Remembering Évian

60 years ago representatives of the French government and of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne, GPRA) completed, in Évian-les-Bains, the final stage of the protracted negotiations that brought a savage war to a civilized end. In doing so, they contrived to annul at long last the fateful error of 1848, when the constitution of the Second Republic proclaimed Algeria to be an integral part of France.

Most of the provisions of the Évian Agreements were of secondary or only temporary importance. What mattered was that the French and the Algerians were negotiating at all and, after a long process of trial and error, at last negotiating to real purpose, the purpose of reaching a firm agreement. For this to be possible it was necessary that the French government come to terms with painful realities. This took seven years and not one revolution but two.

In abandoning agitation within the framework of French legality as futile and going to war with France instead, the FLN was displaying a hard-headed realism, drawing the lesson of repeated disappointment, seeing a blind alley for what it was, and redeploying to very different ground, that of guerrilla warfare, the maquis or, as Algerians call it, al-jebel (‘the mountain’). In doing this the FLN’s founders were revolutionizing their praxis and themselves, transforming Algerian nationalism from a movement making claims to a movement creating facts, and its activists from petitioners to the agents of liberation.

Moreover, the FLN’s founders had thought through their main moves and had a clear strategy. This was to secure the allegiance of the Algerian people in order to demonstrate to Paris that France could no longer govern the country, and then negotiate the conditions and modalities of the transition to a sovereign Algerian state. The main terms of the eventual negotiation were lucidly envisaged and stated clearly in the Proclamation of 1 November 1954. On the Algerian side, the end of the war was in its beginning.

On the French side nothing could be further from the truth. The Fourth Republic had driven Algerian nationalism to resort to war by its misgovernment of Algeria, symbolized by the serial rigging of elections to deny the nationalists the representation to which their popular support entitled them. Its weak and irresolute governments, dependent on fragile coalitions in the National Assembly, could not free themselves from the veto power of the settler lobby or the hallucinatory dogmas of Algérie française. It took a constitutional revolution to achieve this. In founding the Fifth Republic, de Gaulle established the constitutional preconditions of authoritative government and thus the political framework within which Algerian realities could at last be recognized and inform policy choices.

Recognition was the heart of the matter, the main stake of the violence. What France had to be induced to recognize was a whole series of inconvenient and disturbing truths – that ‘Dad’s Algeria was dead’; that Algeria was not French but Algerian; that the Arabic-speakers and Berber-speakers of Algeria were not a fragmented patchwork or mosaic, different elements of which could be played off against one another, but one people; that this people had the right of self-determination; that the FLN was the legitimate representative of the Algerian people and the sole interlocutor of France; that the choice of independence was ineluctable and acknowledgement of this a prerequisite of serious negotiations; and that the Sahara was Algerian too.

But there was a more fundamental matter to be recognized. The revolutionary democracy pioneered by France since 1789 had established the principle that citizenship was the precondition of entitlement and respectful treatment by governments. This principle, realized only intermittently at first but consistently  from 1870 onwards in the Third Republic and, after the Vichy hiatus, the Fourth Republic also, could not be applied in Algeria because it presupposed the equality of all citizens before the law, and Algeria’s Muslims could not abandon their juridical status as Muslims. Herein lay the folly of the 1848 decision. The consequence was that, denied the rights of citizenship and the respect that French governments were inclined to show those to whom they were electorally accountable, Algeria’s Muslims were subject to all kinds of constraints, disadvantages and penalties which inevitably assumed the character of systematic discrimination and oppression expressed in the mortifying register of explicitly racist contempt. Ending this state of affairs, compelling the French to recognize the humanity of the Algerians, their right to be citizens in a state of their own if they could not be French citizens, was unquestionably one of the war aims of the FLN. 

Recognition of the humanity of the Algerians was the precondition of the recognition of all the other matters. The FLN’s success in compelling the French to recognize all these things and the willingness of the French at last to do so under Gaullist leadership made the negotiations possible, once the failure of the French army’s rival project of eradicating the insurgency had been demonstrated by the success of the FLN’s Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) in surviving everything thrown at it.

That serious negotiation was part of the FLN’s revolutionary game plan and repertoire from the outset has not been well understood by recent generations of Algerians, whose successive attempts to remobilize the revolutionary tradition against a regime whose legitimacy they contest have imitated mechanically one or another aspect of the revolution – the maquis as revived by the armed Islamist groups in the 1990s, the utopian perspective of a radical purification of Algeria as articulated in the hirāk’s slogans Système dégage and Yetnahaw ga‘a [‘Let them all clear off’] in recent years – while displaying an inability to countenance, let alone engage, purposeful negotiations with a regime staffed, after all, by their fellow-countrymen.

But the fact that the GPRA delegation at Évian was led by Krim Belkacem, one of the historic founders of the FLN and the principal architect of the ALN, and that it was Krim who signed the Agreement for Algeria is evidence of the importance of negotiation within the FLN’s political repertoire and of the constancy and sophistication of its revolutionary vision, the secret of its success.