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VIII. 1961: PUTTING PEACEMAKERS TO THE TEST
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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CHAPTER EIGHT 1961: PUTTING PEACEMAKERS TO THE TEST To prepare the largest possible majority for the "yes" vote in the 8 January 1961 referendum in Algeria, the territory's tiny group of European liberals worked hand-in-hand with Muslims as well as with de Gaulle's agents Morin and the Protestant Coulet. On the eve of the referendum,two team-workers at the Clos Salembier hostel in Algiers, Denise Duboscq and Pierrette Faivre, wrote to Jacques Beaumont and the CIMADE executive in Paris.1 They had stayed inside their quarters duringthe December rioting intheir district, they reported, doing their best to maintain a strictly neutral attitude as Muslim and European crowds fought in the streets outside. Afterwards, when they asked what had provoked the cries of "Algerie musulmane!" and "FLN vaincra!," their Muslim friends had told them they had listened too long to European students crying out "Algerie fran9aise!" by day and night. The street fighting of December had clearly widened the gulf between Algeria's two communities, the women went on to report. For most Muslims, the referendum was too late in coming; substantial abstentions were thus expected; if the youth were intoxicated, it was because the franchise had at last been granted them. The Europeans, meanwhile, were in a bitter and equally volatile mood. Regular contributorsto Reforme revealed their voting intentions as the referendum deadline approached. Roger Mehl indicated his reluctant commitment to the "yes" side;2 Andre Philip, true to his reputation as a free if somewhat cantankerous spirit, rejected both "yes" and "no" options, indicating that, to gain his affirmative vote, de Gaulle would have to offer a specific negotiating position on Algeria before 8 January or at least to release Ben Bella andpunishthe paratroopers who had fired on Muslim demonstrators in Algiers in December.3 Rene Courtin, who was at the time presiding over the French chapter of the Mouvement europeen, was resolutely committed to the "no" campaign. He was challenged in this by the Protestant diplomat Rene Massigli who had resigned from the Vichy administration to serve de Gaulle and Free France during the war. Massigli suggested that Courtin's opposition was motivated by a refusal to accept the idea of Algerian self-determination. A massive "yes" vote, in Massigli's view, would endFLN speculation about France's intentions and allow the president to move towards a liberal, pragmatic, solution in 195 196 The Call of Conscience Algeria while containing both Ultras and extreme Algerian nationalists.4 In explaininghis decision to vote "yes," editor Finet conceded to the readers of Reforme that he was influenced in part by the tradition of his Huguenot forebears. As a Christian, he would cast his ballot in favour of maintaining peaceful relations between Algeria'stwo communitieseven in the face of evidence that the myth of fraternization was now dead. Tragically, 9,000,000 Muslims had once longed to be fully French only to discover that this passion was not reciprocated. Meanwhile the zeal to remain French among Algeria's Europeans was, alas, based on nothingmorethan theimpulse of their chromosomes! Unfortunately, Frenchand Algerian nationalismswere now both driven by visceral feeling. Only de Gaulle seemed capable of inspiring in both groups a commitment to rise above the passions thatdivided them. Elie-Georges Berreby, apied-noir who had contributed a number of articles to Reforme during the conflict, took exception to the tendency of the Frenchpressto characterizethe European community asuniformly committed either to the Ultra or the activistes' cause when in fact so many were, like himself, supporters of the kind of genuine integration proposed by Maurice Viollette in 1935. As Berreby saw it, the indigenous population of Algeria which had heretoforehad no fatherland of its own had been seeking to be part of France. If denied this option, it would surely find its ownpatrie. Like others on both ends of the political spectrum, Jacques Soustelle denounced the referendum as a thinly disguised plebiscite which de Gaulle was bound to win, not because of the merit of the question put before the electorate but because the president had threatened to resign if the "yes" side did not win.5 When it was announced, the anticipated massive victory for the "yes" in metropolitan France was balanced by an overwhelming rejection on the part of the pieds-noirs; and a "yes" vote by Algeria's Muslims was in large measure cancelled out by substantial abstentions in response to an FLN boycott. The co-editors of Tant qit 'ilfait jour were understandably bitter...