LA GRANDEUR: DE GAULLE AND HOUPHOUëT
In 1956, an Ivorian leader, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, joined the French cabinet as a minister, the first African, the first person of colour, in any European or North American government ever, something that would have been unthinkable in London, let alone in the US. Formidable, playful and shrewd, Houphouët was a phenomenon, son and successor of a tribal chief, who had converted to Catholicism and qualified as a doctor; he had served as a chef de canton in the Côte d’Ivoire, became grand propriétaire of a cocoa plantation and then in 1945 was elected to the French Assembly to represent his country, campaigning for independence with Machiavellian artistry. When he allied with the French Communists, he teased anyone who accused him of Communism: ‘How can we say I, Houphouët, traditional leader, doctor, grand propriétaire, Catholic, am a Communist?’
France had traditionally been brutal in crushing any challenge to its empire, but after Indo-China and Suez the French embraced Houphouët and other black African nationalists and, instead of fighting the rise of African potentates in British style, they chose their favourites and promoted them. Houphouët, soon president of independent Côte d’Ivoire and known as Papa or Le Vieux, became the intimate of French presidents as did the absolute kings of Morocco.* But there was a glaring exception to this generous approach: the agony of Algeria.
As de Gaulle watched and waited in his Colombey house, the Algerian revolt deteriorated into a sectarian bloodbath. Yet it was Algeria that had brought him back to power. The French army and colons destroyed and deported whole villages, waterboarded and electrocuted prisoners or threw them out of helicopters, and assassinated leaders, while the FLN murdered, kidnapped, mutilated, raped civilians, terrorized Algerians and executed their own activists: in eight years, around 900,000 Algerians, 25,000 soldiers and 10,000 colons were killed. On 13 May 1958, as Parisian governments failed to cope, in Algiers French generals, backed by pieds-noirs, launched an insurrection against Paris and declared a Committee of Public Safety, feeling out de Gaulle, whom they called Le Grand Charles. He regarded the restoration of France as his destiny: ‘There was no moment in my life when I wasn’t certain one day I would rule France.’ It was not easy: ‘How can one govern a country,’ he said, ‘that has 258 cheeses?’ Now that country was on the verge of disintegrating. This strange-looking giant was born for conflict. ‘To be great,’ he paraphrased Shakespeare, ‘is to sustain a great quarrel.’ He believed that ‘France cannot be France without la grandeur.’ His definition of grandeur was himself. The Napoleons were on his mind: ‘I want 18 Brumaire [Napoleon’s 1799 coup] without the methods of 18 Brumaire.’ Yet by inclination and conviction he was a monarch. ‘The leader is he,’ he wrote while held in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1917, ‘who does not speak.’
His inscrutability allowed both sides, the floundering politicians and the rebellious generals, to believe he was theirs. A maestro of clandestine intrigue, much of it organized by a plump, bland ex-spy, Jacques Foccart, he kept the military threat simmering until the politicians accepted his return. ‘The national crisis’, he announced, could be ‘the start of a resurrection … Now I’m going to return to my village and hold myself at the disposal of the country.’
On 1 June 1958, as premier, he asked the National Assembly for full powers for six months, which they approved – giving his coup legality. Three days later he flew to Algeria to tell the ecstatic crowds: ‘I’ve understood you.’ He had, but not in the way they hoped. Eighty-five per cent of the French ‘Community’ (France and the African colonies) ratified a constitution that created what he called ‘a kind of popular monarchy which is the only system compatible with the character and perils of our epoch’.*
One of his first acts was to invite the chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, to Colombey, where these two old men created a new Europe. His predecessor Mollet had already forged a European Economic Community. Initially de Gaulle was suspicious but a partnership with Adenauer placed France at the centre of an increasingly federal Europe. He kept Britain out with a haughty ‘Non!’ – and America at a distance, while he created France’s own nuclear force de frappe.
His priority was Algeria, where he surprised the colons, coolly betraying Algérie Française and granting Algeria independence. ‘We move,’ insisted the president, ‘or we die.’ In response, in April 1959, generals, paratroopers and Foreign Legionaries took over central Algiers, while at home the army planned to seize power. Addressing the nation in uniform, de Gaulle denounced this ‘handful of retired generals … We see the state flouted, the nation defied, our power degraded … Alas! Alas! Alas!’ He added, ‘Look where France risks going, compared to what she is in the process of becoming.’ The brutality intensified in Algeria and France; the FLN launched terrorist attacks in Paris; the pied-noir terrorist organization, the OAS, tried to kill de Gaulle. On 22 April 1961, French generals launched a coup d’état in Algiers against the French president. Soon afterwards French terrorists tried to kill him with a bomb. A year later on 22 August 1962, de Gaulle’s Citroën was ambushed by terrorists with a bullet narrowly missing his head. In Paris, on 17 October 1961, French police attacked an Algerian demonstration with such savagery that over fifty were killed, an atrocity unparalleled in any western democracy.
‘Napoleon said that in love,’ remarked de Gaulle, ‘the only victory is flight. In decolonization too, the only victory is to leave.’ On 1 July 1962, Algeria became independent. Yet if France was to remain great, the general said, ‘It is thanks to Africa.’
The general placed his éminence grise Foccart in charge of Françafrique, and Foccart duly became the godfather of the Francophone autocrats, most of whom worshipped de Gaulle. For thirty-five years under four presidents, Foccart policed African politics, sending in French troops and spies whenever French-backed autocrats were threatened. ‘Let’s put an end to this comedy,’ de Gaulle said to Foccart, who ordered troops into Gabon. When African dictators faked their elections, they were told, ‘The General finds 99.8 per cent a bit too much.’ In 1966, in the Central African Republic, a murderous officer, Jean-Bedél Bokassa, who worshipped de Gaulle as ‘papa’, seized power: Foccart advised that he was ‘reliable’.
‘Yes,’ answered de Gaulle, ‘but an idiot.’ Bokassa was backed by France as he crowned himself a Napoleonic emperor: only after thirteen years of tyranny, when he murdered hundreds of schoolchildren, did French troops remove him.*
There was success too: Papa Houphouët did not expel French colonialists, praised ‘the human relationship between the French and Africans’ and ruled for thirty-three years as a French-backed autocrat, masterfully cooperating with French presidents. He was so close to de Gaulle that he helped draft the 1958 constitution. Houphouët, accompanied by his beautiful, free-spirited wife Marie-Thérèse, twenty-five years younger than Le Vieux, frequently saw de Gaulle and Foccart (the latter was godfather to their adopted children). The two Frenchmen backed Houphouët even when in old age he moved the Ivorian capital to his home village, where he built a cathedral larger than St Peter’s. It was said its French architect became too close to Marie-Thérèse: he died soon afterwards in a helicopter crash. Unembarrassed by his wealth – ‘People are surprised that I like gold; it’s simply that I was born in it’ – Houphouët helped Foccart overthrow Communist leaders all over Africa. Even in the twenty-first century, French troops were fighting in west Africa and presiding over successions. Such was France decolonization: ‘Everything had to change,’ writes Julian Jackson, ‘so everything could stay the same.’*