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- [00:01]
William Dalrymple
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com.
- [00:20]
Anita Anand
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- [00:47]
William Dalrymple
Do.
- [01:00]
Anita Anand
Well. Hello and welcome to Empire with me,
- [01:02]
William Dalrymple
Anita Arnan and me, William Drymple.
- [01:06]
Anita Anand
So this is episode three of our Algeria series. In this episode, the Algerian Revolution begins. So question first of all, how did a clandestine group of Algerian nationalists force the mighty French Republic into an all out merciless war in the 1950s? This is how the Algerian War of Independence began. It's the night of the 1st of November, 1950, or if you prefer, All Saints night. It's past midnight in the freezing Ores mountains of eastern Algeria. A bus is making its way along a winding mountain road and it is dark. On board are two young French schoolteachers, Guy and Pauline Monero, and they're returning from their honeymoon. The bus stops. Armed men have blocked the road. The passengers are ordered off. The Monaraus are pulled out. Guy Monnaraut is shot straight away. Pauline Monnaureau is shot. Guy dies on the roadside. Pauline, though badly wounded, manages to survive. These are the first European civilian casualties of a war that will last eight years and kill hundreds of thousands of people.
- [02:21]
William Dalrymple
The Monauh killings were one of around 70 attacks across Algeria that night. Bombs, ambushes, raids on armories and police posts, coordinated at midnight across six military zones by the newly founded Fronte Liberacion national, or fln, as we'll call it for the rest of the podcast, the armed nationalist group that had been formed to fight the French for Algerian independence.
- [02:48]
Anita Anand
Now there's always mythology after a night like this, and in Algerian mythology it is known as the Night of Blood, or Toussaint Rouge. It's remembered as the night a nation rose as one, the dramatic unified opening of a national liberation struggle.
- [03:05]
William Dalrymple
The reality, of course, was rather messier. In Algiers, nervous FLN operatives failed to blow up the city gasworks. A planned warehouse fire was abandoned when the cell leader called in sick. The attacks were wildly uneven in execution, and many of Them failed. The general public actually had no idea that a war had started.
- [03:26]
Anita Anand
In our last episode, we did explain how Mohamed Budhiev convened the committee of the 22. Do you remember? It sounded like a sales convention in June of 1954, where the Neuf Historiques, the nine historic leaders, christened the FLN. And then among them, they divided Algeria into six military zones called the Vilayas. Now, that was only a few months before the start of the war. Willy, just tell me, I mean, what does the FLN look like when we get to November 1954? Cause I'm not clear on that.
- [04:00]
William Dalrymple
No. Well, I think no one was, and particularly the French weren't, because they were tiny, they were clandestine, but they were already very ruthless and very motivated. They numbered perhaps a thousand men. They had no fixed bases, no safe areas, no supply lines, and recruitment in the early months was almost entirely through families and personal networks. They were virtually unknown to the wider public. You included people you could absolutely trust, because a single informer could wreck the whole project and one broken cell could lead to uncovering of a whole network. So the FLN enforced loyalty with a terrible brutality that's important to acknowledge honestly. New recruits were sometimes required to assassinate a designated target, a young gendarme standing on a corner, for example, or a pro French official. And they'd have to do this in front of a senior FLN figure who would just kill the recruit if they even hesitated.
- [04:58]
Anita Anand
Yeah, I mean, it all just sounds like it's from the Godfather, you know, like those Mafia hits and Mafia recruitment and Mafia loyalty. So, Willi, what I'm really keen to know about is what the French reaction is to all of this, because, you know, it's a nightmare for them. You know, cells just breaking out, no plan, no sort of connection, no way to get into these networks. I know the French historian Benjamin Storer referred this period up to July 1955 as a phony war, which sort of makes me feel like they're not really taking it as seriously as they should.
- [05:29]
William Dalrymple
Well, they don't take it seriously, and it's not really a nightmare for them, because if you are in the main areas of French settlement, like Oran or Algiers, you hardly notice anything's changed.
- [05:40]
Anita Anand
Oh, really?
- [05:40]
William Dalrymple
You know, use a few small items in the bottom of the newspaper. But it's mainly in the rural hinterland, like where the poor couple got shot, that the early actions take place with any effect. Early on, the French still referred to it as the drol de Revolution, the joke revolution. But the French military Commander in Algiers is still dismissing this violence as a tribal flash in the pan in the provinces. And the authorities in Algiers convince themselves that it's a minor plot and that it's probably orchestrated from Cairo, where Ben Bulla is sometimes based and where the main support is coming from NASA's Egypt. In metropolitan France, if you look at the newspapers, there's literally not a mention. There's no one knows anything has happened.
- [06:29]
Anita Anand
Genuinely shocked by that. You know, sort of, you know, a young honeymooning couple, you know, you can imagine that would get acres of space. Okay, everyone's playing it down, but I do believe the French government do grasp the severity of the situation because you have the Interior Minister of France in November 1954. He's this 38 year old socialist politician called Francois Mitterrand. You may have become familiar with that
- [06:55]
William Dalrymple
name, may have heard of him, may
- [06:56]
Anita Anand
have heard of him. He will eventually become the longest serving President of the Fifth Republic and one of the giants of European post war politics. But in November 1954, Mitterrand is reacting to the first news of these FLN attacks on All Saints Night, and he sees there is something amiss and something that could grow. And he issues a declaration that will define France's entire subsequent approach to Algeria. He says Algeria is France. From Flanders to the Congo, there is the law, one single nation, one sole parliament. So his reaction is crush it. Crush it dead before it starts. I mean, that's, that's what he's saying.
- [07:36]
William Dalrymple
And that is the reaction. Once it really gets going though, at the moment, you know, there's pretty little to crush as far as the French are concerned. But it's this idea that Algeria is France is both the kind of strength and weakness of the French position in Algeria. On one hand, it's laying down the gauntlet. This is part of our land. We're not going to give it up anymore. We're going to give up the Seine or Burgundy or Provence or whatever. On the other hand, it puts them into a terrific bind. And this becomes an issue which not only breaks the Republic, which casts a shadow over 30 years, but also in a very real way is still alive in the next French election, which is coming up this year with Le Pen's party, which emerges from this war, as we'll see in future episodes. This is something which, while sounding at this point like a declaration of strength, is the kind of red thread that will unravel the whole of the French Republic in due course.
- [08:38]
Anita Anand
Okay, So, I mean, you know, they want to obviously put a blanket over it in France and not alarm people and say, you know, that we're in control. And there is one France, and all of the messaging is very clear, don't panic. But in Algeria, where people see what's happening, where they hear about what's happening, I mean, what does it look like for them? And what is the kind of reaction that Algerian Muslims face in the wake of these attacks?
- [09:02]
William Dalrymple
So it's very different if you are a French Muslim peasant up in the mountains of the Ores or the Kabylia mountains in the east, because now you really are feeling the presence of the FLN who appear in your village at night, demand food and shelter, and then there's always some informer who will tell who gave the food and shelter. The following morning, the French will turn up when the daylight comes, they'll arrest, there'll be torture. And so it's becoming an impossible sort of double game. You have to face the French during the day and you have to face the FLN at night. And the FLN realizes, in a sense, that the more it encourages the French to overreact, the more popular their revolution will become, the more alienated the people will come from French rule, the more impossible it will be to maintain French rule.
- [09:53]
Anita Anand
Yeah, goad them into cruelty, and then cruelty will itself inspire a revolution. It's a playbook. I mean, you see these things happening all over the world.
- [10:02]
William Dalrymple
I covered the Kashmir uprising in the 1990s, and it was exactly the same there. The revolutionaries would come out at night, they would extract stuff from the villages, expect loyalty, and then there'll be informers turning up, grassing to the government by day, and the whole thing would go on. But at this point, it's really. There's. One local official estimates the mood at the time and reckons that about 10% of the masses support the French, 10% support the rebels, and a massive 80% at this point are still living hoping that it's not going to touch them and they can just avoid having to make a decision. And the FLN understands this and wants to cast them off the fence into one position or the other.
- [10:44]
Anita Anand
So, I mean, I guess they're waiting for this moment where it reaches the tipping point, you know, where violence is escalated to the point where actually those people, you know, the. The prudent expectation group, the fence sitters, if you like, they're going to have to choose a side and they get that moment. That tipping point happens in August 1955. Now, this is one of the worst atrocities committed against French Algerians. The FLN military commander organised a coordinated uprising around the town of Philippeville in August 1955. And what does that mean? That means simultaneous attacks on European civilian communities right across the region. Tell us a little bit about it.
- [11:22]
William Dalrymple
So this is what's known as the Philippeville massacre. It's in August 1955. And it's this that really sets off the trail of dynamite that leads to the powder keg that is the Battle of Algiers in the summer of 1955. The FLN military commander in the Wolaya of Constantine, a man named Sigurd Yousef, has a theory that the only way to break the deadlock of the phoney war is to force a major confrontation so brutal that neutrality will become impossible. Exactly as you said. And he has organized a coordinated uprising around the settler town of Philippville in August 1955. Simultaneous attacks on European civilian communities across the region.
- [12:08]
Anita Anand
And the most horrific violence occurs at El Haliyeh. It's a small pyrite mining center. There are about 130 Europeans, some 2,000 Muslims, living working together, and they have been for years. And at noon on August 20, after local communications have been quietly cut, sometime in the night, Muslim mine workers led coordinated groups from house to house, mercilessly killing European men, women and children. And what makes this worse is when you hear some of the details of this, because the attackers, as they're sort of hacking away at these, you know, families, are urged on by chanting women. And in surrounding towns, we learn that local religious leaders are broadcasting calls to arms and praising the attacks. I mean, is it wrong to say it's almost like a jihadi cry that's going on here?
- [13:06]
William Dalrymple
It's exactly a jihadi cry. That's exactly the description. No, There is now for the first time, a stirring among the ulema, among the religious community. This genie's out of the bottle. This is something that will haunt independent Algeria as well as the Battle of Algiers. But at this point, it's still largely secular. But you do have, on this night of the Philippeville massacre, for the first time, the mullahs calling for the minarets calling for blood. Now, Alastair Horne, who's the great historian of this in English, argues that the details of the event are the key to the potent and profound effect what he calls the Philippeville massacre was to have on the Pied Noire and indeed on the whole subsequent history of the Algerian war. And he's right. I think it's 102 Europeans die across the region, and it's a massive shock. To the settler community, who have been dismissive in general of the Algerians and the Arabs, and particularly dismissive of this joke uprising. Now, suddenly, 100 people are dead, and they realize it's serious, and in order to make sure that it doesn't happen again, they decide to do the same back to the Algerians, but on a much greater scale.
- [14:16]
Anita Anand
Do the same, but more. I mean, the French reprisals were catastrophic. You've got the army, you've got the police, you've got settler vigilante groups all acting in concert. I don't think it's the wrong word. But to execute thousands of Muslims, it's
- [14:32]
William Dalrymple
exactly the right word. That's exactly what happens. They are their executions.
- [14:35]
Anita Anand
And these may be the people who are involved in those attacks or anybody you know. So at El Halia, you've got 80 Algerians who are shot on the spot. In Philippeville, the army herds hundreds of Muslims into the local football stadium and just executes them. So no due process, no trial, no finding out where they're involved or not. This is collective punishment on a grand scale.
- [14:57]
William Dalrymple
So, again, very much like the Israelis in Gaza, there is a deliberate determination that, you know, for every one death on their side, they're going to make 100 more casualties. And the death toll at the end of this round is between. Well, the lowest estimate is 1,200, and the highest estimate is 12,000. And the distance between those two figures is a measure of how little is done openly. A lot of it's done in the night. You know, bodies are buried and disposed where they can't be found. And it tells you about, in a sense, the polarization of the war between 1200 and 12,000. But historians agree that the sheer scale of the blind French revenge forces those 80% of Algerians who had hoped to sit on the fence. This is the moment that they finally choose to change sides and they commit themselves to the revolution and to independence. This is the thing that changes everything.
- [15:55]
Anita Anand
And it always works like this. If you do collective punishment and if you kill people in such large numbers, what ends up happening is that you will have every family who knows somebody who has been killed. And therefore they're in it now. They're in it because they've lost someone that they love. Right? So you could say, you know, Zigur Yusef's strategy has worked with an extraordinary cold, calculating precision. He draws the line, and he draws the line in blood between the colonizers and the colonized. But what he's trying to do, more than Anything else is signal to France that this is no phony war. If you think this is a phony war, a joke revolution, think again, because we're here and we're here in great numbers.
- [16:36]
William Dalrymple
Even the French Governor general at the time, Jacques Soustel, admits that a complete abyss, as he calls it, has been dug between the two communities that he's governing and that is filled by what he calls rivers of blood. This is a phrase that is born in the 1950s. The conflict was rapidly escalating now into an all out merciless war. But to sustain this violent momentum, the FLN could no longer operate as a fractured regional insurgency.
- [17:07]
Anita Anand
Yeah, so where do they go from here? I mean, that's a really good question and we'll try and answer it after the break. We're going to look at how a ruthless political mastermind takes control of the FLN and restructures what has gone before into a rebellion of all out, full blown rebellion right under the noses of the French military.
- [17:32]
Katie K
Hello and welcome to Doing It Anyway, a brand new series from Goal Hanger. I'm Katie K. I've spent years studying the science and art of confidence, writing books about how we can close the confidence gap between men and women and talking to experts and younger women about how to pass it on. Confidence means taking risks, acknowledging your fears and, well, doing it anyway. In this series, I'll be talking to psychologists, entrepreneurs and business leaders to unpack how you can rethink challenges and grow your own confidence. We'll talk about how to spot the difference between confidence and competence, how to deal with office politics and stolen credit and yes, handling rejection and ultimately, ultimately, how you can become a better leader, teammate and yes, a better person. Doing It Anyway with Katie K. Every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts, I'm Mary Beard. And I'm Josephine Quinn. At the Rest Is Fest this September,
- [18:31]
Anita Anand
we're putting on a show that can
- [18:32]
Katie K
only be described as an iconoclastic romp
- [18:35]
Anita Anand
through the ancient world.
- [18:36]
Katie K
We're talking about leaders behaving bad, sadly, emperors putting their horses in charge, cities built by asylum seekers and empires getting their comeuppance. There will be some proper myth busting, but we'll also be asking why these myths matter even when we know they're wrong. So if you love your ancient history and you're free on September 6th, get your ticket now and join us at London's South Bank Centre. Tickets are on sale now. Just visit southbankcentre.co.uk that's southbankcentre.co.uk.
- [19:15]
William Dalrymple
Welcome back. Well, in the summer of 1956, the FLN leadership does something of quite extraordinary audacity. They hold a major conference and it's in the heart of French cantilled territory, in a forester's cottage deep in the chestnut forest of the Kabilia Mountains in the Sumam Valley. And the senior leadership doesn't just sort of, you know, meet overnight quickly and sort of shake each other's hands. They convene for 20 days under the noses of a supposedly pacified French army. Now, although the rebels get away with that, they don't get away with the next thing, which is something we referred to in our Suez series, do you remember, Anita, where we talked about the, the hijacking by the French government of a plane in which Ahmed Benbola is flying? There is intelligence that he's in the air. This is the exiled leader of the fln. There are four of them, Hossein Ahmet, Mohammed Buddhayf, Mohammed Khidr and Muzaffa Le Sharif. And they've been in Rabat in King Mohammed V of Morocco's conference in Tunis, wanting to internationalize the Algerian question. And this is obviously a very important moment politically for them. And they all go there and they then fly back on a flight from Rabat to Tunis and they fly via Palma de Mallorca to avoid French airspace over Algeria and they think themselves safe, but French military intelligence has been tracking them. And basically, to cut a long story short, we told this story in full in the Sue's episode. The French aircraft force the Algerian leader's plane down and they arrest them all. So on one hand you've got the internal leadership meeting in the forest and getting away with it directly under French noses. And you've got the external leadership who've been caught in a single go and are now popped in a French prison. We should talk about the leader of the event in the forest, Ramdani Abani,
- [21:26]
Anita Anand
who is a Kabile, he's an indigenous Berber. He's pretty ordinary background to him, son of an ordinary family. He's worked as a municipal clerk. He's spent years in French prisons where he actually takes the time to educate himself reading Marx, Lenin and Mein Kampf. Equal opportunity dictators are available. I mean, he's a short, chubby faced man, he's got sort of those lively eyes.
- [21:53]
William Dalrymple
He looks quite tough in the picture I've got in front of me though.
- [21:55]
Anita Anand
I mean, he look, he looks like a mugshot. And in the mugshot you sort of get an idea of what he's really like, because he's said to have this. This ferocious intellect, but a really ferocious temper as well. And it's made worse, we later understand, by severe stomach ulcers. So you know what? He's basically in a bad mood most of the time. Some contemporaries comparing to Robespierre, such was the terror that he inspires. And others say, actually, you know what? He's Algeria's Mao. That's who he is. He's certainly the first person in the FLN's leadership who thought like a politician rather than a guerrilla leader. And that's very significant.
- [22:34]
William Dalrymple
So what he achieves at Sauma, in that wooded valley that month, shapes the entire revolution. He reorganizes the entire fln. He structures it into a kind of military organization with clear chains of command. And each chain of command has as its boss someone who gets the rank of colonel explicitly to prevent any single military figure from accumulating power to dominate the revolution, and also, presumably to mean that if the French do capture anyone, they're only capturing one tiny part of it. Chain of command. Yeah. And not the whole leadership. And he imposes two rules that define the FLN's character. Civilian political leadership holds supremacy over the military, and the fighters in Algeria, the ones bleeding on the ground, hold supremacy over the exiled leaders in Tunis and Cairo. Now, as most of them are now in a French prison, that's something that is very easy to establish. This is a huge coup because people like Ben Buller, who've been left stranded outside Algeria, are the main founders of the movement. And so, in a sense, it's a kind of internal putsch.
- [23:48]
Anita Anand
Yeah. I mean, the movement's grown bigger than them, and they may be the Historique, but they also remain in history because now the future is with somebody else. What I think is really interesting is that while Habane is restructuring the movement in the mountains, you also have the FLN doing other things that, you know, perhaps those in prison don't even know about, have no idea about until they read it in the newspapers, because they open a new front in the city. Now, you said this earlier on, that, you know, people weren't taking it seriously at all because it was happening in the mountains, it was happening in rural areas. You know, people were losing their lives on dark, twisty roads in a mountain pass. But now the FLN brings the violence to the cities. And this is where we arrive at what arguably is the most famous chapter of this entire conflict. And it's immortalized in the movie that we have talked about a number of times since starting this series. That 1966 film, the Battle of Algiers,
- [24:47]
William Dalrymple
we should say if you haven't seen this movie, it is a great watch and it's very long, but it is completely gripping. It's a classic. It won the Lion d' or at Venice that year. And it's one of the great political movies of all time. And so if you haven't seen it, go straight away and watch it now. This is an important moment because I think far more than the normal history perhaps acknowledges, it has been up to this point, a rural movement. My friend Farah, when I was talking to her for the bonus episode, felt very strongly that the rural uprising at the beginning had not been given its due. That's partly because I think the movie version is so firmly focused on the city. But this is the moment that this city, the Algiers Casbah, now becomes the main center of attention. So it all begins in June 1956, and the French authorities guillotine 2 FLN prisoners in Algiers. The FLN responds by shooting European civilians in the streets. Then European extremists answer by planting a massive bomb in the Kasper, the densely populated Muslim quarter at the top of the city, right up at the top of the mountain, killing up to 70 civilians. It was this bomb that convinced the FLN leadership to make the decision that would define the next year and indeed the subsequent revolution. They would take the war into the city, into the European quarters, into the spaces where the international press was watching.
- [26:25]
Anita Anand
So the military commander who's in charge of this operation is a man called Saadi Yassef, and he's a former baker, but very, very street smart. That's the thing to know about him. He's a brilliant urban tactitioner, and he joins the FLN in 1954. So, you know, one of the first signups, and he's the one who's going to transform everything, isn't he? Because he sees the Kasbah Willi as a fortress more than anything else. This is a fortress that can be protected.
- [26:52]
William Dalrymple
So you should really understand the topography to understand this. Algeria is obviously a port. The port is at the bottom of the hill. There's an area around that that is the posh French area with the boulevard and bits that look like a slightly orientalized version of Paris. You then have above this on the mountain, this Casper, this bazaar with flat roofs, mud houses huddled higgledy piggledy up the hill, right up to the top of the mountain. And this is transformed into a fortress of secret Passages, underground bomb factories and hidden rooms. There are no French living there, it's just Algerians. And so it's the ideal command center for the new revolution that's moved to the city. And his clever move and his masterstroke is to recruit a network of young Algerian women who at this point in history are still, you know, in traditional dress and very much sort of home based. And contrary to everything the French expect, these become the most famous operatives of this entire liberation war, the female bombers.
- [27:59]
Anita Anand
So I've seen a photograph of four of these women and they could be out on a picnic. This is the real cognitive dissonance about this photograph is they are smiling, they're not dressed in veils, they're dressed in skirts, long skirts, conservative skirts and polar necks. And they're laughing together. Except one of them happens to be holding what looks like a machine gun. So this is a network of young women. Some of them are from the middle classes, some of them are from Daughters of the Kasbah. So it's like, you know, crosses across economic threshold. The one that's really important too, we should talk about is Zora Driff. And you also have, I think, should we talk about three of them? Zora Driff, I'm completely obsessed with Zora
- [28:42]
William Dalrymple
Drift is still alive. I've heard her being interviewed.
- [28:45]
Anita Anand
So have I. I did the Google on her and I can't believe she's still alive. And talks about these days actually quite fondly. Jamila Bouillard is another, Samia Lakhdari is another. And what they do is they answer the call. So if they were wearing traditional veils, they put them aside and they start dressing in these sort of European styles so that the French military, you know, once they get to a French military checkpoint, they look at them and say, you know, these are not, they're not like those Muslims, they're fine, let them through. And that's how they get through checkpoints. And they are carrying deadly explosives in pretty beach bags, you know, as if they're going to go and sunbathe somewhere or read a book. And that's how they are able to cause such chaos and carnage. It's a masterstroke in guerrilla warfare, but it has a bloody toll, doesn't it?
- [29:35]
William Dalrymple
It certainly does. And this is one of the most famous scenes in the movie where it is very exactly reproduced. On 30 September 1956, three enormous bombs go off in crowded European establishments in Algiers. The milk bar, the cafeteria and the Air France terminal. And it's the 22 year old, very glamorous Zora Driff, who plants the bomb in the milk bar. And this is, you know, a popular cafe filled with mothers and children. I mean, it's a completely non military target.
- [30:09]
Anita Anand
It's the softest of soft targets. And there's something quite horrific about thinking of a woman doing that to other women who are just, you know, sort of feeding their kids on that day.
- [30:20]
William Dalrymple
She walks in, she buys a milkshake, she puts a bag under her table and then she walks out. And a minute later the bomb goes off. To get out. She even flirts with the French guard to pass through the military barricade. And years later, after spending five years in French prisons, she would go on to become a successful lawyer and Secretary General of the Algerian Ecole Nacional de Ministration. So she's now a famous figure in Algiers and regarded as one of these sort of iconic revolutionaries. But there's no question that this is a bloody event.
- [30:54]
Anita Anand
Yeah, I mean, actually when we were chatting about this with our producer, she said this sounds a lot like the troubles in Northern Ireland where those who might have made bombs, planted bombs, shot guns, then end up being the establishment and the political figureheads of what comes next. But back to that attack in the milk bar. We should tell you what happens. Three people are killed and over 50 are injured. On that day in September, the FLN leadership has circulated a directive stating explicitly, a bomb causing the death of 10 people is the equivalent on a psychological level to the loss of a French battalion. So I mean, if that is explicitly what they want to do, you know, cause psychological distress on that level, they want to strike terror, but they would reject Willy, any kind of terminology saying they were terrorists, you know, even if they saying we want to strike terror because they would what, characterize themselves as freedom fighters.
- [31:51]
William Dalrymple
This was something that my friend Farah said she wrestled with as a Berber Algerian growing up in Paris, where following Sarkozy's changes to the curriculum, these figures were explicitly referred to as terrorists in French school textbooks. And she said these are people she'd grown up with all her life, being heard of as the great iconic fighters. Just like people in India remember Subhash Chandra Bose, who also embraced violence. And some of these women are not just figureheads, they are at the center of things. And this is also true of Jamila Buhirt. She's born in the Casper and she becomes a messenger. She uses her good looks and her beach bag and her low cut French dress to pass messages around Algier and at One point, she is captured, and they find on her person a correspondence from Yasef. So this central figure, and this is found when she is caught. She tries to escape, she's shot, she's taken to a hospital where she's operated on. There's a wound to her shoulder and out of the hospital. She's then taken directly to a torture chamber and she is brutally interrogated. And she's given electric shocks. We know all this because she writes a very full description of it right before she is sentenced to death. And she describes electric shocks, her wound deliberately torn open, her arm forced in positions that aggravated the injury. Beatings, cold water in winter, and this bath that they, you know, a form of waterboarding that they drown you in. And she will not reveal Yassef Saadi's whereabouts. Not one detail.
- [33:40]
Anita Anand
But what makes this really extraordinary is that, you know, the torture is one thing, but when she's sentenced to death, it's the kind of people who actually come and stand by her side. And I think scholars have called this the Jamila phenomenon, because as soon as people heard about what she'd gone through, what she was saying, she was doing it for the freedom of her people. You've got people like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and basically the entire French intellectual left who rally to her side and say, you know what? You cannot punish this woman for doing something which they say is heroic. She's fighting for her people. She's fighting against oppression. So, you know, she's got quite the fan club.
- [34:21]
William Dalrymple
I don't think it's so much that it's a fan club. What Sartre and de Beauvoir are objecting to is that the French are using what they call Nazi tactics.
- [34:33]
Anita Anand
They also sympathise with the fact that she was doing something from a conviction point of view. I mean, they do say that as well. They do, they do.
- [34:40]
William Dalrymple
But their focus of attack is that we French revile the Nazis for using torture and extreme interrogation, and we are behaving like the Gestapo. That's the line that the French left tend to take.
- [34:55]
Anita Anand
And that's a very powerful thing to say in France, because France still has very fresh memories of what the Gestapo did. You know, let's not forget.
- [35:01]
William Dalrymple
Exactly.
- [35:01]
Anita Anand
So that's going to hit all sorts of nerves. So tell us how the French really respond to this bombing campaign.
- [35:09]
William Dalrymple
So it's brutal. In January 1957, with the FLN calling for a general strike to coincide with the United nations debate at Algeria, the French government takes a step that would decide the war's moral outcome even as it won the military one. They handed police powers over to a guy called General Jacques Massou and his paratroopers. And that is the story that we'll be telling next time. And it's a super brutal one.
- [35:36]
Anita Anand
So that's next. The battle for Algiers escalate. More stories of institutional torture, military mutinies, a dramatic collapse of the French Republic on the road to Algerian independence. If you can't wait for that, you know what you have to do. Join our club. But till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand.
- [35:58]
William Dalrymple
And goodbye from me, William Durrymple. A quick word for our Empire listeners. For a limited time only, we are running a discount on the Empire Club.
- [36:14]
Anita Anand
We totally are. It's our summer sale. It's live now. And from now until the end of August, all you need to do is head to empirepod uk.com empirepod uk.com use the code summer26. Summer 26. You get an extra 20% off annual
- [36:31]
William Dalrymple
membership this sizzling summer. We would love you to join our Empire Club and we know you will love being a member of our community. You'll get bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series and much more.
- [36:43]
Anita Anand
And your summer trips provide you that perfect opportunity to dive into our archives and catch up on all the exclusive content you might have missed before joining. So you can listen to our interview with Yung Chang, our Willy's fabulous bonus on Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring, and our exclusive four part member series covering the scandal that shaped partition.
- [37:07]
William Dalrymple
So make the most of the deal before it ends at the end of August 2026. The code is Summer 26 to be used on our annual membership@empirepoduk.com we'd love you to become a member of our club and it's brilliant even if we say so ourselves.