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Intelligence and the Transition to the Algerian Police State: Reassessing French Colonial Security after the Sétif Uprising, 1945

2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 28; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/02684527.2013.789637

1743-9019

Martin Thomas,

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

Abstract In May 1945, as France celebrated the end of the Second World War in Europe, its foremost overseas dependency, Algeria, erupted into rebellion. Revisiting the roles and responses of the colonial security forces to what came to be known as the Sétif uprising, this article suggests two things. One is that the intensity of repressive violence pursued becomes more explicable once we consider the part played by political intelligence gathering in the operation of French colonial government in Algeria. The other is that the decision to use the political intelligence amassed before, during, and after the rebellion to coerce the Algerian population at the rebellion's epicentre signified a fundamental shift in the nature of the French colonial state in Algeria. Intelligence-led security policing, much of it later adopted by police agencies in metropolitan France at the height of the Algerian War, became more repressive, less selective, and highly violent. Acknowledgements Research for this article was supported by the Leverhulme Trust. The author is grateful to Martin Alexander, Emmanuel Blanchard, Martin Evans, Jim House, Sébastien Laurent, James McDougall, Alexandre Rios, and Kim Wagner for their comments on earlier drafts. Notes 1 The refusal of French (and indeed British) colonial authorities to apply the terminology of war to organized anti-colonial violence will be familiar to readers but, in the Algerian context, is more often discussed in relation to the Algerian War of Independence between 1954 and 1962. For discussion of this phenomenon, see: John Talbott, The War Without a Name: France in Algeria, 1954–1952 (New York: Knopf 1980); Benjamin Stora, La gangrène et l'oubli: La mémoire de la guerre d'Algérie (Paris: Éditions La Découverte 2005); Raphaëlle Branche and Sylvie Thénault (eds.) La France en guerre 1954–1962: Expériences métropolitaines de la guerre d'indépendance algérienne (Paris: Éditions Autrement 2008). My reading of Sétif suggests that it was both a locally-organized rebellion and a popular uprising. Hence, these labels, alongside the more commonly applied term ‘revolt’, will be used throughout the article. 2 For a classic exposition of civilian involvement in pre-insurrectionary violence, see Chalmers Johnson, ‘Civilian Loyalties and Guerrilla Conflict’, World Politics 14/4 (1962) pp.646–61. 3 Benyoucef Ben Khedda, Les Origines du 1er Novembre 1954 (Algiers: Éditions Dahlab 1989); Jean-Charles Jauffret (ed.), La Guerre d'Algérie par les documents. Volume I: L'Avertisssement, 1943–1946 (Vincennes: SHAT 1990); Gilbert Meynier, Histoire Intérieure du FLN (Paris: 2001); Annie Rey-Goldseiguer, Aux origines de la guerre d'Algérie 1940–1945. De Mers-el-Kébir aux massacres du nord-constantinois (Paris: Éditions La Découverte 2002), part III; Marcel Reggui, Guelma, Les Massacres de Guelma. Algérie, mai 1945: Une enquête inédite sur la furie des milice coloniales (Paris: Éditions La Découverte 2006); Jean-Louis Planche, Sétif 1945. Histoire d'un massacre annoncé (Paris: Perrin 2006); Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Guelma, 1945. Une subversion française dans l'Algérie coloniale (Paris: Éditions La Découverte 2009); Charles-Robert Ageron, ‘Les troubles du Nord-Constantinois en mai 1945: Une tentative insurrectionnelle?’, Vingtième Siècle 4 (1984) pp.23–38; Anthony Clayton, ‘The Sétif Uprising of May 1945’, Small Wars and Insurgencies 3/1 (1992) pp.1–21. Planche and Peyroulou have made the most effective use of police and army intelligence materials. 4 Since 1945, more armed struggles have occurred within, rather than between, states, often in colonial or former colonial territories. Algerian violence in 1945 pitted the colonial authorities against internally organized groups that sought ultimate control over the state. Acts of organized violence committed by each side, although not sustained at the same intensity, would continue for years to come, thus fulfilling a widely applied criterion for ‘war’ rather than civil unrest. See Errol A. Henderson and J. David Singer, ‘Civil War in the Post-Colonial World, 1946–92’, Journal of Peace Research 37/3 (2000) p.275; James Fearon and David Laitin, ‘Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War’, American Political Science Review 97/1 (2003) pp.75–90. 5 Archives Nationales d'Outre-Mer (ANOM), Aix-en-Provence, Gouvernement-Général de l'Algérie (GGA), Governor Marcel Edmond Naegelen Cabinet Civil papers, Carton 9cab/48: menées anti-nationales/atteintes à la sûreté de l'Etat, no. 4679/CDP, Governor General Chataigneau to Algeria Prefects, ‘A/S de la répression des “propos anti-français”’, 28 August 1947; Colonel Courtès, ‘Note pour M. le Délégué Général au Plan, “Attitude à l'égard du MTLD”’, 15 January 1948. Even those caught singing the banned Algerian national anthem, a favoured protest during the Sétif riots, were liable to imprisonment. 6 Odile Rudelle, ‘Le vote du statut de l'Algérie’, in Serge Berstein and Pierre Milza (eds.), L'Année 1947 (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po 2000) pp.312–15; James I. Lewis, ‘French Politics and the Algerian Statute of 1947’, Maghreb Review 17/1 (1992) pp.147–72. Launched in September 1947, the centrepiece of the Statute for Algeria was a 120-member Assembly with power of budgetary supervision, elected on a dual college system dominated by settler voters. 7 Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization. The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2006) pp.39–43; Andrew Shennan, Rethinking France. Plans for Renewal, 1940–1946 (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1991), chapter 7. 8 Hendrik Spruyt, Ending Empire. Contested Sovereignty and Territorial Partition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 2005) pp.89–90, 94–7; Martin Shipway, The Road to War. France and Vietnam, 1944–1947 (Oxford: Berghahn 1996) pp.87–104; Martin Thomas, ‘The Colonial Policies of the Mouvement Republicain Populaire, 1944–54: From Reform to Reaction’, English Historical Review 118/476 (2003) pp.380–7. 9 ANOM, GGA, 9H/44, CIE intell. summary: ‘Note sur la situation générale en Constantine’, 23 April 1945; no. 3305/EMA, ‘Rapport mensuel de l'OFF/AN.M. de la sub-division de Sétif’, 30 April 1945. 10 The security service analyses discussed here reflect other, long-standing transnational fears about challenges to predominant whiteness in colonial societies, see Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line. White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2008) pp.1–5, 350–2. 11 The death toll was definitively collated by an Algiers colonial government commission of inquiry headed by a gendarmerie commander, General Paul Tubert, a leading member of the Algerian Assembly at the time. Their findings were sent to the French Interior Ministry on 20 June 1945: see Archives Nationales, France (AN), Interior Ministry General Administration files, Ministry of Interior Cabinet, F/1a/3298, Algiers Governor Yves Chataigneau to Adrien Tixier, ‘Rapport rélatif aux événements du département de Constantine’. Another 76 European settlers were seriously wounded, and eight women and young girls were raped. By the time this report was filed, the officially admitted body count of Algerians killed during security force operations was approaching 1200. Although unfamiliar in the context of 1940s Algeria, such ‘atrocity killings’ are strikingly widespread in the opening phases of inter-ethnic civil disturbance, see Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot, new ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press 2003) pp.109–23. 12 Some have even claimed that up to 40,000 Algerians died in Sétif alone, certainly a huge over-estimate, see Jacques R. Goutor, Algeria and France (Muncie, IN: Ball State 1965) p.51; cited in Fahd Abdullah al-Semmari, ‘The Role of the ‘Ulama in the Algerian Revolution, 1945–1954’, JUSUR, UCLA Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 2 (1986) p.89. 13 Jonathan Githens-Mazer, ‘The Blowback of Repression and the Dynamics of North African Radicalization’, International Affairs 85/5 (2009) pp.1015–29. 14 These definitions draw on Charles Tilly, ‘Contentious Choices’, Theory and Society 33/3–4 (2004) p.473. 15 The ‘intelligence state’ concept is explored in my Empires of Intelligence. Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press 2007). 16 Derek Sayer, ‘British Reaction to the Amritsar Massacre 1919–1920’, Past & Present, 131 (1991) pp.160–1. For more Dyer's actions, see Purnima Bose, Organizing Empire: Individualism, Collective Agency, and India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2003) pp.31–7. For more details of the inquiry into Dyer's actions, see Helen Fein, Imperial Crime and Punishment: Massacre at Jallianwala Bagh and British Judgement, 1919–20 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii 1986); Nigel Collett, The Butcher of Amritsar: Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer (London: Hambledon 2005). 17 Jordanna Bailkin, ‘The Boot and the Spleen: When Was Murder Possible in British India?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 48/2 (2006) pp.466–9. 18 For discussion of white violence against workers and servants as punitive acts meant to reinforce the hierarchy of colonial state power, see David M. Anderson, ‘Master and Servant in Colonial Kenya, 1895–1939’, Journal of African History 41/3 (2000) pp.459–85; also cited in Bailkin, ‘The Boot and the Spleen’, p.468. 19 ANOM, GGA, 9cab/48, no. 311 SG/PLU, Note for Governor General, ‘Attitude à l'égard du MTLD’, 15 January 1948; Sous-dossier: Etat d'esprit des populations, 1948–1950, Prefect of Constantine Maurice Papon, to Governor Naegelen, ‘Orientation de la politique musulmane dans le département de Constantine’, 31 January 1950. 20 ANOM, Governor Jacques Soustelle Cabinet Civil papers, 11cab/8, sous-dossier: Instructions sur l'attitude à adopter vers les rebelles, 1954–55. 21 ANOM, GGA, 40G/32, Sous-dossier: Police-sécurité Etat d'urgence, 1955, Interior Minister Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury to Governor General Jacques Soustelle, 30 April 1955; 40G/61, no. 9198/PRMMP, Prefect of Constantine to General Parlange, Commandant Civil et Militaire du Sud Constantinois, Batna and sous-préfets and civil admnistrators, ‘Responsabilité matérielle collective’, 11 July 1955. 22 Almost 700 Algerians were executed by vigilante death squads. For the full extent of extra-judicial killings in and around Guelma, see Peyroulou, Guelma, 1945. 23 Over 300 official complaints were logged by families, desperate for news of missing loved ones, by the end of May, see: ANOM, GGA, Governor Yves Chataigneau Cabinet Civil papers, 8cab/166, Service Central de la Police Judiciaire, Commissaire Divisionnaire Bergé to Directeur Général de la Sécurité Générale, Alger, 31 May 1946, ‘Objet: Répression des émeutes de GUELMA’; Commissaire Divisionnaire Bergé to Directeur Général de la Sécurité Générale, Alger, 20 January 1946. 24 For the classic elaboration of this connection between modernity and disciplinary social control, see especially Part IV of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, English trans. (London: Penguin 1977). 25 This overhaul extended to the protectorate administration in French Morocco as well, see: Service Historique de l'armée, Vincennes (SHA), Fonds de Moscou, Carton 286/D428, no. 1780, Direction des affaires indigènes (Rabat), ‘A/S des incidents de Constantine et de leur répercussion possible au Maroc’, 23 August 1934. See also Planche, Sétif 1945, pp.33–4, who dates the overhaul to December 1934. 26 ANOM, GGA, Alger/41/1, no. 2281/NA, Governor General Naegelen to Algeria Prefects, ‘Rôle et attributions des SNLA départementaux’, 29 August 1950: summarizes the history of the SNLA and its CIE antecedent. 27 On the pre-war Algerian reforms attempted by the Popular Front, see SHA, Fonds de Moscou, C1109/D667, SEA (Algiers), ‘A/S du projet de loi Viollette pour l'attribution des droits politiques aux indigènes’, 5 February 1937; Benjamin Stora, Nationalistes Algériens et Révolutionnaires Français au temps du Front Populaire (Paris: Éditions l’Harmattan 1987); Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur (eds.), French Colonial Empire and Popular Front. Hope and Disillusion (London: Palgrave-Macmillan 1999); and my The French Empire between the Wars: Imperialism, Politics and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2005), ch.9. 28 ANOM, GGA, Alger/41/1, no. 13/CIE, Direction Générale des Affaires indigènes et des Territoires du Sud, ‘Note relative au fonctionnement du CIE’, Algiers, 28 July 1936; no. 900 Direction Générale des Affaires Indigènes, Sous-direction des affaires indigènes, 2e Bureau, Administration générale, Governor General to Algiers Prefect, ‘Centre d'Informations et d'études: délégation de crédits provisionnels’, 22 February 1938. 29 ANOM, GGA, ALGER/4I/1, No. 2281/NA, Governor General Naegelen to Algeria Prefects, ‘Rôle et attributions des SLNA départementaux’, 29 August 1950. This document explains the morphing of the CIE into various post-war incarnations of intelligence-analysis centre and notes Le Beau's pivotal role before 1940. 30 See AN, F60/871, sous-dossier Comité de l'Afrique du Nord, for the Constantine CIE reports relayed to the Interior Ministry and the provisional government's North Africa committee in 1945. 31 Correspondence files of these three sources are available respectively in ANOM, Gouvernement-Général de l'Algérie, Cabinet civil du gouverneur général Yves Chataigneau, sous-série 8CAB, especially 8CAB 88 and 8CAB 118; ANOM, Fonds de la prefecture de Constantine, série B3, Cabinet du Préfet files; Archives Nationales, Secrétariat-Général du Gouvernement et Services du Premier Ministre, files F60/871–F60/874; AN, Ministère de l'Intérieur, Cabinet du Ministre files, F/1a/3292–F/1a/3298; and Service Historique de la Gendarmerie Nationale (SHGN), Commandement Général de la Gendarmerie en Afrique du Nord, Corréspondance Algérie, R/2, Cartons 140–144. The following authors consulted these records extensively: Benoît Haberbusch, La Gendarmerie en Algérie (1939–1945) (Vincennes: Service historique de la Gendarmerie nationale 2004); Planche, Sétif 1945. 32 AN, F60/871, no. 1345/CAB/C, and no. 1395/CAB/C, two reports sent by Algiers Prefect report to Governor Chataigneau, same title: ‘A/S collusion entre le P.P.A. et les “Amis du Manifeste”’, 21 March and 7 April 1945; no. 1485/CAB/C, further Algiers Prefect report, ‘A/S collusion entre le P.P.A. et les “Amis du Manifeste”’, 1 May 1945. 33 Haberbusch, La Gendarmerie en Algérie (1939–1945), pp.49, 221–2. Messali was arrested by the last Algerian colonial government of the Third Republic on 4 October 1939. In March 1941 a Vichyite military tribunal in Algiers sentenced him to 16 years’ hard labour for sedition. 34 For background to ‘ulama activity and intellectual debate during and after Sétif, see al-Semmari, ‘The Role of the ‘Ulama in the Algerian Revolution’, pp.83–102; James McDougall, ‘S'écrire un destin: l'Association des ‘ulama dans la révolution algérienne’, Bulletin de l'IHTP 83/1 (2004) pp.38–51. 35 AN, F/1a/3295, Interior Ministry, Sous-Direction de l'Algérie, ‘Scoutisme musulman’, 15 August 1945. 36 AN, F60/871, no. 1345/CAB/C, and no. 1395/CAB/C, reports sent by Algiers Prefect report to Governor Chataigneau, each with the same title: ‘A/S collusion entre le P.P.A. et les “Amis du Manifeste”’, 21 March and 7 April 1945; no. 1485/CAB/C, further Algiers Prefect report, ‘A/S collusion entre le P.P.A. et les “Amis du Manifeste”’, 1 May 1945. 37 As Stathis N. Kalyvas argues in his The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006), the capacity to impose security over a specified area is the chief currency of local power in conditions of acute inter-ethnic conflict or civil war. This point is explored more fully by Daniel Branch in his Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya. Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2009), chs.2–3. 38 SHGN, Commandement Général de la Gendarmerie en Afrique du Nord, Corréspondance Algérie, C141, no. 406/2, CGG-AFN, synthèse mensuelle, mois de février 1945, 1 March 1945. 39 SHGN, Commandement Général de la Gendarmerie en Afrique du Nord, Corréspondance Algérie, C141, no. 406/2, CGG-AFN, Lieutenant-Colonel Roubaud, synthèse mensuelle, mois de février 1945, 1 March 1945; C142, no. 950/2, CGG-AFN, General Taillardat, synthèse mensuelle, mois d'avril 1945, 1 May 1945. 40 AN, F/1a/3294, no. 1428/A44R, Ministry of Justice reports on recent Algerian public order disturbances, sent to Interior Ministry, 8 May 1945. 41 SHGN, Commandement Général de la Gendarmerie en Afrique du Nord, Corréspondance Algérie, C141, no. 705/2, CGG-AFN, synthèse mensuelle, mois de mars 1945, 3 April 1945. 42 Divisions among PPA executive members emerged more clearly in the days and weeks after 8 May, see Planche, Sétif 1945, pp.246–50. 43 Both Ferhat Abbas and Messali Hadj were removed to detention in French Equatorial Africa after the uprising, the former to Libreville, the latter to Brazzaville, see TNA, FO 141/1052, Algiers consular despatch 95, Carvell to Foreign office, 12 June 1945. 44 AN, F60/872, no. 911/CPD, Yves Chataigneau to Interior/Cabinet Politique, 11 May 1945. 45 As Sloan Mahone and David Anderson argue, this characterization of Algerian Muslim behaviour was also evident among British authorities fearful of Mau Mau violence in colonial Kenya: ‘Civil War, Trauma, and the Psychology of Mau Mau’, research paper delivered at the University of Exeter, UK, 22 May 2008. 46 Richard C. Keller, Colonial Madness. Psychiatry in French North Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2007) pp.2–4. 47 AN, F60/871, Constantine prefecture, CIE, ‘Rapport mensuel d'information sur l'activité indigène, Département de Constantine, période du 22 avril au 21 mai 1945’, 21 May 1945. 48 As Daniel Lefeuvre has shown, there was a surge of settler out-migration from the Algerian countryside after the May 1945 uprising: see his ‘Les trois replis de l'Algérie française’, in Jean-Charles Jauffret (ed.), Des hommes et des femmes en guerre d'Algérie (Paris: Autrement 2003) pp.57–60. 49 Jock McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia, 1902–1935 (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press 2000) pp.80–4; John Pape, ‘Black and White: The “Perils of Sex” in Colonial Zimbabwe’, Journal of Southern African Studies 16/4 (1990) pp.699–720. 50 For parallels with modern-day representations of Islamist violence, see Dag Tuastad, ‘Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarian Thesis: Aspects of Symbolic Violence in the Middle East Conflict(s)’, Third World Quarterly 24/4 (2003) pp.591–3; Githens-Mazer, ‘The Blowback of Repression’, pp.1015–20. 51 AN, F60/871, Constantine prefecture, CIE, ‘Rapport mensuel d'information sur l'activité indigène, Département de Constantine, période du 22 avril au 21 mai 1945’, 21 May 1945, p.2. 53 AN F60/871, GGA, Direction de la Sécurité Générale, Service Central des RG, ‘Bulletin d'information et de documentation, mois d'août 1945’, p.36. 52 AN, F60/871, no. 2098/2, Direction de la Gendarmerie, Bureau des liaisons et informations, ‘Rapport du Général Taillardat, synthèse mensuel, mois d'août 1945’, 1 September 1945. 54 ANOM, GGA, 40G/32, ‘Règlement relatif au fonctionnement et à l'emploi des Groupes Mobiles de Police Rurale’, Algiers GGA, 12 May 1955. 55 ANOM, GGA, Centre d'Informations et d'Etudes (CIE)/Services des Liaisons nord-africains (SLNA), Carton 40G/32: Police activité 1945–50, no. 675, Circulaire ministerielle, Minister of Interior Tixier to Commissaires de la République, Prefects of Police and Prefects, 30 August 1945: Mesures préparatoires en vue de la suppression de l'internement administrative. 56 ANOM, GGA, 40G/32, no. 16,570/POL/A, Ministre Plenipotentiaire, GGA, to Général de Corps d'Armée, Commandant le 19e Corps d'Armée, 20 May 1945, ‘A/S/ de la création d'un Centre de Séjour Surveillé destiné à recevoir des internés politiques musulmans’ signed by Governor Chataigneau's Secretary-General, Gazagne. 57 ANOM, GGA, 40G/32, no. 1899, Prefecture de Constantine, Police des Renseignements Généraux, Commissaire Principal, Chef de la PRG du District de Constantine Bordier, to Constantine Prefect, 18 March 1946: ‘Libération des détenus de la Maison Centrale de Lambèse’; GGA SIDM, ‘Note pour M. Paye’, Alger, 23 May 1946. 58 ANOM, GGA, 40G/32, SIDM, ‘Note pour M. Paye’, Alger, 23 May 1946. 59 Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire. From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2008) pp.34–5. 61 Stathis N. Kalyvas, ‘Promises and Pitfalls of an Emerging Research Program: The Microdynamics of Civil War’, in Stathis N. Kalyvas, Ian Shapiro and Tarek Masoud (eds.) Order, Conflict, and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2008) pp.406–7. 60 Recent examples include: Jeff Goodwin, No Other Way Out. States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001); Elisabeth J. Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003); Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2006); Jeremy M. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007). 62 For the cross-fertilization between Algerian and French security policing, see Jim House and Neil MacMaster, Paris 1961: Algerians, State Terror and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006), ch.1; Emmanuel Blanchard, ‘Contrôler, enfermer, éloigner. La répression policière et administrative des algériens de métropole (1946–1962)’, in Branche and Thénault, La France en guerre, pp.318–31; and, especially, Emmanuel Blanchard, La Police Parisienne et les Algériens (1944–1962) (Paris: Nouveau Monde éditions 2011) pp.166–73, 313–58. 63 AN, F/1a/3293: 1944–47, Sous-Direction de l'Algérie, Compte-rendu de la visite d'information de Monsieur Papon en Algérie, n.d. October 1945. 64 R.J. Golsan, ‘Memory's bombes à retardement: Maurice Papon, Crimes against Humanity and 17 October 1961’, Journal of European Studies 28 (1998) pp.153–72. 65 ANOM, Constantine département archives, 93/139, IGAME pour la region de l'Est Algérien, Maurice Papon, Constantine, 4 September 1956, ‘Directive concernant l'action politique’. 66 House and MacMaster, Paris 1961, pp.88–99, 162–79, 214–15; Jim House and Neil MacMaster, ‘“Une journée portée disparue”: The Paris Massacre of 1961 and Memory’, in Kenneth Mouré and Martin S. Alexander (eds.) Crisis and Renewal in France, 1918–1962 (Oxford: Berghahn 2002) pp.267–90.