Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945

by Tony Judt

The new Socialist government of Guy Mollet granted independence in March 1956 to the neighboring French colonies of Tunisia and Morocco—the first surrender of colonial power on the African continent. But when Mollet visited Algiers, a crowd of European settlers pelted him with rotten fruit. Paris was caught between the implacable demands of the clandestine FLN and the refusal of Algeria’s European residents, now led by a Committee for the Defense of French Algeria (l’Algérie française), to accept any compromise with their Arab neighbors. The French strategy, if it merits the name, was now to defeat the FLN by force before putting pressure on the settlers to accept political reforms and some power-sharing measures.

On May 28th Pfimlin resigned and President René Coty called upon De Gaulle to form a government. Without even pretending to demur, De Gaulle took office on June 1st and was voted full powers by the National Assembly the following day. His first act was to fly to Algiers, where on June 4th he announced delphically to an enthusiastic crowd of cheering soldiers and grateful Europeans: ‘Je vous ai compris’ (‘I have understood you’). The new French Prime Minister had indeed understood his Algerian supporters, better than they knew. He was immensely popular among the Europeans of Algeria, who saw him as their saviour: in the referendum of September 1958 De Gaulle secured 80 percent of the vote in France, but 96 percent of the vote in Algeria.6 But among De Gaulle’s many distinctive traits was an unwavering appreciation for order and legitimacy. The hero of the Free French, the implacable critic of Vichy, the man who had restored the credibility of the French state after August 1944 was no friend of the Algerian rebels (many of them former Pétainists), much less the free-thinking insurrectionary young officers who had taken their part. His first task, as he understood it, was to restore the authority of government in France. His second and related objective was to resolve the Algerian conflict that had so dramatically undermined it.

Even the Belgians finally released the Congo in June 1960 (albeit in an irresponsible manner and with disastrous results).7 Colonial Algeria was fast becoming an anachronism, as De Gaulle fully understood. He had already established a ‘Communauté Française’ as the first step towards a ‘commonwealth’ of France’s former colonies. South of the Sahara, formal independence would be granted rapidly to French-educated elites of countries that were far too weak to stand alone and would thus be utterly dependent on France for decades to come. In September 1959, just one year after coming to power, the French President proposed ‘self-determination’ for Algeria. Infuriated by what they regarded as evidence of a coming sell-out, officers and settlers in Algeria began planning a full-scale revolt. There were plots, coups and talk of revolution. In January 1960 barricades went up in Algiers and ‘ultra-patriots’ shot at French gendarmes. But the revolt collapsed in the face of De Gaulle’s intransigence and unreliable senior officers (including Massu and his superior, General Maurice Challe) were carefully re-assigned away from Algeria. The disturbances continued, however, culminating in

an unsuccessful military putsch in April 1961, inspired by the newly formed OAS (Organisation de l’Armée Secrète). But the conspirators failed to shift De Gaulle, who went on French national radio to denounce the ‘military pronunciamento by a handful of retired generals’. The chief victim of the coup was the morale and the international image (what remained of it) of the French Army. An overwhelming majority of Frenchmen and women, many of them with sons serving in Algeria, drew the conclusion that Algerian independence was not just inevitable but desirable—and for the sake of France, the sooner the better.

March 1962, was more successful, after just ten days of discussion the two sides reached agreement and on March 19th, after nearly eight years

of unbroken fighting, the FLN declared a cease-fire. On the basis of the terms agreed at Evian De Gaulle called a referendum on Sunday July 1st and the French people voted overwhelmingly to free themselves of the Algerian shackle. Two days later Algeria became an independent state. The Algerian tragedy did not end there. The OAS grew into a fully fledged underground organization, committed first to preserving French Algeria and then, after that failed, to punishing those who had ‘betrayed’ their cause. In February 1962 alone, OAS operatives and bombs killed 553 people. Spectacular assassination attempts on French Culture Minister André Malraux and on De Gaulle himself were unsuccessful, though at least one plan to ambush the President’s car as he drove through the Parisian suburb of Petit Clamart came perilously close to succeeding. For a few years in the early sixties France was in the grip of a determined and increasingly desperate terrorist threat. The French intelligence services ultimately broke the OAS, but the memory lingered.

The European pieds-noirs settled for the most part in southern France; the first generation harbored longstanding grievances against the French authorities for betraying their cause and forcing them off their property and out of their jobs. Algeria’s Jews also abandoned the country, some for Israel, many—like the Moroccan Jews before them—for France, where they would come in time to constitute the largest (and predominantly Sephardic) Jewish community in Western Europe.

Many Arabs, too, quit independent Algeria. Some left in anticipation of the repressive, dogmatic rule of the FLN. Others, notably those who had worked with the French or served as auxiliaries with French police and military authorities—the so-called harkis—fled the predictable wrath of the victorious nationalists. Many were caught and suffered horrible

retribution; but even those who made it safely to France got no thanks from the French and scant acknowledgement or...

The Evian Agreements of 1962 put an end to nearly five decades of war or fear of war in French life. The population was weary—weary of crises, weary of fighting, weary of threats and rumours and plots. The Fourth Republic had lasted just twelve years. Unloved and unlamented, it was cruelly weakened from the outset by the absence of an effective executive—a legacy of the Vichy experience, which had made post-war legislators reluctant to establish a strong presidency. It was handicapped by its parliamentary and electoral systems, which favored multiple parties and produced unstable coalition governments. It oversaw unprecedented social changes but these generated a divisive political backlash. Pierre Poujade, a bookseller from St Céré in the deep south-west of France, formed Europe’s first single-issue protest party to defend ‘des petits, des matraqués, des...

But above all, the first post-war French republic was brought low by its colonial struggles. Like the Ancien Régime, the Fourth Republic was crippled by the costs of war. Between December 1955 and December 1957 France lost two-thirds of its currency reserves, despite the steady growth of the economy. Exchange controls, multiple exchange rates (comparable to those operated by the Soviet bloc in later decades), foreign debt, budget deficits and chronic inflation were all attributable to the uncontrolled expenses of unsuccessf...

without a disaffected army, the Fourth Republic would have been hard pressed to face down such challenges just a decade after the worst military defeat in the nation’s history and a humiliating four-year occ...

In the aftermath of his success in ending the Algerian conflict, De Gaulle proposed that the President of the Republic be henceforth elected by direct universal suffrage (rather than indirectly, by the Assembly, as hitherto); this amendment to the constitution was duly approved in a referendum

Sustained by his institutions, his record and his personality—and French memories of the alternative—the French President now had more power than any other freely elected head of state or government in the world.

‘Nothing lasts unless it is incessantly renewed.’

But like much else in De Gaulle’s pursuit of domestic modernization, notably Malraux’s ambitious plans to restore and clean all of France’s stock of historic public buildings, these changes were always part of a larger, political objective: the restoration of French grandeur. Like Spain’s General Franco (with whom he otherwise had nothing in common), De Gaulle understood economic stabilization and modernization largely as weapons in the struggle to restore national glory. France had been in steady decline at least since 1871, a grim trajectory marked by military defeat, diplomatic humiliation, colonial retreat, economic deterioration and domestic instability. De Gaulle’s goal was to close out the era of French decay. ‘All my life’, he wrote in his war memoirs, ‘I have had a certain idea of France’. Now he was to put it into effect. The French President’s chosen arena was foreign policy, an emphasis dictated by personal taste and raison d’état alike. De Gaulle had long been sensitive to France’s serial humiliation—less by its German foe in 1940 than at the hands of its Anglo-American allies ever since. De Gaulle never forgot his own embarrassing isolation as France’s impoverished and largely ignored spokesman in wartime London. His grasp of military reality kept him from expressing the pain that he shared with other Frenchmen at the British sinking of France’s proud Mediterranean fleet at Mers-el-Kebir in July 1940; but the symbolism of the act rankled nonetheless. De Gaull...