Re-Viewing the Battle of with 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

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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 with Germaine Tillion by Donald Reid

Whatever the outcome of this , 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 [ ] were holding out against the assaults of the French army. I read the instantaneous legend. In the Casbah, the oldest of '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.

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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

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(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. He tallied more than 3,000 suspects in police custody who had 'disappeared' in the first months of 1957, many so as to do away with the evidence of torture - what he bitterly called 'my list of Maccabees'.15 Army approval of torture undercut the basis for a republican military, creating an environment of what Tillion termed 'authoritarian anarchy', that would encourage the military's participation in revolts against the Republic and in the terrorist Organisation de l'Armee Secrete (OAS) as the war ended. 'After 1957', Tillion asserted, 'the FLN was too closely associated with the Algerian masses for any lasting detente to occur without its total agreement'; the FLN could be temporarily silenced, but it would always reconstitute itself and re-emerge.16 The army captured the FLN leader Larbi Ben M'Hidi in late February 1957. Told the war was lost, he responded by citing the 'Chant des partisans' of the French Resistance: 'Another will take my place'.17 Ben M'Hidi refused to collaborate; the army murdered him and claimed his death was by suicide. His military adjunct, Yacef Saadi, assumed leadership in the Casbah, and there led the FLN in a 'David against Goliath' battle against the army.18 The Battle of Algiers ended with the capture of Yacef and Zohra Drif on 24 September 1957, and the deaths two weeks later of the popular leader , who refused to surrender, along with , and Yacef's nephew, Petit Omar. The Battle was a turning point in the French-Algerian War, a military victory the brutality of which made it impossible for France to win the war - to achieve its ostensible goal of fostering an Algeria where French Algerians and Muslim Algerians could live together in peace.19 The war created the Algerian national identity whose existence Tillion had questioned in the first years of the conflict. 'We forged and tempered it with our own hands'; 'beating the yolk with oil, we made the mayonnaise - now Algerian unity is made'.20

I have substituted the camera for the machine gun. The idea of re-living those days and recalling the emotions I felt, moved me greatly, but there is no rancor in my memories. Together with our Italian friends, we desired to make an objective, fair-minded film, one that is not a trial of

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a people or of a nation, but is only a heartfelt act of accusation against colonization, violence, and war. Yacef Saadi21

In 1962, the French released Yacef and he published a memoir he had written in prison on the Battle of Algiers. He spurned the offer to become a minister in the new Algerian government, preferring to go into business and founding Casbah Films, the first film production and distribution company in Algeria. He established relations with Italian directors, and in 1963 he assembled private and Algerian government funding and sent a representative - one of his bombmakers during the Battle of Algiers22 - to Italy, in search of a director to make a film on the Algerian War of Independence. Yacef settled upon Gillo Pontecorvo, then known for La Grande Strada Azzurra (1957), the story of a fisherman pursued by the coast guard for his use of homemade bombs to catch fish; and Kapo (1960), a tale of betrayal and redemption in a concentration camp - a film whose sets echo Night and Fog, but which condemns the inhuman consequences of an inhumane system by depicting individuals, rather than the anonymous figures and collectivities of the documentary. Pontecorvo came from a bourgeois Jewish family. Before World War II, he had dropped out of university and gone to Toulon where he served as a liaison between underground anti-fascist groups in Italy and Italian exiles in France. A competitor in international tennis matches, Pontecorvo could travel abroad without arousing the Italian government's suspicion. He joined the Communist Party in 1941 and served as commander of a resistance unit in and the Alps. Saying that what he learned in the resistance found a place in The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo offered Yacef and his comrades the respect Tillion gave them: 'Resistance is the same in Algiers as it is in Paris, Turin or Milan'.23 After the war, Pontecorvo was inspired to become a filmmaker by 's Paisd (1946), a film whose newsreel-like recreation of the liberation of Italy is echoed in The Battle of Algiers. Pontecorvo quit the Communist party in 1956, but remained politically engaged on the left. He planned to do a film, Para, on the Algerian war that focused on a French journalist (and former paratrooper) to be played by Paul Newman or Warren Beatty - Pontecorvo contacted both. The reporter was to be 'like the society he represented, ... hollow, empty, with only one overriding concern - efficiency'.24 Meeting with the OAS would bring the reporter face to face with colonialism. But Yacef convinced Pontecorvo to scrap the idea of a film on a European intellectual in favour of one on the Battle of Algiers, seen from the perspective of the Algerians. The Battle of Algiers had been prompted in 1957 by the FLN's effort to internationalize their struggle by holding a general strike when the United Nations met; the project of the film was to internationalize memory of these events.

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Casbah Films co-produced The Battle of Algiers, the first feature film shot in independent Algeria. Yacef, a former soccer star who spoke fluent French, played his own character in the film, El-Hadi Jaffar.25 One goal of Casbah Films was to invite foreign directors to work in Algeria and to use the experience to provide training for Algerians in all aspects of film production. Pontecorvo brought only nine Italian technicians with him. His crew hired a number of Algerians and introduced them to the various elements of the trade.26 For screenwriter Franco Solinas, The Battle of Algiers was the quintessential New Left film: the revolution, thwarted by working-class integration in Europe, was possible in the Third World and would lead to the demise of capitalism in the First World.27 Working from Pontecorvo's experience in another war of resistance, against the Fascists and the occupying Germans, as well as from Yacef's original script ('awful, and with a sickeningly propagandistic intention', according to Pontecorvo),28 from Frantz Fanon's essays, and from interviews with a number of French and Algerians, Pontecorvo and Solinas produced a less heroic drama than Yacef had originally proposed. Yet France, still torn apart by the war, banned the film when it was released in 1966. Authorized in 1971, The Battle of Algiers confronted threats of violence when shown in French cinemas; it was not broadcast on a major television network in France until 2004. In The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo condemned the French state, not the French soldiers. He did not make the French paras into the SS of Kapo.

About the repressive forces, we tried to present the paratroopers as normal - not maniacs, sadists, or exceptional cases, let's call them products of rational, supercivilized France - because we meant our condemnation to reach beyond them to the political machine itself. In effect it becomes a historical condemnation of those men behind the paras - of colonialism itself. ... I wanted the paras to look like Martians - an irresistible, rhythmical, invading force whose arrival changes the balance of power.29

While most of the torture carried out by the French army was done to humiliate and terrorize the population, torture in the movie appears less gratuitous, part of a policing strategy to purge the Casbah of the FLN. Pontecorvo and Solinas starkly present the inhuman nature of terrorism and repression carried out by the FLN and the army, not to condemn violence as such or to claim that there could have been a good way (without terrorism or torture, for instance) to fight this war, but to condemn a quasi-colonial situation that generated such violence and the immoral, unethical, yet rational system of repression that operates through startlingly accessible figures like Mathieu - a composite of Massu and other paratrooper officers. The Battle of Algiers ends with the demonstrations of December 1960, marked by masses of veiled and unveiled Muslim Algerian women ululating

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and dancing in the streets of Algiers, demonstrations that took both the French and the FLN by surprise and for this very reason were emblematic of an Algerian independence that could not be repressed. These demonstrations won for Algerians the support from the United Nations for independence they had been seeking in the January-February 1957 strike.30

* * *

They executed three men yesterday morning, one of whom was completely innocent ... and two guilty of 'attempts' to assassinate. Guilty like Andre Boullouche (who was armed when the Nazis arrested him): like me accused of having tried to 'neutralize' (that is to say, having wanted to 'eliminate') the French traitors. My great regret moreover was to have failed. The days of executions, they hear the noise of keys at 3 a.m. It is the signal for hysteria throughout the prison. It is next to the Casbah and they stand watch each night, waiting for the signal. Hysteria follows in the Casbah .... We are (after 12 years of peace) in the process of making [faire 'Mimi et Epuration] with the Germans, and we are some of those who would do it more willingly if the Germans had been less out of control [unpeu moins 'have']. Can we wait twelve years to speak with the Algerians?

Germaine Tillion to Louis Mangin, 27 July 195731

If ethnology, which is a matter of patience, listening, courtesy and time, can still serve a purpose, it is to learn to live together. Germaine Tillion32

Although there were a number of Algerians of European origin and French across the Mediterranean who aided the FLN, they do not appear in The Battle of Algiers. The film is premised on the unbridgeable divide between the French and North African Algerians, what Yacef referred to as a 'system of apartheid'.33 For the authorities, wrote Tillion, 'All Muslims were suspects, all French who frequented Algerians were equally suspect; all suspected were arrested and often tortured'.34 The Social Centres were, Tillion explained in 1957 to Louis Mangin (a childhood friend, resister, and member of the president's military cabinet), 'the only public service that had contact with the Muslim masses'; sixteen Social Centre employees were arrested during the Battle of Algiers.35 In response to reports from Algeria, the CICRC launched an investigation into human-rights abuses there. Tillion accompanied a committee of three non-French deported resisters on their visit to Algeria in June-July 1957. The committee found evidence of

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torture and denounced it in their report. Tillion despaired: 'All the Algerian elite was in prison. All those who, among the Europeans and the Muslims, could have made up the first core of a true Franco-Algerian community were imprisoned, tortured'.36 She wrote to Mangin and Andre Boulloche at the end of July 1957 that the 'big idea' of Massu's staff appeared to be to return to 1830 [the year France begin its invasion of Algeria], 'eliminating all who think in the present and the future ... the only ones with whom we can find a modus vivendi ... .'37 This was the context of an event that Pontecorvo does not present in his film, an event which briefly and tentatively bridged the chasm developing between the French and Muslim Algerians. As Tillion prepared to leave Algiers, a scared North African Algerian female friend met her and said that 'they', she could not say who, wanted to meet her.38 Tillion thought she would be given a detailed dossier on torture that the CICRC could use.39 She agreed to meet the FLN and at 2 p.m. - siesta time - on 4 July 1957, a day so hot Tillion noticed that the bus tires left tracks in the tar, she followed a twenty-year-old guide from her hotel through three bus changes to a dwelling in the Casbah, the same one where Yacef and Drif would be captured in September. There she was received by a woman she later learned was Fatiha Bouhired, whose husband Mustapha Bouhired had been tortured and then killed while allegedly trying to escape. Her niece Djamila Bouhired had been arrested in April and charged with placing bombs.40 Tillion was escorted into a darkened room. There she met a young woman and two men, armed to the teeth, 'Far West style'; they were wearing khaki clothes and carrying automatic rifles and revolvers, with grenades in their belts.41 The woman introduced one of the men as 'Big Brother', who Tillion would later find out was Yacef; he introduced the other as 'our glorious Ali la Pointe'. When the woman was arrested, Tillion would learn that she was Zohra Drif, who had set the bomb at the Milk Bar and played an important role working with Yacef to manage operations in the Casbah. Tillion recognized that there was something deeply incongruous about this meeting in an Algiers gripped by fears of terror and army searches:

I found myself in the heart of the city, in a pleasant and peaceful parlour where two charming young women were serving tea to 'terrorists' in full battle dress, tommy-guns in their hands ... To add to the surrealist ambiance there was a beautiful coffee cake [moka] on the table. I was at first pretty amazed .... For a good while, we regarded each other menacingly, asking ourselves why we were there.42

Tillion broke the ice by speaking of her recent work on Algeria. Her account of the social crisis in Algeria and what France should do to respond to it, L'Algerie en 1957, had generated a great deal of interest in France.

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But Tillion hoped to engage Algerians as well. She believed that neither the French army nor Algerian nationalists could definitively defeat their opponent and that the hope for Algeria lay in an 'economic symbiosis with France'. Yacef pursued the conversation, saying 'We aren't accustomed enough to thinking of such things'. When Tillion explained what she saw as the dire fate of an independent Algeria without a special relationship to France, 'Yacef exclaimed, "Then I'll never be a free man!"' His tone, Tillion noted, 'was neither hostile nor angry, but genuinely hopeless'. When her hosts turned to tales of torture by the French army, Tillion responded that she knew of this through her work with the CICRC, and then brought up Melouza, site of an FLN massacre of a community with ties to a rival nationalist organization. The FLN had denied responsibility and blamed the French. Yacef believed this account and had responded with the bombing of the Casino de la Corniche, along the beach in Algiers, in June 1957.43 Tillion had been to Melouza and interviewed survivors about the murders and mutilations. When Ali la Pointe denied FLN responsibility, she dismissed him out of hand. But whereas the French army had widely publicized the massacre in order to demonize the FLN, Tillion used it to suggest a lesson beyond the tortures and mutilations of the respective armies: T could not help pointing out to [Yacef] how unfair it was to attribute to a whole group the crimes committed by some of its members, and that what was unfair to him was unfair to us as well'. As an ethnologist, Tillion conducted research by exchanging stories with her informants and this is what she did in the room in the Casbah. Speaking of poor nations, Tillion mentioned famine, 'saying that [she, as a camp survivor] was the only person in that room who knew exactly how one went about dying of hunger':

Then [she] told a number of personal anecdotes and mentioned the statistics [she] had accumulated before 1942 on the causes of arrests, describing the informers who had decimated our ranks. 'That's the hardest thing to forgive', I said. Yacef interrupted me excitedly. 'Oh, if it would only stop, I'd forgive everyone.' ... [Tillion's] experience of clandestine activities, of [her] ordeals during the Resistance, fascinated them by the comparisons they made with their own situation. They were also quite aware of the extreme compassion these analogies provoked in [her].44 Consequently, after about two and a half hours of conversation, Yacef smiled faintly and said something like: 'You see that we are neither criminals nor murderers.' Very sadly, but very firmly, [Tillion] answered: 'You are murderers.' He was so startled that he said nothing for a moment and seemed to be choking. Then his eyes filled with tears and he said: 'Yes, Madame Tillion, we are murderers'.

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Yacef told of crying three days and nights after the bombing of the Casino, a site chosen because no North African Algerians were allowed entrance (except employees like the dishwasher who set the bomb), and therefore there would be no North African Algerian casualties. The bomb killed nine and wounded eighty-five, and triggered homicidal pied-noir mobs. Yacef said that he had gone to the Casino after the attack disguised as a woman. He saw the dead, among whom was a pied-noir friend with whom he played soccer and his friend's fiancee whose two legs had been torn off.45 Yacef lamented that bombs were the only way his group had of 'expressing themselves'. Tillion responded that the vicious cycle of torture and executions by the French and terror by the FLN fed on one another: 'Innocent blood cries out for vengeance'. Yacef expressed the wish that the bombs could be done away with. Tillion was struck by 'the general spontaneity of all the protagonists ... the total improvisation'. Writing for the court that tried Yacef after his arrest, she expressed her 'profound conviction that he had no intention, in initiating this conversation, of speaking to me of his moral crisis .... His collaborators expected him to take responsibility in all domains. Therefore he had to support on his own the crisis of conscience [caused by the killing of civilians]. ... The turn our conversation took - quite unexpected to both of us - precipitated, in my opinion, a decision he had already been contemplating a long time'. He assured her that the FLN would lay off the civilian population, though he admitted that if there were more executions, he could not vouch for his promise, given what Tillion recognized as the pressure on a clandestine organization to react in order to maintain its credibility with the population. When she reiterated that she was not a representative of the government, Yacef replied, 'That doesn't matter. It is to you that I want to make this commitment and it is to you I make it'. Yacef and Tillion were, she later recalled, 'each from [their] own side, saturated with shame, sadness and compassion'.46 As Tillion left, she turned to Ali la Pointe: 'seizing him by his shirt collar, I shook him a little and said: "Did you understand what I said? Innocent blood cries out for vengeance!'". Intimidated, he answered: "yes, m'dame"'. Led out of the Casbah by the guide, Tillion went for a walk downtown, stopping at the Milk Bar. Tillion returned to Paris and sought to mobilize comrades in and out of the government with whom she shared the experience of resistance and deportation, arguing that the executions should stop as long as there were no more attacks on civilians.47 Yacef had asked Tillion to meet with the FLN governing committee to discuss her ideas on Algeria's future, and the French government encouraged her to engage in this 'private conversation'. However, she was told she would have to go at her own risk for the 'government knew it had ceased to be obeyed [by the army] in Algeria'.48 And just before she left, the government told her that three more nationalists were to be guillotined. Wracked by the memory of her unsuccessful year-long effort during the Occupation to get French

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 103 collaborators to intervene to stop the execution of the leaders of her resistance group, of the five years when she 'revered "the terrorist" [the German term for resisters] and hated the executioner', a shattered Tillion returned to Algiers, where the FLN lodged her in the Casbah. When the executions were carried out in Algiers, the FLN responded with eight bombings. But Yacef assured that there were no civilian casualities, so Tillion, disguising herself in the garb of a North African Algerian woman, kept her meeting on 9 August 1957. Although the FLN leadership was in exile and therefore unable to meet her, she saw Yacef and Drif again. Yacef spoke with warmth of future relations between Algeria and France. After the meeting, Tillion heard of two more executions of FLN militants, which she came to suspect was a deliberate attempt to provoke the FLN in order to drown it in a bloodbath. She wrote Yacef: 'Instinctively, I wrote in the familiar (je le tutois) - for the first time - the same as at la Sante [the prison where she was first interned by the Germans], from one window to another as we were saying Adieu'. Tillion implored Yacef to refrain on his own and unilaterally from attacks on civilians - even though the French government had not stopped the executions. Yacef responded that he would and Tillion credits him with the absence of attacks on civilians between 4 July 1957 and his arrest on 24 September. Tillion secured from Yacef acceptance of the 'civil truce', an agreement to end violence against civilians, that Albert Camus had sought from both sides and failed to attain early in 1956.49 Yacef's group, she wrote, 'had really interrupted the cycle of Algerian acts of revenge (and it was a hardened cycle) to permit the two communities to talk things out and perhaps come to an understanding'. Tillion saw the French government's refusal to pursue the opportunities offered by her meetings as a missed chance to 'abridge' a war whose outcome was already decided.50 General Jacques de la Bollardiere, Massu's colleague punished for his public condemnation of torture during the Battle of Algiers, described torture a decade later as having created 'a frightful void, leaving a gaping abyss between the Europeans and the Muslims. It definitively compromised any chance for the pieds noirs to continue to live in the land they so loved'. He thought that Massu should have refused the mission given him and made the government face up to its responsibilities in Algeria: Massu ought to have negotiated an immediate end to the 'paroxysm of horror' being fed by both sides. This was 'possible and realistic', de la Bollardiere continued: Tillion had done what Massu should have done.51 The army attributed the cessation of attacks to its success dismantling the FLN in the Battle of Algiers. Yacef's decision to initiate meetings with Tillion was certainly a response to the army's devastation of FLN cells and to the FLN's diminished capacity to operate in Algiers.52 However, while the FLN in Algiers was crippled, Tillion contended that later arrests, captured stocks of bombs, and seized FLN documents revealed that the FLN was still intact and could have launched attacks. In any case,

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consideration of the exchange between Yacef and Tillion takes us beyond an assessment of the effectiveness of the army's policing measures in Algiers. Yves Godard, who questioned the captured Yacef, thought the Yacef whom Tillion met was putting on a show,53 yet the question remains whether historical actors are immune to the effects of their scripts. That Yacef and Tillion could improvise in response to one another suggests another future for Algeria than the one played out in the Casbah during the Battle of Algiers. After his arrest, Yacef did not betray his comrades, but he did seek to continue the project begun in the dialogue with Tillion. He told interrogators that 'We must make our position flexible in order not to exhaust the people. ... Independence, these are words, but we must act only in terms of reality'. He wrote to Belkacem Krim, FLN leader in exile, that French emissaries would be coming and that it was very important that these discussions be taken seriously. 'Certainly', he wrote, 'the struggle will last years, I don't deny it, but it is high time to find an equitable solution to this problem. The soil is saturated with blood and I think that you acknowledge the importance of putting an end to this conflict.'54 The idea that terrorism took a toll on its practitioners was inimical to the army, who thought FLN terrorists as pathological as Fanon thought French soldiers. Tillion, however, saw an opening to human dialogue in an inhuman conflict:

Your friends are tortured, those near to you are tortured. You want to avenge them. You avenge them, naturally with the only arms possible: bombs. You fight passionately against the monster (colonialism, a monster without a face), but in a real city, a quite small city, a city of the Midi where everyone knows everyone. ... Practically, it is not from colonialism that the bombs rip the head or an arm; it is your old playmate who was dancing with his fiancee. (She lives, her legs cut off; he is dead.) Or that little girl walking with the doll. Or again the old lady who looks like your grandmother ... ,55

Unlike Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, Tillion saw terror, torture and executions not as evidence of an irrevocably-divided colonial society, but as producing such a society.56 Tillion prepared a record of her meetings with Yacef for his trials in 1958; his lawyers slipped it to the press. Condemned to death three times, Yacef had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment by de Gaulle, thanks, he now tells interviewers, to Tillion's intervention.57 In 1963, Simone de Beauvoir published a condemnation of Tillion's account as a saloperie, a piece of trash, a judgement she and friends had arrived at over dinner in 1958.58 Her slur underscored a divide among French intellectuals over the memory of the Resistance for engaged intellectuals. Tillion did not join in the Resistance-inspired activities (like Francis Jeanson's Jeune Resistance),

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supported by de Beauvoir and others, of encouraging soldiers' insubordina tion and aiding the FLN. A deported resister, Tillion worked during the Algerian War from a Dreyfusard tradition. She attacked military injustice and torture as contrary to republican values. Tillion believed that her struggle and that of many other French men and women against torture revealed that it was not the truth of the Republic, in the way that the camps had been the truth of Nazi Germany. Tillion's activism in Algeria was an element in the refashioning of the legacy of the Resistance in France from a military project to an enduring political and human-rights commitment marked by memory of the deportation. This is the shift one sees come to fruition a decade after the French-Algerian War in the move from Regis Debray, whose mother was a resister, and who was arrested after accompanying in 1967, to Bernard Kouchner helping to forge a new international French identity a few years later, in founding Medecins sans frontier es. In a piece written in response to de Beauvoir, Tillion said of such meetings as hers with Yacef that 'all Algerians and all French who were mixed up in the Franco-Algerian tragedy (I want to say really [mixed up]) had similar experiences'.59 Yet it was the existence of such encounters in an environment saturated with fear and violence that made her meetings with Yacef so important and radical. They partook of the spirit of the resistance of 1940, not because they could be easily paired with the Manichean situation of 1940 - they couldn't - but because they manifested a refusal to accept the unacceptable and tried to combat it when others could see only futility in any new course of action. For this very reason, Tillion's meetings with Yacef initially found little place in many accounts of the French Algerian War. Yacef never mentioned them in his 1962 memoir. They ran counter to the narratives of independence, entitlement and expulsion which both Algerian nationalists and pied-noir loyalists told of the conflict - that the true Algerian identity and future was independent from France or that Algerians were better off under the legitimate dominance of the Euro-Algerian minority. Nor after the Battle of Algiers would anyone in the FLN consider calling on Tillion as Yacef had. Reviewing records of the torture and disappearances of FLN militants which FLN lawyer Jacques Verges compiled and published in 1959, Vidal-Naquet noted that Verges 'systematically eliminated all testimony of Algerians making reference to cordial or simply humane relations between themselves and pieds noirs\ Deported resister Teitgen had resigned from the prefecture in protest over the army's use of torture: Verges told Vidal-Naquet that he hated Teitgen even more than General Massu. And Verges detested Tillion, whom he blamed for preventing him from serving as lawyer for the FLN hero Yacef.60 This was the world in which Yacef wrote his account at the end of the war. Pontecorvo and Solinas did not think of moving from their original idea of an intellectual who contacted the OAS to an

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intellectual contacted by the FLN. Yet Tillion's engagement with Yacef embodies important elements of Pontecorvo's own ethical and moral perspective - that other absent presence embodied by no individual character in the film. Let us think about these missing scenes of Tillion, Yacef, Drif and Ali la Pointe as new - or forgotten - entrees to relationships of French to Algerians, and of French and Algerians to their pasts. If the radical history of 1966 when The Battle of Algiers was released left no place for the dangerous encounters of Tillion and Yacef- dangerous because ambiguous, dialogic and emotional - perhaps this is exactly why they are a place to look for radical alternative narratives now. In 1967, Tillion wrote, 'we will not speak of the Algerian war for twenty or thirty years. See, we are just starting to take an interest in the Nazi concentration camps. ... It's a law of history: silence takes hold for a generation'.61 Beginning with soldiers' memoirs written during the French Algerian war, France has negotiated its relationship to the conflict not through trials, as it has done for World War Two, but through the exchange of stories. In 1971, Massu wrote La Vraie bataille d'Algers, a personal attack on Yacef - an effort to take back the victory Yacef had wrested from him in Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers. For Jules Roy, Massu's defence of torture in his memoir made it resemble the account which the German general responsible for the massacre of the French village of Oradour in 1944 could have produced, but which no German - perhaps they had more decency Roy suggested - had ever written.62 Publication of Massu's book led in November 1971 to an exchange of letters between Massu and Tillion in which she attributed to the army the use of violence to heighten antagonisms in the population of Algiers, the strategy the army had seen the FLN using. Tillion reiterated her belief that during the Battle of Algiers, terrorist attacks

continually responded to the executions, and it would have been sufficient to stop the executions (there were several hundred) to stop the blind urban attacks - but those who needed to drive the European population of Algiers crazy, to use them as a battering ram against the Republic, were on the lookout to prevent pardons.63

She told Massu that 'states now know, thanks to you, that to be sure to lose a province, all they need do is win a "real Battle of Algiers" there'.64 But La Vraie bataille d'Algers was not Massu's last word on the subject. FLN combatant Louisette Ighilahriz had been arrested in late September 1957, between the time of the capture of Yacef and the death of Ali la Pointe. In June 2000 Le Monde published her account of three months of brutal torture by Massu's paras (and of her search for the French military doctor who saved her by transferring her to a hospital).65 Ighilahriz was shuttled through seven prisons before Tillion obtained house arrest

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for her in Corsica, from which she escaped back to Algeria.66 In response to Ighilahriz's condemnation of him, the fervent Catholic Massu examined his conscience. In February 1957 Massu had written to the Pope to complain that the Archbishop of Algiers was not giving his forces the support they deserved. The next month, Massu had taken satisfaction in publicizing the paras' chaplain's approval of torture to combat the FLN.67 After release of The Battle of Algiers, he had defended the use of torture, but in 2000 he changed his tune, declaring that torture was not indispensable in time of war and it would have been better not to have practised it in Algeria. He favoured acknowledgement and condemnation by France of its use of torture in Algeria.68 Tillion was one of twelve prominent intellectuals who had fought torture during the French-Algerian War and who in 2000 asked the French government to follow the precedent of admitting and seeking repentance for the Vichy government's collaboration in the deportation of Jews; they believed that the government should 'by a public declaration' condemn the use of torture during the French-Algerian War.69 But Tillion did not see this as a prelude to trials of individuals. It is 'essentially a duty of truth. If it was a crime in the past, torture is also a crime of today and - I'm afraid - a crime of tomorrow. It is especially because of tomorrow that it is necessary to condemn it today, and not because of the past, by vengeance'.70 She spoke in the deportee's voice of Cayrol's closing to Night and Fog.

Pontecorvo's original title for The Battle of Algiers, 'Thou Shalt Deliver in Pain', evoked in gendered terms the Algerian people in struggle. He now says that at the time when he was filming The Battle of Algiers, he could see women's role in public life in Algeria declining. This is why, he explains, that he 'wanted to end the film symbolically with one woman', the woman dancing with the Algerian flag.71 During the war, Tillion had written that strict Muslim fathers whose daughters joined the resistance wavered 'between consternation and patriotic pride. Who can conceive of ... the heroine in trousers agreeing to resume ... the black haik [body veil] ... and consenting to express her personality henceforth only in her baking?'72 But, Tillion wrote a few years later, 'In our age of generalized decolonization, the vast world of women indeed remains a colony in many respects'.73 Women's participation in resistance movements was not sufficient to secure their emancipation: the birth-control pill, Tillion argued, not women's participation in the resistance, had changed their situation in France.74 For Tillion, women's confinement in independent Algeria was a product of challenges to the endogamous 'republic of cousins' established in the pre Islamic era to keep land within the family. This 'republic of cousins' had progressively extended the enclosure of women within the confines of the family in response to each threat to its power, beginning with that presented

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by injunctions mandating female inheritance in the Koran. As an ethnographer, Tillion did not think, like Fanon, in terms of immediate, radical change.75 She saw systems of behaviour strengthened and reified in times of strain: transformations born of the war added to pressures to confine women. Tillion recognized that despite the professed goals of FLN revolutionaries, independent Algeria remained a 'republic of cousins', in which threats to the extended family, brought by proletarianization of an expanding population, by French military relocation (regroupement) policies during the war, and by postwar development projects, accentuated the seclusion of women. The patriarchal Family Code of 1984 that denied women equality in family law was the Algerian state's response to an Islamic fundamentalism that fed off disappointments and insecurity in independent Algeria. In 1981, when Tillion recalled the meetings with Yacef, she read Zohra Drif through her work on the 'republic of cousins'. Tillion spoke of seeing Algerian women who had undergone a 'thousand-year training {dressage) from which they were unable to free themselves. If an older woman could assume some power and responsibility through her husband and sons, Tillion saw the young woman before her as powerless. 'Zohra Drif was still a child'.76 Drif s memory, on the other hand, is of being cut off by Tillion:

Germaine Tillion really set me on edge. We were living ensnared with the responsibility of responding to the executions when we didn't have the means. And she, who represented the resistance, was coming to give us a moral lesson: bombs, they're bad. Overcome, I broke in: "Shut up, big baby", she said to me. So things wouldn't get bitter, I shut up, letting Yacef continue to lead the discussion ... '77

The meeting between FLN militants and Tillion saw gendered behaviours in French and Algerian society questioned and confirmed: in response to Tillion, who was playing the role French men refused, Yacef told how he had cried after the bombing of the Casino. Drif the obedient soldier adopted a disciplined silence. Yacef and Drif today embody different memory traditions of the meetings with Tillion in Algiers in 1957. Analysts like Martha Crenshaw Hutchinson contrast Yacef and other militants, deeply affected by the death of civilians in the bombings, to Drif, 'apparently less sensitive'.78 After her arrest Drif presented herself as a soldier in the resistance,79 and today, married to one of the founders of the FLN, , she still projects the spirit of the trapped fighter with no time for the improvization through which Yacef and Tillion built a dialogue and a relationship. Yacef and Drif appear in the recent film on the French-Algerian War, Remembering History (2004). He once again recounts his emotional response to the carnage of the Casino bombing and his desire at the time to withdraw from such violence. Drif, saying the liberation struggle was just, expresses no such

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doubts about the tactics used to win it.80 Yacef recognizes this difference in his account of the Battle of Algiers written decades after 1962: an intrepid Drif at the Milk Bar places her order, 'recalling the name of an iced milk drink just unusual enough to elicit the admiration of the waiter. Snobbism was the rule in the neighborhood'.81 Djamila Amrane, an FLN militant who set bombs and later became a historian of women in the struggle, notes a change from the account Yacef Saadi wrote of the Battle of Algiers when in prison and the one he published some twenty years later, although she does not account for the shift. Gone is the climate of emotional intensity in which Yacef collaborated with his female comrades in unprecedented ways.82 Why? Drif embodies the revolutionary struggle past; Yacef now presents Tillion as opening the way to Algeria's future. He made no mention of his meetings with Tillion in his 1962 memoir on the Battle of Algiers, but his later accounts of the Battle cover the meetings with Tillion in some detail. Yacef attributes to her a desire to meet FLN leaders in Algiers and presents his contact as in line with a 'seduction operation' to win over French intellectuals.83 But she stands out in the thousand-page memoir he wrote in the 1980s as one of the French individuals whom Yacef admires and trusts. She represents the relations of equality and respect that Algeria and France, led today by a man clearly marked by his service in Algeria, are now seeking to develop. When President Jacques Chirac spoke before the Algerian Parliament and the Senate in Algiers in March 2003, he championed construction of a special relationship between France and Algeria in which the past must be 'neither forgotten nor denied'. On the platform, Chirac engaged in long handshakes with Yacef and Drif.84 Tillion's meetings with Yacef feature as well in the conflicts over historical memory that mark the struggle between Islamic activists and the FLN in Algeria today. Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers has been, since its release, very popular in Algiers, and is one source of Algerians' memory of their war of liberation, a war recalled in contemporary conflicts in Algeria. The Groupes Islamiques Armees, which launched numerous terrorist attacks in Algiers in the 1990s, was led by a young militant who called himself Ali-Flicha - AH the arrow, an implicit claim to be Ali La Pointe's true successor.85 Abassi Madani, leader of the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), characterized the Algerian Revolution as incomplete: the FLN had 'physically' expelled France, but it was up to their successors 'to banish it intellectually and ideologically, to break with its supporters who have sucked its venomous milk'.86 The FIS has returned to the meetings of Tillion and Yacef to critique what it sees as the morally corrupt nature of post-revolutionary Algerian society. The FIS took pleasure in repeating the false charge made by the French in 1957 and revived by General Paul Aussarasses in 2001 that Yacef was jealous of Ali la Pointe's popularity and that to save his life he provided la Pointe's location (and did so without being subjected to torture). But the heart of the FIS calumny is that Yacef

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How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. ... Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.

Flier for a showing of The Battle of Algiers to Pentagon special-operations chiefs, August 200388

The French-Algerian War and Pontecorvo's film are spectres that today haunt both the right and the left. Richard Pipes, historian of Russia, recently suggested that the Russians should learn from the French experience in Algeria and grant Chechnya independence.89 Ariel Sharon, we are told, keeps the pre-eminent history of the French-Algerian war in English, Alistair Home's A Savage War of Peace, by his bedside.90 The Israeli army has arranged screenings of The Battle of Algiers for some of its units. The film was a touchstone for American strategists in Iraq. In September 2002, two American diplomats came to see Yacef in Algeria to talk to him about the film and to ask him to come to the United States to discuss it.91 The Pentagon arranged a showing of The Battle of Algiers for its special-operations chiefs in August 2003. A few months later, former U.S. National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski remarked, 'If you want to understand what's happening right now in Iraq, I recommend The Battle of Algiers'92 The French-Algerian War and Pontecorvo's film resonate today for Europeans and Americans on the left as well, but less for lessons to be learned than because they evoke a world we have lost. A Solinas of today would be hard pressed to identify the insurgency in Iraq as a catalyst for revolution in Europe and North America. Europeans and Americans on the left (broadly defined) who think about the Battle of Algiers and its representations today are led to engage in necessary and valuable dialogues with their aspirations and desires, past and present. The philosopher Helene Cixous, Zohra Drif's lycee classmate in Algiers, provides an entree to this self-questioning. Cixous thought through both her experience as an individual 'born under the guise of French citizenship' - 'Algeria freeing itself frees me of the sins I did not commit and which had been deposed as

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a poisoned gift in my cradle' - and what her experience as a Jew in Algeria during the Occupation, marked by the erasure of her rights as a French citizen, meant to her French identity, by fantasizing about writing to Zohra Drif during the Battle of Algiers. T might have been born Zohra and I was Helene but a bit of Zohra in me had never stopped chafing at the bit'. But Cixous understood that Drif and the few other 'Muslim girls' in her lycee could never see who she, one of the very few Jews at the school, truly was:

I was the one who needed them, their future freedom, so that mine would be able to blossom. I also needed in an indefinable way a discovery, a reunion, an alliance, because with them I made sense to myself. I called to them in silence and without hope. I was behind the bars of a mad destiny, cooped up with the French, my non-fellow creatures, my adversaries, my hands held out toward my kind, on the other side, invisible hands held out to my own tribe who could not see me. For them, surely I was what I was not: a French girl. My ancient desire for them, my desire for innocence, for purification, inaudible. There was no us.93

The us Cixous discovers when she takes pen to paper forty years after the Battle of Algiers, is women fighting for liberation - the Zohra Drif who, with Djamila Bouhired, led protests against the Family Code legislation. During the French-Algerian War, Algerian nationalist combatants spoke to activists who sought to reclaim their French identity from those they saw betraying it. Tillion was a leader in condemning the inhumane acts of forces who fought in the name of her nation. Other French played an important collaborative role in the Algerian national liberation struggle and scorned the liberal Tillion. But from the perspective of today's war in Iraq, where there are no shared projects between the political left in the United States and Europe and the insurgents, it is hard to imagine that after the war an Iraqi resister might go to Europe in search of a filmmaker to tell his or her story, countering the divide which informs the story, and might engage in an interaction like the one between Yacef and Pontecorvo that led to The Battle of Algiers - a film so unlike either Pontecorvo's Para or Yacef's original script.94 Iraq today is not Algeria fifty years ago, but Tillion's dialogues with Algerian insurgents take on a new transgressive character in the political imagination of the American and European left today, marked by the stymied desire to find fulfillment of their own longings in an insurgent other who has no place for them.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

Donald Reid is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA). He is the author of The Miners of Decazeville: a Genealogy of Deindustrialization and of Paris Sewers and Sewermen: Realities and Representations. He is completing a biography of the homme de lettres and political activist Daniel Guerin.

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Thanks to Alice Conklin and Alice Kaplan for reading drafts of this essay; Rebecca L. Spang for her thoughtful editing; Gary Crowdus for providing with a copy of Yacef Saadi, The Battle of Algiers: Urban Guerilla Warfare; and Nelly Forget for sending an advance copy of Les Ennemis complementaires, and graciously answering questions.

1 Pierre Leulliette, Saint Michel et le dragon. Souvenirs d'un parachutiste, Paris, 1961, p. 317. 2 Helene Cixous, 'Letter to Zohra Drif, College Literature 30: 1, winter 2003, p. 82. 3 Germaine Tillion, Ravensbriick, Paris, 1988, p. 14. On Tillion, see Jean Lacouture, Le temoignage est un combat, Paris, 2000 and Nancy Wood, Germaine Tillion, une femme memoire. D'un Algerie a Vautre, Paris, 2003. 4 Jean Cayrol, Nuit et brouillard, Paris, 1997, p. 43. Resnais later said that he saw Cayrol as pointing to French practices in the war in Algeria: Richard Raskin, Nuit et brouillard, Aarhus, 1987, pp. 51, 57. 5 David Rousset, 'Le Sens de Notre Combat', in Paul Barton, L'Institution concen trationnaire en Russie (1950-1957), Paris, 1959, p. 10. 6 Donald Reid, 'From Ravensbriick to Algiers and Noisy-le-Grand: Dialogues with Deportation', French Politics, Society and Culture 22: 3, fall 2004, pp. 1-24. 7 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Face a la raison d'Etat, Paris, 1989, p. 77. 8 Germaine Tillion, France and Algeria: Complementary Enemies, transl. Richard Howard, New York, 1961, pp. 144^5. 9 Tillion, 'Commentaire a la reponse du general Massu' (1971), in A la recherche du vrai et du juste, ed. Tzvetan Todorov, Paris, 2001, p. 264. The Rue de Thebes bombing was one of about twenty bombings carried out by pied-noir extremists between April and September 1956. Yacef Saadi, The Battle of Algiers: Urban Guerilla Warfare, privately published, no date, pp. 11-13. 10 'L'Armee, les Pieds Noirs et la France. Un entretien avec Germaine Tillion', Jeune Afrique 19-26 March 1962, p. 9. 11 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, 'Le Cahier vert explique', in Les Disparus. Le Cahier vert, ed. Jacques Verges, Michel Zavian, and Maurice Correge, Lausanne, 1959, pp. 97-98. Tillion wrote to Camus that the FLN committed one assassination for every hundred committed by the French. Olivier Todd, Albert Camus, Paris, 1996, p. 686. 12 Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare, transl. Daniel Lee, New York, 1964, p. 22n. 13 Edward Behr, The Algerian Problem, New York, 1961, p. 117; Germaine Tillion to Cardinal Feltin, 7 Dec. 1957, in Germaine Tillion, Les Ennemis complementaires, Paris, 2005, p. 286. 14 Tillion, '1940: La peripheric d'un reseau parisien' (1958), in A la recherche, pp. 99, 106. 15 Gilbert Meynier, Histoire interieure du FLN 1954-1962, Paris, 2002, p. 327. 16 Tillion, France and Algeria, pp. 23, 28, 164. 17 Frederic Allaire in 'Etats d'Armes' in The Battle of Algiers, Criterion DVD, 2004. 18 Yacef Saadi, Memoires de la Bataille d Alger, Paris, 1962, p. 34. 19 Tillion reported that in 1956 North African Algerian boys wanted to own a sports car when they grew up and girls wanted to be teachers. Their dreams were those of their French Algerian peers. Algeria: the realities transl. Ronald Matthews, New York, 1958, p. 65. The Battle of Algiers changed this. In October 1957, Tillion showed Camus essays written in June 1957 by thirty North African Algerian eleven and twelve-year olds in response to their North African Algerian teacher's question, 'What would you do if you were invisible?' All now responded that they would take up arms and kill French paras and government officials. Tillion, Les Ennemis complementaires, Paris, 2005, pp. 174-87. T despair of the future', Camus wrote in his notebook: Carnets III, Paris, 1989, pp. 213-4. 20 Tillion, France and Algeria, p. 175. Tillion to Louis Mangin and Andre Boulloche, 31 July 1957, in Tillion, Les Ennemis complementaires, p. 220. 21 Gillo Pontecorvo, "The Battle of Algiers": an Adventure in Filming', American Cinematographer 48: 4, April 1967, p. 269. 22 Gary Crowdus, 'Terrorism and Torture in The Battle of Algiers: an Interview with , Cineaste 29: 3, summer 2004, p. 32. 23 'The Dictatorship of Truth', in the The Battle of Algiers DVD. 24 PierNico Solinas, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers: a Film Written by Franco Solinas, New York, 1973, p. 164 (interview with Pontecorvo). 25 Yves Godard, Les Paras dans la ville, Paris, 1972, p. 100.

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26 Pontecorvo, "The Battle of Algiers'", p. 267; Guy Hennebelle, 'Une si jeune paix', Cinema 65 101, December 1965, p. 27. 27 Solinas, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, p. 192 (interview with Solinas). 28 Irene Binardi, 'The Making of The Battle of Algiers', Cineaste, 25: 2, spring 2000, p. 15. 29 Solinas, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, pp. 166, 175 (interview with Pontecorvo). Massu saw the panache of the paras ('impeccable and silent') as crucial to their success; he ordered that they wear a beret in place of helmets and keep their leopard uniforms spotless and trim. La Vraie bataille d Algiers, Paris, 1971, pp. 95-6. 30 Djamila Amrane, Les Femmes algeriennes dans la guerre, Paris, 1991, pp. 203-7. 31 Tillion, Les Ennemis complementaires, p. 204. Tillion instructed Mangin to pass this letter on to Andre Boullouche, her friend and director of the civil cabinet of the council of ministers in 1957. He had joined the Resistance in 1940, and like his father and brother was deported to Buchenwald; his mother died at Ravensbriick. 32 Tillion, 'Vivre ensemble' (2000), in A la recherche, p. 59. 33 Crowdus, 'Terrorism and Torture in The Battle of Algiers', p. 32. 34 Jean-Philippe Ould Aoudia, L'Assassinat de Chateau-Royal, Paris, 1992, p. 69. 35 Tillion to Mangin, 22 July 1957, in Les Ennemis complementaires, p. 198. 36 Yves Courriere, Le Temps des leopards, Paris, 1969, p. 535. 37 Tillion to Mangin and Boulloche, 31 July 1957, in Les Ennemis complementaires, p. 218. 38 Otherwise unattributed material on these meetings is drawn from Tillion's accounts in Les Ennemis complementaires, pp. 58-87, 188-272 (some of which is translated in her France and Algeria, pp. 22-51). Tillion wrote these documents in 1957-8 as a woman who devoted herself to saving lives and ending the war. When she told de Gaulle in December 1958 that Yacef had ended attacks on civilians 'solely for moral and humane reasons' {Les Ennemis complementaries, p. 336), she was making the case for his pardon, but she was also analyzing an individual whose acts and motivations could not be accounted for by the uni-dimensional account of Massu's staff. Tillion endows Yacef with complex attributes like those she asks Yacef to see in individual French men and women. Yacef termed Tillion's account of their meetings 'honest and faithful': The Battle of Algiers, p. 19. See also Yacef's account of the meetings in his interrogation after his arrest. Massu, La Vraie bataille, pp. 297-300. 39 'Casbah 1957', Revolution africaine, 2-8 August 1990, pp. 43-4 (interview with Azzeddine Chaabane). 40 Courriere, Le Temps des leopards, pp. 534-8. How was Yacef able to use the Bouhired residence as a hideout for so long? When his sister told the army that Fatiha Bouhired knew where her brother was, Fatiha Bouhired, with the approval of Yacef, responded by blaming the FLN for her husband's death and volunteering to be an informer. Providing innocuous information, she was believed and the army 'protected' her house. Once, French soldiers stayed there three days, while Yacef and Ali la Pointe hid in the attic. The soldiers praised the couscous Fatiha Bouhired served them (in which Ali la Pointe took care to spit): Le Temps des leopards, pp. 545-6. Daniele Djamila Amrane-Minne, Des femmes dans la guerre d'Algerie. Entretiens, Paris, 1994, pp. 134?6 (interview with Fatiha Bouhired); Yacef, Memoires. pp. 111-3. 41 Amrane, Les femmes, p. 112. 42 'Casbah 1957', p. 43. 43 Yacef Saadi, La Bataille dAlger, Paris, 2002, vol. 2, pp. 339^40. 44 In a coded letter Tillion sent to Yacef shortly before his arrest, she told him of her recent meeting with : T told (General de Gaulle): (Yacef and the FLN) are like you, fifteen years ago. The resemblance is hallucinating ... , the same high virtues (and also the same eccentricities, but I can't be angry with them about this since I was the same as them). When I see them, I think of my poor brothers who are dead and this makes me want to cry (because they suffer as we suffered and even more)'. Massu, La Vraie bataille, p. 240. I have followed Massu's decoding of the letter. 45 Courriere, Le Temps des leopards, p. 537. 46 Tillion, 'Un ordre cache' (1978), in A la recherche, p. 40. 47 The memory of deportation resonates in French accounts of the French-Algerian War. In March 1957, at the height of the Battle of Algiers, Guy Mollet defended his government against charges of the widespread use of torture with the argument that a government that included former resisters and deportees could never sanction the use of torture: Paul Clay Sorum, Intellectuals and Decolonization in France, Chapel Hill, 1977, p. 117. But Massu saw deported-resister critics like Teitgen as having been crippled by the experience: 'Traumatized by deportation, they sought to hinder (his action), Vidal-Naquet wrote. There

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are "good" deportees and there are "bad" ones': Vidal-Naquet, Face a la raison d'Etat, Paris, 1989, p. 200; Massu, La Vraie bataille, p. 30. 48 Tillion, 'Deux rencontres avec le FLN clandestin' (1964), in A la recherche, p. 260. 49 Vidal-Naquet, 'La justice et la patrie', Esprit, February 2000, p. 145. 50 Tillion, 'Un ordre cache' (1978), in A la recherche, p. 41. On the meetings Tillion arranged in Paris between an emissary from the FLN in Algiers and leaders of the Republic, see Yacef, La Bataille d'Alger, vol. 2, pp. 465-9. 51 Jacques de la Bollardiere, Bataille d'Alger. Bataille de I'homme, Paris, 1972, pp. 146-50. 52 For the army's position that Yacef was a 'finished man' when he met Tillion, unable to carry out further bombing campaigns, see Maurice Schmitt, Alger-Ete 1957, Paris, 2002, pp. 68-70; and , J'ai mal a la France, Ostwold, 2001, pp. 155-6. 53 Godard, Les Paras, p. 361. 54 Meynier, Histoire interieure, p. 330. 55 Tillion, 'Deux rencontres avec le FLN clandestin' (1964), in A la recherche, p. 260. 56 Sartre developed a long critique of Tillion's analysis of Algeria as based on an agency less modernization rather than exploitation. Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, transl. Alan Sheridan-Smith, London, 1991, pp. 716-34. In turn, Tillion castigated Sartre in 2002 as having been 'on the side of the assassins: "Oh, Sartre would never have followed the assassins (in Algeria). No ... He was too proud. He would have to have been at their head ... ! With the others following him"': Georges-Marc Benamou, Un Mensonge franpais, Paris, 2003, p. 100. 57 Le Monde, 12 May 1994. 58 Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses, Paris, 1963, p. 462. Tillion never forgot de Beauvoir's insult. In 2000, she characterized her life of engagement for an interviewer: 'I've acted the best that I could, always with honesty, never any "saloperies",\ Marie-Louise Bernasconi, 'Germaine Tillion, j'ai agi du mieux que j'ai pu', Reforme 2,872, 27 April 2000. See also Tillion, Les Ennemis complementaires, p. 189. 59 Tillion, 'Deux rencontres avec le FLN clandestin' (1964), in A la recherche, p. 258. 60 Vidal-Naquet, Face a la raison d'Etat, p. 78; Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Memoires, Paris, 1998, p. 123. For Verges's later, more nuanced, interpretation of Teitgen, see Jacques Verges and Etienne Bloch, La Face cachee du proces Barbie, Paris, 1983, pp. 44-5. 61 Michel Cornaton, Les camps de regroupement de la guerre d'Algerie, Paris, 1998, p. i. See Donald Reid, 'Germaine Tillion and Resistance to the Vichy Syndrome', History and Memory 15: 2, fall/winter 2003, pp. 36-63. 62 Jules Roy, J'Accuse le General Massu, Paris, 1972, p. 23. 63 Tillion, 'Lettre au general Massu' (1971), in A la recherche, p. 264. Alistair Home suggests that Yacef's impetus to meet Tillion was to save Djamila Bouhired: A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, Middlesex, 1979, p. 214. Tillion knew that Djamila Bouhired's execution could trigger a new cycle of violence. Massu presents a letter he attributes to Tillion in which she proposes to Yacef in September 1957 that from the safety of Tunis, an FLN militant take responsibility for the acts for which Djamila Bouhired (and Djamila Bouazza as well) had been condemned to death: Massu, La Vraie Bataille, pp. 190-1. 64 Tillion, 'Lettre au general Massu' (1971), in A la recherche, p. 263. In the 1960s and 1970s, French officers taught the techniques developed in Algeria in Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America: Le Monde, 16 June 2001. General , the commanding officer who specialized in the use of torture in Algeria, recommended the screening of The Battle of Algiers in these seminars because of the authenticity of the scenes of torture: Liberation, 4 Nov. 2004. 65 Le Monde, 20 June 2000, p. 1. 66 Le Monde, 23 June 2000, p. 8. And Tillion obtained permission to take Ighilahriz on a camping trip in Corsica: Louisette Ighilahriz, Algerienne, Paris, pp. 168-9. 67 Massu, La Vraie bataille, pp. 159-62. 68 Le Monde, June 22, 2000, p. 6. 69 Liberation, 24 Nov. 2000, p. 16; Le Monde, 23 Nov. 2000, p. 10. 70 Tillion, 'Le devoir de verite' (2000), in A la recherche, pp. 396-8. 71 Gillo Pontecorvo in 'Marxist Poetry: the Making of The Battle of Algiers', in The Battle of Algiers DVD. When tanks made their appearance in the streets of Algiers in June 1965, everyone thought filming of The Battle of Algiers had begun. But it was the military coup that overthrew President Ben Bella, the leader since independence whose radical politics included an affirmation of the new position won by women in the revolutionary struggle. His successor Colonel Houari Boumedienne articulated a more conservative politics of gender. Filming of

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 115 a past that could also suggest a different future for women began in July 1965: Le Monde, 12 May 2004. 72 Tillion, France and Algeria, p. 8. 73 Germaine Tillion, The Republic of Cousins transl. Quintin Hoare, London, 1983, p. 166. 74 Ania Francos, // etait des femmes dans la Resistance, Paris, 1978, p. 459. 75 See Frantz Fanon, 'Algeria Unveiled', in A Dying Colonialism, transl. Haakon Chevalier, New York, 1965, pp. 35-67. 76 Amrane, Les femmes, pp. 111-2. 77 Amrane-Minne, Des femmes, p. 141. Yacef, La Bataille dAlger, vol. 2, p. 395. 78 Martha Crenshaw Hutchinson, Revolutionary Terrorism: the FLN in Algeria, 1954-1962, Stanford, 1978, p. 35. 79 Drif read Andre Malraux's La Condition humaine in prison, but did not see her activism as at all like Tchen's nihilism; she identified with World War Two resisters like those who had assassinated the Czech Nazi Reinhard Heydrich: La Mort de mesfreres, Paris, 1960, pp. 10-11. 80 'Remembering History', in The Battle of Algiers DVD. Drif has no place for the moral and humane motivations at the heart of Tillion's and Yacef's accounts. She explains that Yacef wanted the executions to stop to give the FLN a chance to reorganize, resupply with explosives, and re-establish relations with the FLN in Tunis: Amrane-Minne, Des femmes, pp. 140-1 (interview with Drif). 81 Yacef, La Bataille dAlger, vol. 1, p. 286. 82 Amrane, Les Femmes, pp. 113-4. 83 Yacef, La Bataille d Alger, vol. 2, pp. 381-424. 84 Le Monde, 5 March 2003, p. 8. 85 Le Monde, 12 May 2004. 86 Michael Hunt, The World Transformed 1945 to the present, Boston, 2004, p. 293. 87 Kamel O., 'Les faussaires: Indices sur le chemin de la verite. Faux-Moudjahidines, Yacef Saadi, Aussaresses, Germaine Tillon (sic) et Mme. Massu', El Minibar, 26 Dec. 2001. 88 Washington Post, 26 August 2003, p. 13. 'Richard Clarke, the former U.S. counter terrorism chief, told (an interviewer) that Mr. Bush's habit of putting X's through the pictures of arrested or killed Qaeda managers was very reminiscent of a scene in the movie 'The Battle of Algiers', in which the French authorities did the same to the Algerian terrorists: "Unfortunately, after all the known Algerian terrorists were arrested or killed, the French lost. And that could be the thing that's happening here, that even though we're getting all the known Al Qaeda leaders, we're breeding new ones".' New York Times, 23 Nov. 2003, p. 11. 89 New York Times, 9 Sept. 2004. 90 New York Review of Books, 15 July 2004, p. 29. 91 Le Monde, 12 May 2004. He came to the United States for screenings in 2004. 92 Christopher Farah, "T killed people. I did it for my country"': http://archive.salon.com/ ent/feature/2004/01/09/yacef/index_np.html, 9 Jan. 2004. 93 Cixous, 'Letter to Zohra Drif, pp. 83, 84, 86-87. Cixous mentions three Muslim girls who were her friends in lycee. Two of them, Zohra Drif and Sami Lakhdari, went to law school and are among the three women shown setting bombs in The Battle of Algiers. 94 Yacef says that it was he who insisted that Pontecorvo include the scene of the little boy with his ice-cream shortly before the explosion of the bomb at the Milk Bar : 'It was necessary to avoid falling into an angelic pose': Le Monde, 12 May 2004. If so, it is evidence of the revealing exchanges between historical actors and those presenting their past in film. The political ramifications of this scene in turn got Yacef and Pontecorvo in trouble with the Boumedienne regime in Algeria: Liberation, 4 Nov. 2004.

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