How Not to Save an Empire

A completely new doctrine of counterinsurgency emerged largely in response to these questions. Peterson argues that the French state, contrary to its own propaganda, was not necessarily a purely reactive power helplessly trying to claw back its imperial possession in the face of a mobilized underground movement. It had instead redesigned the very remit of the military’s role over Algerian society. This was not simply a war to subdue Algerian insurgents, but an attempt to transform Algerian society in the image of the metropole. The view of the French colonial administration was that the only way to maintain their country’s interests was to use the sword to mobilize and transform Algerian society.

At the heart of Peterson’s book is a counterargument to traditional narratives of postwar social reform. The very same rhetoric that justified the construction of a supposed top-down progressive modernity after 1945 was simultaneously used to justify the entrenchment of colonial rule in North Africa. As Peterson reminds us, “the modernizing project at the heart of postwar reconstruction offered a compelling framework to understand and counter the collapse of colonial order.” If deprivation, poverty, and administrative neglect appeared to drive support for radical politics in the metropole, then surely, in the eyes of French officials, the dramatic inequalities, political frustrations, and lack of autonomy in the colonial context could be remedied through major socioeconomic reform. In the process, French officials in favor of reintegration of Algeria into the fold of France sought to placate nationalism through a wholehearted embrace of modernity.

On the ground military policymaking and action soon developed into a coherent policy of “pacification,” in which social reform went hand in hand with armed action against FLN rebels. During this process, the French military would come to theorize the role of counterinsurgency as a tool of modernization to “pacify” Algerian society. It adopted some of the ideas advocated by liberal metropolitan humanists, like Germaine Tillion, who had argued in Les ennemis-complémentaires (1960) that extensive social, educational, and civil rights reform could end the war and maintain Algeria as part of France. Not only did Tillion have the ear of reformers like Governor-General Jacques Soustelle, but she was also buoyed by a reformist current in the wake of FLN military success. It soon appeared that only military defeat and social transformation could possibly end the war in the favor of French interests.

Despite its supposedly humanitarian justification, Peterson finds in this modernizing liberalism a kind of regression to nineteenth-century norms: a utopian vision of the regeneration of the colonial state, dictated by a profound misunderstanding of the fractured and broken colonial society French military officials were attempting to “pacify” in order to bring about progress. Without fully reverting to the “civilizing mission” of the mid–nineteenth century, the eleventh-hour colonial project shared a similar set of prejudices and an underlying belief in France’s capacity as a benevolent guarantor of the interests of ordinary Algerians.

Taking power as governor-general in 1955, Jacques Soustelle outlined a series of dramatic and wide-ranging reforms to the colonial state. French officials in the metropole had, he argued, “lost contact” with ordinary Algerians. In his words, the colonial state needed a rapid realignment: training in local languages and customs to rebuild neglected relationships with disparate and rural communities. The idea of “uplifting” Algerian society to nullify political discontent was not a break from the essentialist belief in French moral superiority. It provided a way to justify denying Algerian political demands in favor of strengthening French rule.

As the war continued to develop, an increasingly paranoid military apparatus sought to extend its authority over the civil administration in the colony, in time becoming a guarantor of political and social reform as well as enforcing order through immense violence. New military units like the Sections Administratives Spécialisées (SAS) allowed military officers to enter remote regions to distribute material aid, provide medical care, organize schooling, reopen markets, and construct infrastructure, all while entrenching their surveillance of the local population to seek out FLN operatives. The office of Algerian affairs, which oversaw the SAS units, even consciously modeled itself on a mythologized image of the Bureaux Arabes from the late nineteenth century. The romantic image of forthright independent military officers who could bridge the gap between the lackluster colonial state and disaffected Algerians was a powerful symbol of the military’s renewed purpose.

This entrenched position of social reform through warfare soon, as Peterson shows, became a cohesive policy of social “pacification.” Algeria was becoming, for French officials, not only a battleground for French interests, but a key to fighting the perceived growing global communist threat. For more extreme figures like Lionel-Max Chassin, co-opting the FLN’s strategy was paramount: “To a fight based on subversion, we must oppose the same arms. Against faith, faith; to propaganda, propaganda; to an insidious and powerful ideology, a superior ideology capable of winning the hearts of men.”

From 1957, French officials began to aggressively define the adoption of French modernity as an essential condition for social stability in the colony, projecting a vision of an Algérie nouvelle — a purported loosening of the colonial state in favor of an integrationist and progressive future. In juxtaposing caricatures of the FLN as destructive, backward, and cruel against a series of reforms that would pave the way for an egalitarian future with France, obedience to the French state became a byword for the modernization drive to come. One propaganda leaflet distributed to Algerian communities explained that “France will spend 300 billion on maintaining order or on building a new Algeria: CHOOSE.” The path to “modernity” was not only defined by France, but the promise of rapid transformation was based on political subservience.

Alongside this vision of an Algérie nouvelle, the military constructed a vast apparatus of pro-French grassroots political infrastructure. One example that Peterson highlights was the system of foyers sportifs to try to win over young Algerian men, who were seen as particularly susceptible to joining the FLN. In an attempt to move men off the streets and onto the track, French officials constructed sports groups led by young Algerian men trained as “youth monitors.” Almost mirroring revanchist nineteenth-century frenzies around public health and the creation of sports and gymnastics clubs following defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, the use of sports was retooled to create a sense of political cohesion and loyalty to France. Although the motives to join and participate in sports are too multifaceted to truly know, the program had some success. From 1957, under cavalry captain René Henri Fombonne, the sports groups were expanded into a system of clubs. On Bastille Day 1957, some five hundred attendees marched alongside the army in their sports regalia down the main thoroughfare in Constantine.

The process of creating a parallel colonial society based around an egalitarian modernity tied to France was a failure. However, Peterson’s interests lie in the extent to which the French state mobilized to rapidly transform a colonial apparatus that appeared to be teetering on the edge of an abyss. Social programs, aid, and reform were embraced, not as progressive means to transform society but to entrench coercion and social control. A grey area between the military and civil authorities only expanded as the war progressed. Although these projects failed on their own terms, the fading empire proved a useful laboratory for state officials interested in counterinsurgency.