Empire’s Legacy
Roots of a Far-Right Affinity in Contemporary France
John W. P. Veugelers
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CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Abbreviations xvii
Introduction 1
PART I: Sedimentation of a Political Affinity
1. Settler Relations and Identities in Colonial Algeria 15
2. The Unmaking of the Colony 29
PART II: Ex-colonials in the Metropole
3. From Newcomers to Incipient Constituency 47
4. New Political Configurations 61
PART III: Shift in Opportunities
5. Gaullism Loses Ground 77
6. Building a Base for the National Front 89
7. The Far Right Organizes in the Var 103
8. A City under the Far Right 117
PART IV: The Far Right Endures
9. Discourse and Politics 133
10. Transmitting a Far-Right Affinity 153
11. Holding Off the National Front 163
Conclusion 175 Appendix 187
Notes 191
References 237
Index 251
PREFACE
Karl Marx wrote that the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Does this not depend? Many traditions have vanished. The weight of the past is itself historical: some societies inherit more history than do others. Tradition seems to be fading nowadays. Collective memory plays tricks on us. It selects and embellishes, represses and confabulates. A nightmare may never outweigh a mote.
Curiosity about the unfixed weight of the past motivates this book, an inquiry into the development of a political potential: the possibility, big or little, that a group of people will support an option like a movement, pressure group, or party. No political potential in a complex society exists in isolation. Situations, options, and resources matter. Many potentials never ripen into solid support.
Some do, though.
Before it happened, the rise of the contemporary far right was a possibility none in France foresaw. The time for reactionaries and fascists seemed long gone. The country’s far right came out of World War II reviled and damaged. After 1945, usually its candidates got few votes. Suddenly, during the 1980s, the National Front became a serious competitor. Entering the party system, it upset the balance of forces. Its opponents responded with new tactics and strategies. Political debate became obsessed with immigration, Islam, and national identity. Not a flash party, the National Front endured.
Before the far right broke through, this book argues, a subculture had kept its potential alive. Societies are not uniform wholes with one way of making sense. We are code switchers: each milieu has its own way of organizing words and other symbols. As this book shows, subcultures shape cognition recognizing features, setting boundaries, and classifying people, things, events, and other phenomena; evaluation tying classes of phenomena to appraisals; and emotion connecting the foregoing to
responses (sensitivities, moods, passions, and humors) of varying intensity on the pleasure–pain continuum.
Skill enacts identity. When people put a code into practice, their very act conveys meaning: “I am like others who talk like this, and unlike those who lack this ability.” Members of a subculture may not share the same skill in using its vernacular. All know about tact, though. Effects that give spice to life—such as humor, gaucheness, and insult—result when, purposely or not, discourse is out of joint with what the situation calls for.
Discourses that mark identity never arise fully blown. The superficial identity of a loose subculture is like a wardrobe item: thrown on and off, as befits the occasion. Other identities are not so light and switchable. A subculture may have performance standards that make authenticity and belonging exacting. Becoming adept at using a code may require insider knowledge and years of practice. Putting the foregoing together suggests a line of inquiry. The codes that define a tight subculture might be rooted in lasting relations of inclusion and exclusion. In France, as we will see, a subculture with an affinity toward the far right grew out of relations between colonizers and colonized. Codes enable meaning through practices as diverse as ritual behavior and visual representation. At its core, though, the subculture that kept a far-right potential alive in France did so with words. Using a language of sturdy gloom and hurt pride, it upheld ideas now disreputable. Allotting honor and blame, it separated friend from foe. Looking back at the past to see into the future, it fashioned threats and hopes. Out of joint with a mixed-race France, it hid a political affinity.
External scrutiny, control, and interaction corrode subcultures. If shielded from these intrusions, all kinds of milieus (such as the family, village, gang, neighborhood, school, sect, religious community, and online network) can uphold eccentricity, autonomy, and closure. Another milieu that can shield is the voluntary association. In institutional and semi- institutional political processes, associations may act as lobby groups or cogs in patron- client systems. In addition, this book shows, associations can protect subcultures of dissent. They do so when they inhibit multiple group memberships and cross- cutting connections. When this happens, associations join the set of milieus that harbor hidden political potentials.
This book asks why the breakthrough of the National Front caught observers off guard. The answer, I will suggest, was a blindness to latent potentials. This does not mean that analysts had ignored the past. On the contrary, we knew much about the ties of ideology and organization that linked the National Front to earlier strands of the French far right. Still not appreciated, though, was the potential of a current below the surface: a subculture not expressed in party politics yet thriving socially.
[ x ] Preface
During the decades of post-1945 decolonization, millions of European settlers migrated from former dominions to imperial metropole—to Belgium, Britain, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands. By far the greatest flow—1 million settlers, or pieds noirs departed from Algeria during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Most resettled in parts of France that later became the heartland of the National Front.
Although not all became supporters of the far right, the pieds noirs were carriers of a legacy shared by others in French society. From ancient Rome and the British Empire to Shōwa Japan and Communist China, imperial powers have spun myths about civilization and its opposite (with civilization cutting both ways, lest we forget, for anti-imperialists condemn empire as barbaric). Through various channels—literature, schools, newspapers, exhibitions, advertising, and film—a generous appraisal of conquest and colonization spread through nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. This propaganda did not persuade everyone. Still, it has had a lasting influence.
In addition to the settlers, imperialism shaped others who spent years of their life overseas, sometimes with their family: soldiers, merchants, missionaries, educators, doctors, engineers, and administrators. The Algerian War mobilized some 1.7 million French conscripts and regulars. Businesses and politicians from the republican left to the conservative right joined in an imperial lobby that, until Algerian independence, bridged interests in the metropole with those in the colony. In the making of an imperial legacy, then, evaluation meshed with experience on both sides of the Mediterranean.
For reasons soon clear, this study starts with the conquest of Algeria, France’s biggest settler colony and frontline of a brutal, divisive war. It ends in 2018—when, hoping to improve her party’s image, the leader of the National Front decided to change its name to the National Rally. Ranging across nearly two centuries, Empire’s Legacy consists of four parts that progress through time.
Searching for the roots of a far-right potential, Part I (1830–1962) looks at social relations in colonial Algeria. Chapter 1 examines how thousands of European settlers from different lands became the French of Algeria, a people that defined itself in opposition to the native Arabs and Berbers. Chapter 2 probes the years from World War II until the onset of Algerian independence, an unsettled time for notions of them and us. Once dominant in the social order of the colony, in 1962 the settlers ended up on the losing side. Relations with natives, metropole, and each other would condition their postcolonial identity and far-right availability.
Part II (1962–1968) begins with the flight of the settlers. Shifting the focus to Toulon—the greatest experiment in municipal right-wing
extremism in Europe since 1945—I trace the transformation of colonial refugees into political clients. Chapter 3 shows why opposition to Algerian independence and sympathy toward the pieds noirs set leading politicians in Toulon against the dominant Gaullist party. Chapter 4 charts strategies— in civil society, city council, and electoral politics—by which the pieds noirs formed a political bloc. It also shows how disunity within the pied noir community limited their influence. By winning the pieds noirs over, mainstream politicians had shrunk the space for the far right. An affinity went underground.
Part III (1968–2001) shows how the far right changed from political outsider into challenger. Chapter 5 begins with its response to the regime’s troubles in May 1968. While the regime recovered, Gaullist dominance over the right slipped. This opened opportunities for the non-Gaullist right and the pieds noirs. Chapter 6 surveys the National Front’s founding and early challenges. Turning to Toulon, Chapter 7 examines how changes in national politics combined with initiatives by the far right and errors by local politicians to turn this city into a stronghold for the National Front. Seizing a rare chance to study the contemporary far right when it governs, Chapter 8 reviews the problems that marred its term of office in Toulon. Still, the National Front had proven it could endure. With its loyal electorate, active members, and organizing efforts, in parts of southern France it had overtaken the left as the main opposition.
Part IV (2001–2018) examines in finer detail the culture of the pieds noirs. Focusing on the link between situation and practice, Chapter 9 isolates the affinity between their subcultural language and the insider discourse of the far right. Chapter 10 analyzes the connection between group boundaries, cultural practices, and political choices. Despite claims that voluntary associations are good for democracy, pied noir groups nurtured a far-right potential by shielding their members from cross-pressures. Chapter 11 distills lessons, for mainstream politics, about how to keep the far right at bay. Despite the continued success of the National Front in southern France, since 2001 the conservative right has held power in Toulon by avoiding scandal, governing well, and controlling partisanship.
This Preface opened with a wary nod to Marx; it closes with a wee bow in his direction. Believing it indispensable to connect theory with practice, Marx treated utopian socialism with contempt (better, he asserted, to analyze the real prospects for revolution in light of the concrete situation of the proletariat). Not an exercise in Marxist analysis, Empire’s Legacy does not assign a central role to class conflict; but it does take a swipe at what we can call utopian liberalism. Enthusiasm for liberal democracy lacks gravity unless anchored in a sound assessment of its real potential next to other possibilities. What do we gain by plumbing the contradictions of our
[ xii ] Preface
time? An alternative to unilinear readings of contemporary history, which squeeze out conflict and make outcomes inevitable. The past is more than a series of victories by the strong over the weak—an inexorable march that would explain, allegedly, our situation today. In taking stock of how we got here, let us be on the lookout for subterranean currents, countervailing forces, and lost causes. This has little to do with a sentimental partiality for underdogs. Against bullish optimism or soothing gloominess, shuttling between the mainstream and what lies beyond expands our vision of what remains possible, for better and for worse.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For funding, I am grateful to the Faculty of Arts and Science at the University of Toronto as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. For quiet in which to write and community in which to deliberate, my thanks to the Camargo Foundation in Cassis; the Department of Political Science at the University of Siena; and the Maison Suger of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris. For access to material on which this book depends, I am indebted to the library of the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris; the library of the Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’homme in Aix-en-Provence; and the Archives Municipales and the Bibliothèque du Centre Ville in Toulon.
In France, I was fortunate to receive all kinds of support—moral, material, and scholarly—from Georges Boutigny, Marie-Lou Boutigny, Emmanuelle Comtat, Antoine Di Iorio, Stephan Di Iorio, Jean-Marie Guillon, Guy Hello, Jean-Jacques Jordi, Bernadette Lombard, and Nonna Mayer. I am also grateful to the pieds noirs who agreed to my interviews. They gave graciously of their time, hospitality, and thoughts, even when they must have guessed that our views differed. Likewise, I am indebted to those who participated in the post-electoral surveys of 2002, 2007, and 2012.
Along the way, talented students at the University of Toronto provided invaluable help: Nadine Abd El Razek, Aya Bar Oz, Edana Beauvais, Amanda Foley, Gabriel Menard, Gavin Nardocchio-Jones, and Pierre Permingeat. Young people like these brighten our future. Colleagues at the University of Toronto who, despite their learning, could not rescue this project from its imperfections include Zaheer Baber, Dean Behrens, Joseph Bryant, Robert Brym, Clayton Childress, James DiCenso, Ron Gillis, John Hannigan, Eric Jennings, Charles Jones, Vanina Leschziner, William Magee, Jeffrey Reitz, and Lorne Tepperman.
The café at 321 Bloor Street West that the Mercurio family runs with Tony Macri supplied good cheer and daily fuel.
Work on this book may have put to the test my bonds with Domenico Cuomo, Lawrence Hill, Christopher Kevill, Bernard Maciejewski, and Bruce Veugelers. Gladly, most of these bonds more than resisted.
ABBREVIATIONS
ANFANOMA Association Nationale des Français d’Afrique du Nord, d’Outre-Mer et de leurs Amis
CNIP Centre national des indépendants et paysans
CODUR Comité de Défense et d’Union des Rapatriés
EU European Union
FLN Front de libération nationale
FN Front national
FNC Front national des Combattants
FNR Front national des rapatriés
FRAN Front des Réfugiés d’Afrique du Nord
FSR Fédération du Sud des Rapatriés
LR Les Républicains
MSI Movimento sociale italiano
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
OAS Organisation armée secrète
ON Ordre Nouveau
PACA Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur
PFN Parti des forces nouvelles
PR Parti républicain
PS Parti socialiste
RANFRAN Rassemblement National des Français Rapatriés d’Afrique du Nord
RECOURS Rassemblement et coordination unitaire des rapatriés et spoliés d’outre-mer
RI Républicains indépendants
RPR Rassemblement pour la République
TPM Communauté d’agglomération Toulon Provence Méditerranée
UAVFROM Union des Amicales Varoises des Français Rapatriés d’Outre-mer
UDCA Union de défense des commerçants et artisans
UDF Union pour la démocratie française
UMP Union pour un mouvement populaire
[ xviii ] Abbreviations
Introduction
During the two centuries after the French Revolution, no problem mattered more for domestic politics in Europe than conflict between the social classes. Other divisions—the landed interests against commerce and industry, the subject cultures of the peripheries against the centralizing state, the religions against each other or against the secularists—also shaped alliances and oppositions. Still, above all, domestic politics consisted of left versus right: those who dreamed of a broader distribution of wealth—if not an overthrow of the capitalist system—opposed the propertied classes, who feared a revolutionary upheaval that would unseat them.
Sometimes hidden, sometimes open, another opposition pitted the native against the outsider. Largely dormant after World War II, today this cleavage is back. Out of solidarity with race or nation, social classes are closing ranks and choosing the xenophobic option; to oppose the politics of exclusion, likewise, opponents of nativism are crossing lines of class. The opposition over nativism has not eliminated other cleavages, it overlays them, thereby making politics more complicated.1
Many countries are feeling this tectonic shift, but the shockwaves have hit longest and hardest in France. Its far-right party has offered a model for anti-immigrant parties across the continent. The dominant party of the left—the Socialist Party—has made its peace with capitalism while chasing the ethnic vote. Blurring the lines between extremism and moderation, politicians of the conservative right have upheld the nativist cleavage by borrowing from the rhetoric of the far right. During the 2017 presidential election, the leading liberal candidate—Emmanuel Macron—declared that colonialism had been a crime against humanity. Setting himself apart from the patriotic right, he was competing for the anti-nativist vote.
This book will succeed if it persuades the reader that the social roots of nativist politics in France lie in imperialism and its legacy.
After World War I, the history of France consisted of a mostly unwanted and sometimes bloody exit from the ranks of the great powers. Legacies of empire endure today—in French sovereignty over islands across the seas as well as the presence, in the metropole, of millions of people whose origins lie in former dominions such as Senegal, Morocco, Tunisia, or Vietnam. This book focusses on the Europeans of French Algeria, who lived in that land for over a century before fleeing to the metropole at the time of decolonization. Their story provides the guiding strand for Empire’s Legacy, which connects cultural codes to social milieu and political choice. Relations between colonizer, colonized, and French state inculcated among the Europeans of Algeria an affinity toward the far right, I will argue, but only later—in a kind of delayed reaction—did this affinity translate into actual support for the National Front.
During the first decades after World War II, France conformed to the dominant pattern in Europe: an anti-liberal, extreme right survived, but in a space much constricted by comparison with the interwar period. In eastern Europe, the single-party, communist regimes barely tolerated rival political organizations or ideologies (whether conservative, liberal, socialdemocratic, or fascist). In southern Europe—Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece—the postwar far right found the terrain more fertile. Elsewhere in Europe, though, support for a brand of politics now associated with Nazism proved absent, weak, or transitory. During the 1970s, moreover, even Portugal, Spain, and Greece traded right-wing authoritarianism for parliamentary democracy.
By the 1980s, the European far right seemed on the way to extinction. Anachronistic, irrelevant, and illegitimate, instead of valuing social equality its advocates believed in a hierarchy of races deemed natural, inevitable, and legitimate. Instead of valuing parliamentary democracy, they put the interests of race, nation, or state ahead of liberal rights and freedoms. Impatient with social conflict, they reacted with hostility not only toward their critics but also toward the pluralistic principle that an open society should value and protect the right to hold or express divergent opinions. In a fashion often eccentric, they ranked emotion and honor ahead of material well-being and peaceful coexistence.2 In public, members of the postwar far right tended to avoid nostalgia for their predecessors; in private, they proved less circumspect.3 Stigmatized by its association with the worst episodes of barbarity in the West’s collective memory, the far right clung to the edges of social and political life.
Rather than remaining passive or clinging to outmoded ways, the far right adapted. Its rejection of democratic politics softened into demagogy.
Some in the far right kept their support for parliamentary democracy either ambiguous or conditional.4 Others presented themselves as champions of populist protest.5 Instead of overthrowing democracy, they wanted to clean up the system by throwing out the elites: establishment politicians out of touch with the people, corrupt scoundrels who line their pockets with bribes, and nepotistic opportunists for whom political office is a sinecure.6
The far right also learned to blame differently. To the Jew, the Freemason, the Bolshevik, and the plutocrat, it added the “immigrant”—a specious label for immigrants, refugees, and ethno-racial minorities with full citizenship.7 Issuing crude disparagements of people of African, Caribbean, or South Asian ancestry in the United Kingdom, during the 1970s the British National Front led the way. After it all but disappeared from the political scene, a more viable prototype surfaced in France, the National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen. Inspired by its example, since the 1980s farright politicians in the rest of Europe have adopted the nativist formula, with Muslims, Sinti, and Roma joining the list of aliens to blame for a host of problems: rising crime; scarce jobs; cultural decline; urban decay; heavy taxes; and shortcomings in housing, education, and health care. Among voters, in turn, opposition to immigration is the dominant motivation for supporting the far right.8
THE PENETRATION OF PARTY POLITICS
The far right has adjusted its image and its message, but to what effect? “The far right is on the rise!” warn the news media. Journalists have been recycling this message for years, after each surge in support for the far right: in France one year, Italy or Belgium another year, then Switzerland, next Greece, Hungary, Poland, Austria, Italy, Germany, and—looking across the Atlantic—the United States. Their diagnosis makes the alarm bells ring: the failure of mainstream parties to deal with serious economic problems due to globalization has made extreme solutions more attractive to an alienated, suffering, and desperate segment of the electorate. The wave is swelling, and it threatens to submerge democracy. This—the losers of globalization thesis—lacks credibility given voting trends over the past decade. If the alarmists were correct, a marked increase in far-right support should have followed the jarring economic crisis that hit Europe in 2008. Its after-effects are still afflicting youths and pensioners, workers and families, firms and communities. Yet of 28 European Union (EU) member countries, 10 still have no far-right party. Among the other 18 countries, after 2008 only nine saw an increase in far-right support. Among these nine, the increase topped 5 percent in only four (Austria,
France, Hungary, and Latvia); among the nine countries where support dropped, again the decrease topped 5 percent in four (Belgium, Italy, Romania, and Slovakia).9 The pattern is inconsistent and contradictory. Economic conditions have had effects on far-right voting that are neither uniform (the same across different societies) nor straightforward (unaffected by other conditions).
Consider Spain, which each year between 2009 and 2013 received 6.7 immigrants per 1,000 inhabitants (compared with 2.4 in France); and in 2014, received 265,800 immigrants (compared with 168,100 immigrants who went to France).10 Between 2008 and 2013, its unemployment rate surged from 8 to 26 percent (more than twice the EU average). In 2000, surveys suggest, Spaniards were more accepting of immigration than were the citizens of any other country in Europe.11 Today, three-quarters of them say their country has too many immigrants. In national elections, though, Spaniards have given the far right hardly any support.12
The far right has gained, in fact, but at a deeper level. In free elections held during the decades after World War II, party systems remained frozen. From one election to the next, the options on offer hardly changed. Brief exceptions aside, to vote meant choosing between the parties of the liberals, the conservatives, the farmers, the workers, the Catholics, or the Protestants. Despite their different labels, programs, and electorates, these options had built mass organizations and penetrated systems of local politics before the final thrust toward universal suffrage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Space for another option—the communists—opened after the Russian Revolution. Then the freeze set in.
Starting in the 1950s, non-party movements of the left and the right posed a new challenge. Through a process of survival by adaptation, though, the established parties deflected or absorbed the messages, cadres, and supporters of their challengers.13 During the 1980s, by contrast, party systems thawed as other options—the new left, ecologists, and far right— became relevant. The far right broke through in France, then in other countries: Austria, Belgium, Italy, Denmark, and Norway. In some places (Britain, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain), it remained absent, transient, or marginal. Like the new left and ecologist parties, still, it challenged the strategy of adaptation that had served the established parties for so long. Between 1960 and 1994, the vote for established parties shrank an average of 24.5 percent in four European countries with patronage politics (Austria, Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland) and 9.2 percent in eight others.14 Between 2000 and 2016, similarly, electoral support for Europe’s mainstream parties (social democrats, Christian democrats, conservatives, and liberals) fell from 75 to 64 percent.15 Levels of support for the challengers (new left, ecologists, and far right) have varied. Yet the established parties would have
declined even more had they not reacted by adopting new messages and strategies. Along with the rise of the new left and the ecologists, in sum, the far right has contributed to the thawing of party systems. The fortunes of these upstarts will continue to wax and wane, but they have reconfigured the political landscape.16
Where the far right has become entrenched in party politics, we should not expect it to disappear. This need not represent a threat to democracy, whose stability rests on a consensus: an agreement, between those who govern and those who do not, to abide by the rules of the game. These rules permit open but peaceful challenges to those who govern. Although not without fissures, the consensus on these rules is now stronger than during the interwar period: democracy has been sliding lately but remains in the saddle. Some argue that incorporating the far right into party systems is better than their exclusion, which tempts them toward extremism, violence, and subversion. A difficulty remains, of course: far-right parties are intolerant. They oppose pluralism of opinion and peoples. An ascendant far right emboldens hateful speech and action.
A CONSTANT DEMAND
This book does not attempt to resolve the conundrum of whether a defense of democracy can justify a militant intolerance of political extremism (by suspending the right to free speech or freedom of association, for example).17 Anchored in an interdisciplinary approach at the juncture between history, sociology, and political science, instead this book addresses a paradox.
Scholars who study the contemporary far right look at two families of factors: (1) demand-side factors that pertain to electorates (such as social atomization, relative deprivation, ethnic competition, popular xenophobia, or political discontent); and (2) supply-side factors outside of electorates (such as party messages, party organizations, interparty dynamics, electoral systems, elite alliances, or media messages).18 At first glance, it would seem sensible not to rule out causes of either kind: How could explanation do without both? According to this line of reasoning, far-right voting depends on the interaction between demand and supply. A good part of the electorate must share an appetite for the far right; and the party system (as well as mass media and other opinion shapers) must whet and satisfy that appetite.
Sensible as this composite theory seems, one of its premises turns out to be weaker than expected. Explanations focused on the demand side risk overestimating the importance of demand. This is because attitudes sympathetic to the far right are always in plentiful supply.19 Far-right success may
have less to do with change in demand than with change in party politics. This provides a cue for Empire’s Legacy, which charts a new direction by treating far-right affinities as a relative constant within the electorate. It asks how much can be explained by the supply side alone.
Saying some factors do not change while others vary is still vague, though. What also matters is the significance of change or continuity, as well as the place and period in question. Since the early 1960s, a socially rooted affinity toward the far right has proven less changeable than have parties, party systems, and other elements of the environment that shapes electoral competition. Empire’s Legacy charts the birth, development, and maturation of this affinity in France before its channeling into support for the far right.
TOULON
The story that unfolds in this book turns on a single event: the victory, on 18 June 1995, of the National Front in Toulon. On that day, this Mediterranean port of some 170,000 inhabitants became the largest city in Europe to come under the far right since 1945. Victory had eluded the National Front in elections with higher stakes (whether departmental, regional, parliamentary, or presidential). The party of Le Pen thus scored a coup in 1995: the chance to show it was not merely a protest party but one that could govern well. Its opponents feared the south of France would become a showcase for the politics of reaction and intolerance.
To explain the victory of the National Front in Toulon, I return to the development of a complex and multilayered sense of belonging and exclusion among the Europeans of colonial Algeria. Herein lie the roots of an affinity for the French far right. Other parties received the support of the ex-colonials during the two decades that followed the independence of Algeria. During the 1980s, though, many ex-colonials turned to the far right. Whether members of this group supported the National Front depended on closed social ties that sealed them within a subculture.
PAST AND PRESENT
Born in the same year in the 1940s, Monsieur Bertou and Monsieur Ollières both grew up in Algiers. They migrated to the metropole during the summer of 1962, and both reside in Toulon, where they know each other. These men are lukewarm Catholics: they go to church for baptisms, marriages, and
funerals, but not for Sunday mass. When I interviewed Monsieur Bertou and Monsieur Ollières separately, I asked if some races possess superior aptitudes (past research found the answer a powerful predictor of far-right support). Each denied a belief in racial differences. Similar in so many ways, politically the two men differ.
For the past three decades, Monsieur Bertou tells me, people in his neighborhood have known that he votes for the National Front.20 He admits the media could be telling the truth when it accuses this party of racism. He denies that he is a racist, though, and says he has yet to see racism at National Front rallies. This also holds for the Algeria of his youth. A few landowners may have lived far above the rest of the population. Still, the colony was a symbiosis of communities:
Even with the Arabs—people with whom we would have many quarrels later on—we all lived together, each community contributed its own customs, its traditions, and everything was mixed together, was really mixed together and it made for a melting pot that worked well.
At the Algiers Forum in May 1958, Monsieur Bertou joined the thousands of settlers who called out “Long Live De Gaulle!” They counted on this man—who thanks to their insurgency soon became president—to save their colony:
Four years later, he kicked us out. In this regard, I think that we pieds noirs, we’re all the same. We were manipulated by the Gaullists. They came to power by making us think they would restore order but in the end, after four years, they let everything go.
As a teenager, Monsieur Bertou joined in clandestine activity. This led him to Pierre Sergent, an OAS leader who later entered the National Assembly as a deputy for the National Front.21 Remembering Sergent and other nationalists who opposed Algerian independence reminds Monsieur Bertou of losses that seared his soul:
You know militants who are dead, people who were fighting with you, they were from my neighborhood, and now they were dead.
Honoring such sacrifices means not turning the page. He calls the National Front a protest party, not a governing party. But honor entails duties:
I am loyal, no matter what. I am loyal to the people who fought the same fight I did. And in the National Front there are many people who fought the same fight we did. I don’t
