It is wrong to transform the injustices endured by the Arab people into a systematic indulgence of those who indiscriminately murder Arab and French civilians without regard to age or sex. After all, Gandhi proved that one could fight for one’s people, and win, without forfeiting the world’s esteem for an instant. No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people in which the killer knows in advance that he will kill women and children.
As the reader will soon discover, I have said repeatedly that, if criticism is to be effective, both camps must be condemned. I therefore concluded that it was both indecent and harmful to denounce French torture in the company of critics who had nothing to say about Melouza2 or the mutilation of European children. By the same token, I thought it harmful and indecent to condemn terrorism in the company of people whose consciences found torture easy to bear.
The truth, unfortunately, is that one segment of French public opinion vaguely believes that the Arabs have somehow acquired the right to kill and mutilate, while another segment is prepared to justify every excess. Each side thus justifies its own actions by pointing to the crimes of its adversaries. This is a casuistry of blood with which intellectuals should, I think, have nothing to do, unless they are prepared to take up arms themselves. When violence answers violence in a mounting spiral, undermining the simple language of reason, the role of the intellectual cannot be to excuse the violence of one side and condemn that of the other, yet this is what we read every day.
The effect of this is to further enrage the condemned party while inciting the exonerated perpetrator to even greater violence. If the intellectual does not join the combatants themselves, then his (admittedly less glorious) role must be simply to calm things down to the point where reason might again play its part. A perspicacious Right would therefore, without renouncing its convictions, have tried to persuade its supporters in Algeria and in the government of the need for deep reforms and of the dishonorable nature of certain methods. An intelligent Left, without sacrificing any of its principles, would have attempted to persuade the Arab movement that certain methods are inherently ignoble.
But no. On the right, we hear France’s honor repeatedly invoked to justify what is most damaging to that honor. On the left, we hear justice repeatedly cited as an excuse for affronts to any authentic idea of justice. The Right has thus ceded the moral response entirely to the Left, while the Left has ceded the patriotic response entirely to the Right. France has suffered from both reactions. The country needed moralists less joyfully resigned to their country’s misfortune and patriots less willing to allow torturers to act in France’s name. Metropolitan France has apparently been unable to come up with any political solution other than to say to the French of Algeria, “Die, you have it coming to you!” or “Kill them all, they’ve asked for it.” Which makes for two different policies but one single surrender, because the real question is not how to die separately but how to live together.
I ask those who might be vexed by these words to set their ideological reflexes aside for a moment and just think. Some want their country to identify totally with justice, and they are right. But can one remain just and free in a nation that is defunct or enslaved? Is not absolute purity for a nation identical with historical death? Others want their country to be physically defended, against the entire world if need be, and they are not wrong. But can a people survive without being reasonably just toward other peoples? France is dying because it has not been able to resolve this dilemma. The first group of people wants the universal at the expense of the particular. The second wants the particular at the expense of the universal. But the two go together. Before we can discover human society, we must know national society. If national society is to be preserved, it must be open to a universal perspective.
Specifically, if your goal is to have France rule alone over eight million silent subjects in Algeria, then France will die. If your goal is to sever Algeria from France, then both will perish. If, however, the French people and the Arab people unite their differences in Algeria, a meaningful future is possible for the French, the Arabs, and the entire world.
For that to happen, people must stop thinking of the Arabs of Algeria as a nation of butchers. The vast majority of them, exposed to blows from both sides, suffer in ways to which no one gives voice. Millions of them cower in fear and panic, yet neither Cairo nor Algiers speaks out in their behalf. As the reader will soon discover, I have long endeavored at least to make their misery known, and some will no doubt object to my somber descriptions of their plight.
Yet I wrote these pleas on behalf of Arab misery when there was still time to act, at a time when France was strong and silence reigned among those who today find it easy to attack their enfeebled country, even on foreign soil. Had my voice been heard 20 years ago, there might be less bloodshed today. Unfortunately (and I experience it as a misfortune), events have proved me right. Today, the danger is that the poverty of the Algerian peasantry may grow rapidly worse as the population increases at a lightning pace. Caught between contending armies, these people are also afraid: they, too, need peace—they above all! I think of them as well as my own people whenever I write the word “Algeria” and plead for reconciliation. And it is they who must at last be given a voice and a future free of fear and hunger.
If that is to happen, though, there must also be an end to the wholesale condemnation of Algeria’s French population. Some in France never tire of hating the French of Algeria unremittingly, and they must be recalled to decency. When a French supporter of the FLN dares to write that the French of Algeria have always looked upon France as a “prostitute” to be exploited, the irresponsible gentleman must be reminded that he is speaking of men and women whose grandparents opted for France in 1871 and left their native Alsace for Algeria; whose fathers died in great numbers in eastern France in 1914; and who, twice mobilized during the last war, joined hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the fight to defend that “prostitute” on all fronts. Knowing these things, one might still consider the French of Algeria naïve, but one can hardly accuse them of being “pimps.” Here, I am recounting the story of my own family, which, being poor and devoid of hatred, never exploited or oppressed anyone.
But three-quarters of the French in Algeria are like my relatives: if one provided them with reasons rather than insults, they would be prepared to admit the necessity of a more just and liberal order. There have of course been exploiters in Algeria, but far fewer than in the metropole, and the primary beneficiary of the colonial system has been the French nation as a whole. Even if there are Frenchmen who believe that France’s colonial ventures have placed it (and it alone among nations otherwise holy and pure) in a historic state of sin, they need not offer up the French of Algeria as expiatory victims. They would do better to offer themselves up: “Die, all of us, we all have it coming!” The idea of acknowledging guilt as our judges-penitent do, by beating the breasts of others, revolts me.
It is pointless to condemn several centuries of European expansion and absurd to curse Christopher Columbus and Marshal Lyautey in the same breath. The era of colonialism is over, and the only problem now is to draw the appropriate consequences. Furthermore, the West, which has granted independence to a dozen colonies over the past 10 years, deserves more respect and above all patience than Russia, which in the same period has colonized or placed under its implacable protection a dozen countries of great and ancient civilization.
It is good for a nation to be strong enough in its traditions and honorable enough to find the courage to denounce its own errors, but it must not forget the reasons it may still have to think well of itself. It is in any case dangerous to ask it to confess sole responsibility and resign itself to perpetual penance. I believe in a policy of reparations for Algeria, not a policy of expiation. Issues must be raised with an eye to the future, without endless rehashing of past sins. And there will be no future that does not do justice to both communities in Algeria.
True, this spirit of fairness seems alien to the reality of our history, in which power relations have defined a different kind of justice. In our international society, the only morality is nuclear. Only the loser is culpable. It is easy to understand why many intellectuals have therefore concluded that values
