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Re-Viewing the Battle of Algiers with Germaine Tillion Author(s): Donald Reid Source: History Workshop Journal, No. 60 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 93-115 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25472817 Accessed: 25-09-2018 11:09 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25472817?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History Workshop Journal This content downloaded from 130.235.66.10 on Tue, 25 Sep 2018 11:09:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Germaine Tillion in discussion at St Mande, date and companion unknown. Re-viewing The Battle of Algiers with Germaine Tillion by Donald Reid Whatever the outcome of this Algerian war, it is certain that in fifty years, one hundred years, the Algerians will remember. They will teach their children what that year 1957 was. Legends will be born of the time when the Casbah, the most profound symbol of their community, was night and day under siege, when terror reigned as absolute master, when each of the inhabitants could at any time say: 'In an hour, maybe they will knock on my door and take me away forever Pierre Leulliette, a paratrooper in Algiers1 I learned from the newspapers that in the Algiers Casbah a leader of the FLN [Yacef Saadi] and his young woman companion [Zohra Drif ] were holding out against the assaults of the French army. I read the instantaneous legend. In the Casbah, the oldest of Algeria's cities, the most folded up, the convoluted one, the cascade of alleyways with History Workshop Journal Issue 60 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbi035 ? The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This content downloaded from 130.235.66.10 on Tue, 25 Sep 2018 11:09:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 94 History Workshop Journal the odors of urine and spices, the secret of Algiers, and, if I had been able to name it then by its hidden name, I would have called it the savage genitals, the antique femininity. Yes the Casbah with its folds and its powerful and poor people, its hunger, its desires, its vaginality, for me it was always the clandestine and venerated genitals of the City of Algiers. And it resisted rape. Helene Cixous2 Germaine Tillion is the absent presence of Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers (1966). Reintroducing Tillion opens up this film by revealing decisions made and debates engaged in during its construction and reception. These textual breaches carry new political charges today, as we think about the nature and the meanings of terror and resistance. Tillion, an ethnologist who studied the inhabitants of the southern Aures in Algeria from 1934 to 1940, returned to France in June 1940 in time to hear Petain's capitulation. An organizer of one of the first resistance groups in France, she was arrested in 1942 and deported the following year to Ravensbriick. Upon her return to France in 1945, she put aside study of North Africa for that of the camps, the 'history of the de-civilization of Europe'.3 Tillion served as a consultant to Alain Resnais's documentary on the camps, Night and Fog (1955). Jean Cayrol's filmscript for Night and Fog ends with the warning that if we think concentration camps were of one time and place we may fail to look around and hear the cries of victims today.4 Several years earlier, the board of Tillion's association of deported female resisters had voted to join the Commission Internationale Contre le Regime Concentrationnaire (CICRC), an international organization of non Communist political deportees to Nazi camps launched by David Rousset. As camp veterans, CICRC members 'knew', wrote Rousset, 'that where the concentration camp bell rang, it rang for them'.5 Tillion never separated her resistance experience from her years at Ravensbriick; she understood that to remain loyal to oneself, one's principles, and one's comrades in the camps required a heightened resistance and it is this understanding that she would bring to the war in Algeria.6 Shortly after the Algerian War of Independence began in November 1954 the government sent Tillion to Algeria to assess the situation and she stayed on to establish an innovative education and job-training programme, the Social Centres. In 1956, the situation in Algeria deteriorated as the Fourth Republic began to surrender its authority to the army and to Algerians of European origin, pieds noirs. In March 1956, the French National Assembly voted to give the army 'special powers' to put down the insurrection. The French state refused to recognize combatants of the Front National de Liberation (FLN) as political prisoners or prisoners of war. In June 1956 two FLN militants were guillotined in the Barberousse prison in Algiers, This content downloaded from 130.235.66.10 on Tue, 25 Sep 2018 11:09:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Battle of Algiers 95 where the overcrowding made executions a public performance with immediate repercussions in the city. This was an act of 'enormous symbolic weight' for both French Algerians and North African Algerians in Algiers since the refusal to grant clemency was interpreted as marking a new degree of Parisian acquiescence to the pieds noirs? If the French army's use of torture could always be blamed on 'an irresponsible subordinate', the execution of FLN militants, done in the name of the French Republic, was, Tillion wrote, 'what a certain stratum of "colonial" public opinion insisted upon, the definitive compromising of the only possible arbiter of the conflict, in order to render that conflict insoluble'.8 The FLN answered the executions with attacks on civilians in the streets of Algiers. The police killed two gunmen, one of whom lived at 3, rue de Thebes in the Casbah. On 10 August 1956, a group of pieds noirs, aided by the police, set off a bomb there that killed more than fifty people: 'the first "terrorist" bomb exploded in Algiers', wrote Tillion, 'but it was a French bomb'.9 French authorities made no effort to track down the perpetrators. On 30 September 1956, the FLN responded by detonating bombs at two of Algiers' most popular cafes, the Milk Bar and the Cafeteria. In January 1957, faced with a general strike called by the FLN at the opening of the session of the United Nations to show that it represented Algerians, Governor-General Robert Lacoste 'stabbed the republican regime in France in the back', wrote Tillion,10 by turning over police powers in Algiers to paratroopers (paras), commanded by General Jacques Massu, a wartime hero who had joined de Gaulle in London in 1940. For Pierre Vidal-Naquet, delegation of police powers to the army led the French republic to betray itself by condoning the daily and systematic use of torture: 'The French army was quite poorly equipped for the task. Unlike the German army of 1933-1945, it did not have at its disposal a special police, bureaucratic and terrorist at the same time, which accompanied it in its moves'. Massu set up a force that 'had to play at the same time the role of the SS and that of the Gestapo'.11 Colonel Roger Trinquier, assigned to intelligence in Massu's regiment in Algiers (and a member of Massu's Committee of Public Safety of 13 May 1958), had spent the war as a Vichy officer in Shanghai, but invoked the Resistance memory by contending that French resisters had known that their violation of the rules of war in occupied France meant that they accepted that they could be subject to torture if caught: 'Their glory is to have calmly faced those risks with full knowledge of the consequences' - and he thought FLN combatants who employed terror should do the same.12 Edward Behr estimates that during the Battle of Algiers, thirty to forty per cent of adult males in the Casbah were arrested for questioning; all arrested, male and female, were tortured, wrote Tillion, unless saved by the rapid intervention of a powerful protector.13 It is difficult not to read Tillion's scholarly work on the French Resistance published during the French-Algerian War as a response to this situation. In 1958, she wrote that, 'Thanks to German repression This content downloaded from 130.235.66.10 on Tue, 25 Sep 2018 11:09:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 96 History Workshop Journal (that began its role as recruiter for the Resistance in the second half of 1941), the latent sympathy [of the French] grew more and more active from year to year. ... When the enemy's use of torture spreads, the danger of contacts [among resisters] grows inordinately - but the solidarity and will to strike of the oppressed people grows inordinately as well. And it is the enemy that loses the most'.14 Secretary-general of the prefecture in Algiers, Paul Teitgen, a resister who had been deported to Dachau, recognized in Algerian prisoners signs of the torture he had suffered at the hands of the Gestapo.
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