Olivier Todd is the author of Albert Camus: A Life.
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Vol. 20 No. 6 · 19 March 1998
pages 15-17 | 3311 words
A Glass of Whisky in One Hand and Lenin in the Other
Olivier Todd
- The Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War (1954-62) by Martin Evans
Berg, 250 pp, £34.99, November 1997, ISBN 1 85973 927 X
In 1954 I was stationed near Versailles, doing my national service with the 93rd Infantry Regiment. I had been called up for 12 months, but like many young Frenchmen of that unlucky generation, I was kept in the Army nearly two and a half years owing to unforeseen ‘events’ in North Africa. We weren’t old enough to have joined either the Free French in Britain or the Resistance against the Nazis in France. In those easy Manichaean years, not having read Koestler or Orwell, some of us even wished we’d been able to fight with the International Brigades in Spain. We could only nurse our nostalgia, and, as French citizens subject to national service, we were forced to take part in the unsavoury end of the colonial adventure in North Africa. Some of us felt we were involved in the wrong conflict, on the wrong side.
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Letters
Vol. 20 No. 8 · 16 April 1998
From Martin Evans
Olivier Todd’s review of my book, The Memory of Resistance: French Opposition to the Algerian War 1954-62 (LRB, 19 March), confirms the extent to which this period is still an open wound in France. Poke in it and the result is acrimony and anger. For example, Todd’s view that resisters to the Algerian War were a ragbag of crackpots whose effect was negligible is simply untrue. The trial of the Jeanson network in September 1960 forced the Left to take a more combative stance against the war. Above all, it inspired the 27 October anti-war demonstration in Paris organised by the French students which, despite opposition from the Communist Party, brought together twenty thousand people, thus highlighting the link between the Algerian War and the gauchisme of May 1968. Todd’s notion that resistance to the Algerian War achieved nothing of lasting value is similarly untrue. Yes, for a long time the war was a taboo subject, but now everybody knows about torture just as everybody knows about the Battle of Algiers. In large part this knowledge is due to those like Pierre Vidal-Naquet who have fought for the subject to be put on the school curriculum. Todd accuses me of being too close to my subject. What about his own intellectual hero, Albert Camus: he might have been a left-wing liberal, but in saying in 1957 that he loved his mother (i.e. French Algeria) before justice did he not sanction the deaths of thousands on thousands of Algerians?
Martin Evans
University of Portsmouth
