The FLN, Algérie Française, and the Untenable Myths of Equality

5 Former President François Mitterand, as minister of the interior, once famously stated, "Algeria is France." However, the FLN‟s violent rejection of this notion led to a clean break with what had been an unhappy historical relationship or what Kristen Ross called a "long and abiding „mixed‟ marriage" between European and Islamic civilizations.5 While the official rhetoric of France was that adoption of French culture and jus soli were the key pathways to French citizenship, Algeria‟s Muslims were institutionally denied access to the benefits of the French state. As Christopher Harrison stated, "The concept of Algérie française was an expression of unity that belied a great deal of tension. Indigenous Muslims had been consistently denied basic political rights and disposed of their best land by the „colons‟."6 France‟s Muslims were generally unable to gain French citizenship if they insisted on maintaining their hereditary religion. France was not, in fact, seeking to proselytize Catholicism; rather there was the distinct fear that the religiosity of Algeria‟s Muslims would dilute France‟s dearly held tradition of secularism. Thus, the situation of the Berbers and Arabs within the French state was an uncomfortable and embarrassing "family secret"7 for the French whose notions of citizenship and national identity were effectively undermined by a double-standard in Algeria. Furthermore, Sartre‟s writings on imperialism led to an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the institutional violence of imperialism on the part of the French public.8 Taken together, these stark realities did not adequately represent the ideals of the new France.

6 France‟s vicious response to riots on V-E Day in Sétif on 8 May 1945 served to underline the subaltern status of Muslim Algerians who had revolted in an effort to gain the rights of French citizens. The bloody aftermath of the French crackdown, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of Muslims, removed the fig leaf of the "national unity" of Algeria with Continental France. Muslim Algerians fought and died in large numbers during the First and Second World Wars defending the patrie from autocracy and fascism yet were unable to benefit from France‟s victories or share in her prosperity. Instead, they seemed to be permanently consigned to second-class status. A sea change occurred after Sétif, which had sent a clear signal that the Muslims could expect none of the benefits of French citizenship, despite the fact that they lived within the administrative territories of the French Republic. Furthermore, French military and policing policy in Algeria grew ever more draconian. The French implemented a policy of „„collective responsibility.‟‟ When a French soldier was killed, the Algerian people were held responsible, and a village was burned to the ground. An estimated 8,000 villages were so torched.9 In such a milieu, the Muslims of Algeria felt they had more in common with the Vietnamese, Senegalese, and France‟s other colonial subjects than with the Bretons, Corsicans, Basques, or metropolitan France‟s other peripheral – yet constitutive – ethnic groups. The FLN and its political forebears (for example, Comité Révolutionnaire d’Unité et d’Action) played on this changing sentiment and used the memory of Sétif (and other crackdowns on political action), as well as the worsening demographic and economic situation among the Muslim community, to attract a new cadre of Muslims committed to complete independence from France.10

7 Despite the FLN‟s nationalist rhetoric in support of all Algerian Muslims, from its very beginning the organization was notable for its bloody campaign against those very people it claimed to represent.11 The spectacular violence perpetrated by the FLN on Arabs and Berbers in Algeria after 1954, while ironically garnering nearly ubiquitous loyalty amongst the Muslim population, led to a widening gulf between the Muslims and French. The use of throat-slitting, disemboweling, the cutting off of noses, and other appalling tactics rendered the Muslim unredeemable in the minds of many Frenchmen, who were doing their best to put the actual and institutional violence of the Second World War behind them and create a moral and just society governed by international laws and respect for the Rights of Man. It can also be argued that the symbolic violence used by the FLN purposely played on eternal European prejudices against the "marauding" Arab,12 further dividing the European and Muslim communities – a primary goal of the FLN from its inception. The lasting bitterness of France toward the Philippeville Massacre of 20 August 1955 "in which FLN operatives killed thirty-seven ordinary colons with sharp implements, inflicting mutilations on their victims" resonated throughout the war serving for many as a powerful totem of the civilizational divide between the Muslims and Europeans.13

8 This view of the metropolitan French was further heightened by the FLN‟s policies of "isolation terrorism" which, according to Hutchinson, was successful in promoting a severing of all ties with both the government and European community in Algeria. "The non-cooperation campaign meant that Algerian children were forbidden to attend French schools, the indigent were forbidden to accept assistance or to work for a French employer, those in need of legal aid were forbidden to see a French attorney, the ill were forbidden to consult a French doctor or pharmacist, and peasants were forbidden to accept French plots in the French land-grant programs."14 These policies, some of which were conducted under the aegis of the aim of the re-Islamification of Algeria, served to bring about an end to the moribund notion that "integration" was still possible. According to William Watson, In January 1958 de Gaulle gradually became convinced that France‟s Algerian adventure of 130 years should come to an end. He came to believe that it was not politically, economically, or culturally sound to further integrate Algeria and its huge impoverished Muslim population into its more prosperous Catholic European population . . . De Gaulle believed that France would be stronger in the world without Algeria than with it.15When de Gaulle relinquished control of Algeria, many French gave a collective sigh of relief as the national contradiction of non-citizen Muslims living within French borders – but outside of French society – was finally resolved.16

9 While the Arabs and Berbers of the Maghreb have often been discussed as a constitutive "other"17 for the French, in the context of the Algerian War, the more immediate "other" was not the culturally and religiously alien Muslim but instead the strange yet undeniably familiar colon.18 Beginning in 1830, a steady trickle of Europeans had migrated to Algeria and other parts of the Maghreb as permanent settlers. These immigrants came from France (especially Alsace after the Franco-Prussian War) and various parts of the Mediterranean basin, particularly from Valencia in southern Spain but also Sicily, Malta, and Corsica. The Europeans settled in urban areas and the temperate, fertile coastal regions of North Africa. There they intermingled with Jews, Berbers, and Arabs but observed the tried-and-true Ottoman demographic tradition of residing in separate quarters from the indigenous population. Over time, the Europeans came to be known collectively as pieds-noirs („black feet‟).19 By the Second World War, there were roughly one million pieds-noirs living in Algeria, 240,000 in Morocco, and 175,000 in Tunisia.20

10 The panoply of Europeans residing in North Africa (principally in the coastal areas of Algeria) steadily developed a cogent identity based on the French language (which most Jews came to adopt, eschewing Ladino), the perquisites and demands of colonial domination, and their rugged character and individualism. According to Paul Silverstein, the pieds-noirs saw themselves as a "new, mixed Latin race, rejuvenated by the African sun."21 Many metropolitan French observers compared the energetic, intrepid, and entrepreneurial pieds-noirs to the Americans who settled the Far West.22 While their religious, ethnic, and linguistic attributes easily differentiated the pieds-noirs from their indigenous Arab and Berber counterparts, their machismo, hybridity, organizational character, and historical background made distinctions with metropolitan French almost as palpable.

Blood on the Tricolor: Muslim and "White" Terrorism Hit Home

11 Despite Sartre‟s embrace of the liberating power of violence (influenced by Frantz Fanon, a ground-level witness to the effects of the Algerian War), most of the French intellectual elite and French society-at-large was committed to the construction of a peaceful, prosperous, and moral France devoid of imperial entanglement, especially when these intrigues invited violence within the hexagon and international scorn. In fact, a sizeable majority of metropolitan French favored direct negotiations with the FLN (which would have most certainly meant eventual independence) from 1957 onwards.23 The issue of torture became a shibboleth separating the colon-minded factions of French society from their post-modern counterparts. By resorting to torture, France (hijacked by the colons and the military) "betrayed the nation‟s historic reputation as the birthplace of the Rights of Man," while simultaneously confirming the FLN‟s argument that Algeria was never part of France but instead a colonial possession where the freedoms and liberties of Continental France did not apply.24

12 Although the FLN terror campaign in France proper was brief, low-impact, and lacking in commitment, it did serve to remind the Continental French that their colonial cousins, through intransigence and brutality, had brought their conflict back to France – a place where neither most of these colons nor many of their ancestors had ever been. This "blowback" came in two forms: the political "Algerianization" of France25 and the spread of terror (both colonist and FLN) to the hexagon. The "incontestable psychological shock" of terrorist attacks on the police and economic targets, though modest, did cause "panic, insecurity, disarray, disorientation, bouleversement, and fear" in French society,26 while the press seizure, limits on free speech, violations of juridical norms, and increased police brutality ate away at France‟s view of itself as the exemplar of European civilization.

13 The Algerian War eventually produced an environment in which the metropolitan French increasingly saw themselves as distanced from their African brethren and those Frenchmen sent to protect them "whom the colons regarded as the modern-day equivalents of French crusaders of a bygone era."27 As the war progressed, metropolitan France came to view the colons as violent, brutish reminders of a past best left behind – a community unable and unwilling to ascribe to the mores and values of post-modern Europe. The image of the pieds-noirs was further tarnished by the enthusiastic support given them by the nostalgics for Vichy and their receptiveness to such quarter.28 According to John Talbott, 16 percent of mainland France felt no solidarity at all with the settlers and half of the population responded "somewhat" or "little" when questioned about their solidarity with the pieds-noirs.29

14 Paris‟ decision to allow the colons to form paramilitary self-defense units (Unités Territoriales), the government‟s wink-and-nod approach to the ratonnades („rat-hunts‟ i.e., colon vigilante and French army pogroms against Muslims), which resulted in the deaths of over 5,000, and the increasing use of torture by the paratroopers (or paras), which was nearly universally condemned outside of France, began to tear the nation apart. As Saadi Yacef, the FLN‟s military commander in Algiers, stated, "So torture is a problem that fell more on the shocked French conscience than on the conscience of the Algerians, who were its eternal victims."30 The protection of the colonizing "other" through the use of torture did not sit well with much of France‟s intellectual community.

15 Writing as a "simple citizen" in Le Monde, Henri Marrou believed that the very essence of France was being undermined. This was occurring through media censorship imposed by a government now invested with „special powers‟ but especially by the systematic practice of torture, which Marrou contended brought shame on the country of the French Revolution and the Dreyfus Affair. Although official spokesmen were still falling over themselves to deny the use of torture, Marrou [and other intellectuals] compared the French torturers to the Gestapo, asserting that nobody in Algeria denied it was being used.31

16 The last straw was undoubtedly the use of terrorism by the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS)32 on French soil – an organization that finally made explicit the long-implied connections between the political leanings of the pieds-noirs and the French fascists of Vichy.33 The manifestation of "white terror" in support of imperialism was anathema to what Europe, and most of French society, stood for by the early 1960s. It should also be remembered that piedsnoirs terrorism actually "escalated" the conflict in Algeria itself; since it was not until the secret pieds-noirs bombing of the Casbah (reprisals for a spate of violent attacks on local administrators and police) that the FLN began a policy of indiscriminate bombing attacks on settlers in Algiers. The most infamous of these were coordinated attacks in September 1956 on the Milk Bar and Cafeteria, conducted by female FLN operatives wearing European apparel and make-up to avoid police detection – an act immortalized by its neo-realistic portrayal in Gillo Pontecorvo‟s 1966 movie, The Battle of Algiers. These attacks were, according Saadi Yacef, a direct response to the nearly two dozen bombings against Algerian Muslims including one in Rue des Thebes which demolished three buildings and took some 70 lives.34 According to Yacef, You have to understand that at this time the ultracolonists, the pied noirs, would often disguise themselves as paratroopers, and, because they were not interested in any mercy, they would place bombs indiscriminately, resulting in the death of civilians. So we too began to place our bombs indiscriminately, not really worrying about the consequences.35

17 Ultra-colonist and FLN terrorism in Algeria and at home steadily led to a disturbing reduction in civil liberties within the hexagon, including patently un-French limitations on the rights of its resident Algerian guest worker population and press seizures. As Harrison stated, freedom of information became "one of the earliest casualties of the Algerian war."36 In the country which gave birth to the Declarations of the Rights of Man in 1789, Guy Mollet‟s description of traditional liberties as "weakness" did not sit well with the general population.37

18 Importantly, international media coverage of terrorism during the Algerian War tended to focus much more on the actions of the ultra-colonists (ultras) and their French army allies than on that perpetrated by the Muslims,38 possibly furthering the psychic disavowal of a society still coming to terms with the institutional violence of Vichy.

19 Sentiment against the discriminatory police curfew and suspected police collusion in anti-Algerian violence led to the demonstrations and ensuing deaths of hundreds of protestors on 17 October 1961. The police response to the Fédération de France du FLN-organized protest was exceptionally brutal. According to Joshua Cole, "Numerous witnesses reported seeing police throw the bodies of unconscious protesters over the parapets of the city‟s bridges and into the river Seine."39 In his essay on Franco-British relations during the Algerian War, Martin Thomas stated, "It was hard to imagine anything on the British street remotely akin to the horrific killing of over 200 Algerian immigrants by the security forces in Paris."40 The circumstances surrounding those events (including the revelation that the préfet de police, Maurice Papon, who masterminded the crackdown, had been involved in the deportation of Jews from Bordeaux to concentration camps in the Second World War) further polarized French society and sowed distrust between the political elites and intellectuals with the masses caught somewhere in between.

Exorcising and Internalizing the Imperial "Others:" Muslims, Pieds-Noirs, and Harkis

20 As Gil Merom argued, "In the final analysis, the French had to decide whether they wanted to preserve the democratic identity and order in France (and the benefits associated with them) or keep Algeria French (and lose whatever benefits democracy entailed)."41 The inherent institutional violence of imperialism served to create a Jekyll-and-Hyde complex during the years of the Algerian conflict. Metropolitan France embodied the rational, prosperous, and moral spirit of the post-modern era, while the ultra-vigilantes, para torturers, and the insidious regeneration of the Polizeistaat were vestiges of modernity in all its negative and violent connotations. Merom discussed a growing divide between the French Algeria lobby, which advocated great brutality, and the French intellectuals, who saw the war as a cancer eating away at soul of the nation and enslaving the political order.42 William Cohen recounted, "A public opinion poll revealed that 57 percent of Frenchmen believed that between half and the total of the Pieds-Noirs belonged to the OAS."43 French society ultimately came to see the pieds-noirs as an unacceptable appendage, one which darkly reflected its own checkered past. France was happy to set about forgetting and erasing this anachronistic and embarrassing vestige once de Gaulle brought an end to the war. The pieds-noirs, though allowed to immigrate to metropolitan France, were effectively swept under the carpet, forced to live out their lives as marginalizednon-entities fuming at the loss the of their Algeria in smoky men‟s clubs – out of sight and out of mind.44

21 Unlike the pieds-noirs, the harkis – French loyalists among the Muslim community – tended to stick out like a sore thumb in post-1962 France. These Algerian refugees came to represent a national stain on French ineptitude during and after the war and a powerful, transnational reminder of the destructive and lingering effects of political terror. According to Brillet: Strictly speaking, the word „harkis‟ originally denoted one of the categories of former Muslim auxiliaries in the French army who had served on a voluntary basis under the French flag during the War of Algerian Independence (1954-1962). When Algeria achieved independence in 1962, those former auxiliaries . . . who were able to escape the National Liberation Front‟s bloody reprisals were forced to seek exile in France.45Although Paris was loath to admit these refugees, it was totally incapable of forcing the FLN-dominated government of Algeria to adhere to the clauses of the Evian Declaration which proscribed reprisals against anti-nationalist factions within Muslim society. The terms of the Declaration of Guarantees read:No one may be harassed, sought after, persecuted, convicted or be subject to penal sentence, disciplinary sanction or any discrimination whatsoever, for acts committed in connection with political events that occurred in Algeria before the day of the proclamation of the cease-fire.Instead, the FLN hunted down formerly pro-French Muslims and employed a policy of summary execution and internment resulting in the deaths of upwards of 150,000 people. Despite France‟s desire to not offend the new Algerian leadership, Paris ultimately admitted roughly 130,000 refugees from Algeria – a population which in France became "living and embarrassing witnesses to the violation of the ceasefire accords by the Algerians."46 By contrast, in Algeria the harkis represented an "internal enemy" par excellence and "scapegoat for all the problems that affect independent Algeria today."47

22 In many ways, the action taken by the FLN against the harkis after independence was merely a continuation of well-established policy of political domination within Algeria. A vast majority of the deaths in Algeria during the struggle for independence were the result of Muslim-on-Muslim violence. The FLN had used terror to satisfy two primary goals: first, to rend all ties between the colonizers (the Europeans) and the colonized (the Algerian Muslims) and second, to obliterate any rivals to its claim to be the seul interlocutor valuable.48 They were eminently successful on both counts and subsequently emerged as an exemplar for revolutionary terrorists around the world from the IRA to the Black Panthers. Thus, the full ascension of the FLN to power in post-independence Algeria sounded the virtual death knell for European settlement and the actual death knell for the harkis who remained in-country. Knowing full well the fate that faced their former auxiliaries, many French military officers violated the agreements on repatriation and were severely reprimanded by Louis Joxe, minster for Algerian affairs, for their disobedience. De Gaulle, however, had little sympathy for the harkis, who, after Algeria achieved its independence, he saw as "collaborators."49 De Gaulle did not stand alone; the word harki has become synonymous with „traitor‟ across the Muslim world.50 French society was little more disposed to incorporating them – due in no small part to their role as painful souvenir of a recent humiliation. Unlike the pieds-noirs, harkis were not automatically granted citizenship but had to apply for it. Failure to achieve it could result in deportation: a veritable death sentence. Lack of skills and cultural differences made their absorption into French society difficult, and the government policies that kept them isolated in refugee housing for decades predictably led to low levels of education and high levels of criminality among the second generation.

23 It was not until the late 1980s that the government (under media scrutiny) changed its policies toward the harkis and fully facilitated their integration into French society, thus ending their long purgatory. According to Cohen, "Maybe more than any other group of foreign origin, the Harkis presence represented a test of the French ability to tolerate diversity and practice the principles of equality which their country had been identified since the great revolution of 1789."51 According to most observers, France failed this test miserably. Thus, the harkis – victims of one of the largest terror campaigns in the post-Second World War era – fell victim to two tragedies: one associated with remembrance (as traitors to the Algerian nation) and one steeped in forgetting (the policy of disregard employed by the French government in whose name they fought). The treatment of the harkis was part of a larger policy of "official amnesia" to which France had grown accustomed after Vichy. In the words of Richard Derderian, "The French state pursued a willful forgetting as its primary strategy toward the Algerian War, and one might add, much of its imperial past."52

24 Caught up in this soul-crushing nexus, many second- and third-generation harkis felt alienated and abandoned by both cultures. It is not surprising then that many young beurs (as the Maghrebi community of France, using verlan slang, call themselves) have turned to fundamental, universalist Islam in recent years to provide meaning to the lives. Olivier Roy suggested that it was among those young European Muslims who felt most disconnected and alienated from their hereditary culture and the society in which they live who became "born again Muslims," i.e., turning to the constructivist community of the global ummah, and in some cases, even to jihadism.53

Realpolitik and the Postmodern Paradise: Reconciling de Gaulle’s Relationship with Europe during and after Algeria

25 Although French involvement in European integration began with the vision of Jean Monnet,54 it was not a national priority until the emergence of the Fifth Republic under de Gaulle. De Gaulle‟s unwavering distrust of Anglo-Americanism and European supranationalism, combined with his realistic appraisal of French foreign policy, perpetuated the development of European integration on French terms. Before de Gaulle‟s return to the French presidency, European integration was based on partnership and resource sharing. Europe‟s earliest integrative institutions (European Coal and Steel Community and the European Atomic Energy Community) were designed to foster equal development and reconstruction within an established framework. De Gaulle criticized these developments as antithetical to economic development and hindrances on state power.

26 Upon his reascendancy in 1958, de Gaulle made it clear that France had to return to its role as the "lynchpin" of Europe and resume its great-power status. Realizing that France‟s position in Algeria had deteriorated, de Gaulle made the decision to exert pressure on the post-war alliance of the United States and Great Britain for military support and to begin discussions on the creation of a "tri-partite directorate" which would make Paris‟ voice better heard in international relations. In a meeting with the American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles on 5 July 1958, de Gaulle suggested that "France must be a nuclear power . . . must play a world role . . . participate in the directing councils of the alliance alongside the „Anglo-Saxons‟ . . . and must have its hegemony recognized in a combined „Eurafrica‟."55 De Gaulle‟s priorities were designed to stimulate French public support and influence in political and military efforts.

27 Unfortunately for de Gaulle, Washington had de-linked Algeria and the spread of communism and had thus determined these priorities to be out of step with the grander problem of creeping Soviet influence. As it became clear that the United States would not aid the French in the development of nuclear arms or include them in a tripartite global consortium, de Gaulle began his campaign of French withdrawal from NATO. Although total withdrawal would not occur until 1966, de Gaulle‟s desire to remove French troops from NATO forces began early in his second presidency. De Gaulle had used NATO as a way of rallying nationalist sentiment in France. "The Fourth Republic‟s inability to control its army in Algeria was blamed on NATO‟s integrated command"56 and not terrorism. For de Gaulle, NATO was a tool utilized by the Anglo-American clique to increase their sphere of influence in continental Europe.

28 By the end of 1958, de Gaulle had begun to realize that Britain was in a precarious position. Although it still maintained its friendship with Washington, Britain needed entrance into the Common Market established by the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC). Britain‟s Free Trade Association had floundered in comparison to its European counterpart, and Prime Minister Macmillan had begun to realize that "Britain desperately needed French cooperation"57 to join the EEC. While this development placed Britain in a difficult spot, it increased de Gaulle‟s power in Europe and leveraged his bargaining position vis-à-vis NATO.

29 This increasing leverage led to talks with both Britain and the United States regarding foreign policy and the role of NATO. When US Secretary of State Dulles arrived in Paris in December 1958, he was greeted with de Gaulle‟s plan of reorganization. De Gaulle made it quite clear that NATO must expand to cover the Middle East and Africa, much to chagrin of the US. Curiously, considering his military background, he argued that it was in the best interest of the United States and Britain to adopt a policy of inclusion, rather than warfare, in order to maintain peace in North Africa and the Middle East. De Gaulle attempted to convince the Anglo-American alliance that Algerian success was inextricably bound to the communist threat. De Gaulle desired a "free" and "French" Algeria; one that had rights and privileges under the new French constitution. According to Irwin Wall: France was undertaking an immense operation, politically and economically, in the form of the Plan of Constantine, to transform Algeria with its vast natural resources into a state that would be associated with the West. If France abandoned Algeria, communism and anarchy would result. Independence might come one day to Algeria, but in cooperation with the West, not against it.58

30 Unfortunately for de Gaulle, both the United States and Great Britain disregarded his pleas and ignored his rationale. Britain, whose commitment to the EEC was based on the potential for lucrative European markets, had grown hesitant about compliance with "French demands that they accept a common agricultural policy and a joint external tariff," while the United States continued its commitment to the protection of Europe and its exclusion of French leadership in global affairs.59 As a result of these humbling negotiations, de Gaulle began his vision for Europe and his new partnership with West Germany. Although he had historically eschewed the concept of a Monnet-style United States of Europe, de Gaulle‟s sentiments began to shift in the early 1960s. The end of the Algerian crisis, Britain‟s demurring on economic policy, and the United States‟ refusal to back French security policy in the southern Mediterranean created a nexus that prompted de Gaulle to began a new policy toward Europe – one in which the integration of Europe would occur on his own terms. Slowly but surely, de Gaulle emerged as the apotheosis of continental Europe.

31 Fearing the development and empowerment of such European-wide institutions that could potentially usurp the power of his beloved France, de Gaulle began to endorse his vision of a Europe of States. Based on realist assumptions, de Gaulle felt that l’Europe des patries was best suited to balance the tremendous military and political power of the United States in Europe and around the world. "Even though every state would retain a veto on matters of vital national interest, de Gaulle insisted, the institutions and spirit of the confederacy would nevertheless exert a salutary pressure to harmonize those interests and arrive at joint policies."60 To de Gaulle, the creation of this confederacy would create a Europe that would advance the interests of all states rather than diminish their individual sovereignty. De Gaulle described his vision for France and the integration of Europe most eloquently in an address on 15 May 1962: I have never personally, in any of my statements spoken of a „Europe of Nations,‟ although it is always being claimed that I have done so. It is not, of course, that I am repudiating my own; quite the contrary, I am more attached to France than ever and I do not believe that Europe can have any living reality if it does not include France and her Frenchmen, Germany and its Germans, Italy and its Italians and so forth. Dante, Goethe, Chateaubriand belonged to all Europe to the very extent that they were respectively and eminently Italian, German, and French. They would not have served Europe very well if they had been stateless, or if they had written in some kind of Esperanto or Volapuk. But it is true that the nation is a human and a sentimental element, whereas Europe can be built on the basis of active, authoritative, and responsible elements. What elements? The states, of course; for, in this respect, it is only the states that are valid, legitimate and capable of achievement. I have already said, and I repeat, that at the present time there cannot be any other Europe than a Europe of States, apart, of course, from myths, stories and parades.61 For de Gaulle there was no other solution for Europe. If Europe continued to grant supranational authority to European-wide institutions, France would never regain its global preeminence and the United States would continue to dominate the continent.

32 In 1961, as the Algerian War was ending, de Gaulle persuaded the members of the EEC to meet in Bonn, Germany, to discuss the creation of a "union of states" and an amendment to the Treaty of Rome.62 It was de Gaulle‟s desire to create European institutions that consisted of traditional heads of state, who could act on behalf of their particular governments. De Gaulle believed that there should be a "separate „European Political Commission,‟ comprising officials of the six foreign ministries who would reside in Paris and coordinate agendas for meetings of foreign ministers and heads, leaving the EEC Commission in Brussels with the ordinary economic agenda-setting role assigned it by the Treaty of Rome."63 Each member-state would have the ability of the veto in areas of "extraordinary agenda items," so as to not trample the sovereignty of each.

33 While the Bonn summit yielded limited results, it solidified de Gaulle‟s belief in a French-driven European community. For him the Bonn meeting highlighted the divergence of France from the other members of the EEC. It had become apparent that the other members were content with the Anglo-American protectorate and the possibility of further integration. In his desire to elevate the status of France within the global community, and still smarting from Washington‟s intransigence on Algeria, de Gaulle refused to allow his European brethren to create an American-influenced European system. Most would label his diplomatic inability to convince the Americans, British, and other members of the EEC as a failure. However, it is reasonable to assert that his stubbornness and unwillingness to conform to the bipolarity of the Cold War is a major reason for the current level of French success in European affairs.

34 De Gaulle realized that Algeria had damaged his public support at home and jeopardized France‟s image abroad, and that "getting rid of it was perhaps the greatest service he had rendered France in his career."64 The "release" of Algeria may have begun de Gaulle‟s revival in French public opinion, but it was his commitment to Anglo-American antagonism that truly won the hearts of his citizens. Though many Americans viewed French policy with disdain, de Gaulle realized that European success was dependent upon French participation, as well as a certain level of independence on the part of Europeans themselves. De Gaulle‟s embrace of a leadership role in the European experiment led to his strong relationship with German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the isolation of Great Britain, which he twice denied entrance into the EEC.

35 Although French withdrawal from NATO in 1966 is often perceived as the culmination of French frustration with America‟s hesitation for a tripartite global directorate and coldly served revenge for its Algeria policies, it should also be seen as the coup de grace in de Gaulle‟s vision for Europe in a post-Cold War world. According to Wall: Real self-determination for France in the postwar world required a change in the status quo and a new international equilibrium beyond Cold War politics. Once this was achieved, with France leading the way, an end of the bipolar world based on mutual assured destruction would become possible, and in time communism would be revealed as a superficial veneer masking the deeper reality of the national traditions of the countries in which it ruled, allowing them to join the West in a new world system of peace and equality. De Gaulle was a prophet ahead of his time.65

36 It is difficult to argue that de Gaulle‟s motives were not driven by a dogged adherence to France‟s national interest. It is obvious that they were. Yet, it is plausible to suggest that his vision to recapture the past glories of France were in line with his view of a united Europe. De Gaulle‟s love of France was based upon "continental" France; a France that was powerful enough to influence his European allies and stand up to the superpowers. In this respect, de Gaulle‟s France has never faded. It remains to this day, the seat of Anglo-American antagonism on the continent and the lynchpin of a united Europe. The Algerian crisis precipitated a new milieu in Franco-European relations by distancing Paris from both Washington and London at a crucial juncture. Without Algeria, de Gaulle would have had to create a similar specter or would have had to tow the Anglo-American line like the Benelux countries and West Germany. The immaculate evacuation of Algeria when combined with simmering anti-Anglo-Saxonism (some of which had been generated around the Algerian War) granted de Gaulle the mandate and confidence he needed to chart a new "continental" course for his beloved France, forever changing the face of Europe in the process.