The World

Within five years, in February 1963, the Baathists seized power in Syria and then in Iraq, where the bluff new premier, Colonel Ahmed al-Bakr, used his implacable cousin for special murderous tasks: the thirty-one-year-old Saddam Hussein.

Suez accelerated the African crisis that France and Britain handled very differently. Their vast African empires had existed for only around seventy years, but their power was haemorrhaging. Now France suffered an existential crisis that led to a military coup and the near destruction of democracy.

LA GRANDEUR

: DE GAULLE AND HOUPHOUëT

In 1956, an Ivorian leader, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, joined the French cabinet as a minister, the first African, the first person of colour, in any European or North American government ever, something that would have been unthinkable in London, let alone in the US. Formidable, playful and shrewd, Houphouët was a phenomenon, son and successor of a tribal chief, who had converted to Catholicism and qualified as a doctor; he had served as a chef de canton in the Côte d’Ivoire, became grand propriétaire of a cocoa plantation and then in 1945 was elected to the French Assembly to represent his country, campaigning for independence with Machiavellian artistry. When he allied with the French Communists, he teased anyone who accused him of Communism: ‘How can we say I, Houphouët, traditional leader, doctor, grand propriétaire

, Catholic, am a Communist?’

France had traditionally been brutal in crushing any challenge to its empire, but after Indo-China and Suez the French embraced Houphouët and other black African nationalists and, instead of fighting the rise of African potentates in British style, they chose their favourites and promoted them. Houphouët, soon president of independent Côte d’Ivoire and known as Papa or Le Vieux, became the intimate of French presidents as did the absolute kings of Morocco.^*

But there was a glaring exception to this generous approach: the agony of Algeria.

As de Gaulle watched and waited in his Colombey house, the Algerian revolt deteriorated into a sectarian bloodbath. Yet it was Algeria that had brought him back to power. The French army and colons destroyed and deported whole villages, waterboarded and electrocuted prisoners or threw them out of helicopters, and assassinated leaders, while the FLN murdered, kidnapped, mutilated, raped civilians, terrorized Algerians and executed their own activists: in eight years, around 900,000 Algerians, 25,000 soldiers and 10,000 colons were killed. On 13 May 1958, as Parisian governments failed to cope, in Algiers French generals, backed by pieds-noirs

, launched an insurrection against Paris and declared a Committee of Public Safety, feeling out de Gaulle, whom they called Le Grand Charles. He regarded the restoration of France as his destiny: ‘There was no moment in my life when I wasn’t certain one day I would rule France.’ It was not easy: ‘How can one govern a country,’ he said, ‘that has 258 cheeses?’ Now that country was on the verge of disintegrating. This strange-looking giant was born for conflict. ‘To be great,’ he paraphrased Shakespeare, ‘is to sustain a great quarrel.’ He believed that ‘France cannot be France without la grandeur.’ His definition of grandeur was himself. The Napoleons were on his mind: ‘I want 18 Brumaire [Napoleon’s 1799 coup] without the methods of 18 Brumaire.’ Yet by inclination and conviction he was a monarch. ‘The leader is he,’ he wrote while held in a German prisoner-of-war camp in 1917, ‘who does not speak.’

His inscrutability allowed both sides, the floundering politicians and the rebellious generals, to believe he was theirs. A maestro of clandestine intrigue, much of it organized by a plump, bland ex-spy, Jacques Foccart, he kept the military threat simmering until the politicians accepted his return. ‘The national crisis’, he announced, could be ‘the start of a resurrection … Now I’m going to return to my village and hold myself at the disposal of the country.’

On 1 June 1958, as premier, he asked the National Assembly for full powers for six months, which they approved – giving his coup legality. Three days later he flew to Algeria to tell the ecstatic crowds: ‘I’ve understood you.’ He had, but not in the way they hoped. Eighty-five per cent of the French ‘Community’ (France and the African colonies) ratified a constitution that created what he called ‘a kind of popular monarchy which is the only system compatible with the character and perils of our epoch’.^*