Algérie: le piège Gaulliste. Histoire secrète de l’indépendance

Abstract

Charles de Gaulle is the most popular historical figure in France. He has consistently outperformed even Napoléon Bonaparte for the honour of the greatest Frenchman of all time in national polls. The approximately 4,000 French streets named after him attest to this. The General’s name is synonymous with grandeur, French sovereignty, resistance and national pride. However, this is not the de Gaulle presented to us in Henri-Christian Giraud’s polemic Algérie: le piège Gaulliste. Here de Gaulle is frequently portrayed as deceitful, callous and ruthless. No punches are pulled in this cutting analysis of l’homme du 18 juin’s handling of the Algerian War. The book begins with a refutation of Irwin Wall’s argument that de Gaulle was in favour of maintaining French Algeria but was forced by international pressure to relent and grant independence. Giraud’s work, with the help of newly examined Russian archival material, allows him to assert that de Gaulle had, in fact, decided that Algerian independence was inevitable, from at least 1956 onwards, when he admitted as much to the Soviet ambassador to France, Sergei Vinogradov. What followed was what de Gaulle described in his book ‘Vers l’armée du métier’ as ‘le voile épais de la tromperie’: in other words, de Gaulle’s deception of both hard-line and moderate supporters of French Algeria through a smokescreen of lies and equivocation. The enemy must never know your next move. Giraud skilfully charts de Gaulle’s navigation of the Algerian crisis, from the expertly deceptive ‘Je vous ai compris’ to the studied indifference of le Grand Charles, as the bloody consequences of independence unfurled.