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IX. 1962: THE SPIRITUAL COST OF A PROBLEMATIC PEACE
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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CHAPTER NINE 1962: THE SPIRITUAL COST OF A PROBLEMATIC PEACE In January 1962, nine months after fleeing France to escape arrest, Jacques Soustelle finished L 'esperance trahie, a powerful polemic that served both as apologia for the ex-governor's consistent defense of French Algeria and indictment of what he sawas Charles de Gaulle's betrayal of the promise made to those who had brought him back to power in 1958. The book was published in the spring, just as the seven-and-a-half-year war was winding down.1 As had so often beenthe case duringhis longpolitical career, Soustelle invoked his Protestant origin and upbringing as essential sources of what he presented as a conscience-driven devotion to French Algeria and an equally lively moral resistance to the authoritarian streak in de Gaulle: By background and upbringingI belong to the humble Cevenol folk who profess the Reformed faith. Throughout my childhood I listened as my elders celebrated the memory of these stubborn mountain people, fiercely attached to their beliefs, who dared to defy the most powerful of our kings (Louis XIV). Forced to live in the wilderness, Bible in one hand, sword inthe other, pitchingcamp around their inspired prophets, they endured hunger, exhausting marches, prison, slavery aboard the king's galleys, the hangman's noose, death by fire; or they went into exile in protest against the injustice of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The state might break them; it could never make them bend. I grew up admiring these heroes. A woman on my mother's side of the family died a prisoner behindthe thick stone wallsof the Tour de Constance near the spot where one of her companions,Marie Durand,had inscribed the word "Resist." These images of a bygone day as well as memories of a less remote past when my great-grandfather was one of the Republican leaders inNimes duringthe Revolutionary period (a highly unpopular role to assume then in our part of France) contributed, together with my native temperament, to alienate me forever from the notion that any temporal ruler, no matter how august, should decide in sovereign fashionwhat his subjects should believe or accept.2 The first part of Soustelle's impassioned tract is taken up with defending his actions as Algeria's chief administrator. Injustification of what he insisted was a consistently progressive policy, the ex-governor cited 223 224 The Call of Conscience correspondence with Premier Mollet as well as decrees he had issued promoting full-scale integration of the Muslim population and efforts he had made to persuade the European minority to accept a single electoral college. He had won the Europeans around to his progressive views, Soustelle argued and, following the end ofhis mandate, de Gaulle hadpraised him for the books he had written in defence of French Algeria. The president's attitude towards him and the policies he espoused had changed, however, following de Gaulle's return to power in June 1958. Ignoring Soustelle's advice and marginalizing him in the cabinet, de Gaulle had thrown away the real opportunity afforded by the insurrection of the 13 mai to transform Algeria into "an enclave of fraternity" between Europeans and Africans. The most serious charge he laid against Charles de Gaulle was that his Algerian policy was in the final analysis based on ethnic prejudice, a disdain for Muslims and a dismissal of Algeria's Europeans as "restless and agitated subjects whose Mediterranean and southern souls, part Spanish, part Arab, he could never as a man of the North either appreciate or understand." Just as damning was Soustelle's indictment of the president for violating the principles of the Fifth Republic he had helped to articulate. De Gaulle had not only recklessly invoked Article 16 of the constitution to eliminate open criticism of his disastrous Algerian policy; he had in fact created a virtual dictatorship: "We are living now in an authoritarian, personal monarchy, a dictatorship whose fascistic arbitrariness is limited only by the anarchy which its very excesses has produced."3 In the same month as Soustelle's indictment of de Gaulle, three French officers were accused of torturing ayoung Muslim woman caught distributing FLN propaganda inFrance whohad subsequently died while being transported to hospital. During their trial by military tribunal at Reuilly near Paris overwhelming evidence of their culpability was produced, but the three men were acquitted. Albert Finet was astounded and dismayed at the verdict and the moral lapse it implied. He went...