from negotiating Algerian independence. The coup failed and suddenly Pacification and its affiliated doctrines were out of fashion—after all, Salan and Challe had been two of the biggest proponents of this strategy. The army rebranded its efforts as a humanitarian project to prepare Algeria for independence, but at the same time it did not really have any operational framework to replace Pacification, and so many local commanders just kept on doing what they had been doing until the army demobilized the personnel who ran Pacification programs on the ground.
As I argue, this, too, is an important part of the story of Pacification. On one hand, it allowed the French Army to whitewash its campaign in Algeria as a modernizing, democratizing, nation-building project. On the other hand, the coup and its aftermath allowed officers to claim that Pacification had worked until politics intervened to cut its gains short. Both of these myths help to obscure the violence and the failures of Pacification and ensure that many of its practices lived on after the war, and the French Army courted this outcome directly. One of the very last things they did in January 1962 is host a final eight-day propaganda tour for friendly military attachés from 23 nations to show off the army’s ostensible accomplishments in Algeria.
“French Army trained officers from Portugal, the U.S...”
Victoria Brittain: Strangest of all, from the distance of today, is how this French military experience had a highly respected afterlife in later Pacification programmes such as those of Spanish and Portuguese military against anti-colonial independence movements in Africa, the Americans in Vietnam, the US General David Petraeus in the catastrophic destruction of Iraq, and even France’s post-colonial misadventures in West Africa. Can you talk about how you think men like Aussaresses, Trinquier, Galula carried this off? How much was it their individual charming of US military and academic institutions, and how much a French national scheme to project this version of what many saw even then as a national disaster?
Terrence Peterson: I think the persistence of French counterinsurgency is a result of a deliberate campaign on the part of the French military to cultivate influence. Even today, people talk about officers like Galula and (to a lesser extent) Trinquier as innovative, transformative thinkers, and in many ways that is just taking these men at their word; buying into the myths they spun about themselves. In reality, the French Army poured enormous effort into cultivating affinities and influence with friendly militaries. They trained lots of high-ranking officers from other militaries at the École Supérieure de Guerre in Paris from the 1920s onward in ways that built up a preference for French strategic thought. And throughout the Algerian War, the French military partnered with foreign armies to train officers in Algeria at the military school in Arzew, near Oran. In 1957 and especially 1959 the French Army trained dozens of officers from Portugal, Spain, the U.S., Argentina, and elsewhere in Algeria as part of a concerted effort to win sympathy for the French cause.
These efforts paid dividends because they occurred when Pacification appeared to be most successful, ensuring that even though the war ended disastrously for the French, they could still stake a claim to the emerging field of Cold War counterinsurgency. They did not offer anything radically new or inventive in comparison to other countries like Britain that were fashioning similar practices at the same time. But French officers did capture the zeitgeist of the moment in their doctrines and used that to successfully market their methods abroad. In essence, they built an audience, and this made it easy for entrepreneurial former soldiers like Galula and Trinquier to market their own version of these ideas just a few years later. The most important thing to remember when reading David Galula is that he really just offers a warmed-over version of a failed doctrine tailored to appeal to American sensibilities. With Galula, as with Pacification writ large, we have to take French officers’ claims about what they were doing and how Algerians experienced it, extremely critically.
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