Surrender of French soldiers, Dien Bien Phu, Indochina, April 22, 1954
Book Details
Martin Thomas
FIGHT OR FLIGHT
Britain, France and their roads from empire
539pp. Oxford University Press. £25 (US $39.99).
978 0 19 969827 1
Some strange omissions in a sobering history of decolonization
RICHARD VINEN
"I have lived seventy-eight years without hearing of bloody places like Cambodia." Thus spoke Winston Churchill in 1953. The remark shows how disconcerting the messiness of decolonization could be to those who had grown up in an age of imperial certainty. Churchill liked to recall how he had drunk the health of the Queen Empress in the mess of his cavalry regiment in India and, if anything, the empires of Britain and France seemed more secure after 1918 than they had before 1914. Germany and Russia, which had once had ambitions in Africa and Asia, were broken. New weapons, notably the bomber, made it easier to put down rebellions – as the Berbers in North Africa and the Kurds in Iraq were to find out. Most importantly, Britain and France posed no threat to each other. Except for some squabbles in the Levant, their imperial interests did not conflict. The most enthusiastic British imperialists – Churchill or Rudyard Kipling – were also keen Francophiles.
The Second World War changed things. In the short term, it showed that imperial Britain and France had a dangerous enemy – Japan – and, in the long term, it showed that they had a dangerous rival – the United States. There was, however, no obvious reason to suppose that empire was finished. In many ways, the war confirmed what many British and French strategists had said in 1939 – imperial powers, able to draw resources from across the world, would beat a purely European power, such as Nazi Germany. Charles de Gaulle's struggle against Vichy had, in large measure, been conducted in sub-Saharan Africa and Algeria: troops from these places fought in French uniform and thus earned France its place among the victorious powers.
After 1945, the rulers of Britain and France believed that their empires would last for hundreds of years but, as it turned out, almost all their imperial possessions were gone by the early 1960s. Martin Thomas tells this story in a book that is based on an impressive range of reading. He works hard to present a balanced and comprehensive account, but any work on British and French decolonization is likely to be asymmetric in two ways. First, it is bound to lay a heavy emphasis on the decisions of the imperial powers rather than the experience of the colonized. It was, after all, the colonial powers that conferred unity on the empire and, for a host of practical reasons, historians know more about politicians in London and Paris than they do about, say, guerrilla leaders in the jungle. Thomas gives detailed descriptions of European politicians – he comments on the resemblance between Guy Mollet and the late Arthur Askey – but his descriptions of colonial subjects are more terse: of Chin Peng, we learn only that he was a more "orthodox Stalinist" than his predecessor as leader of the Malayan Communists.
The second asymmetry springs from the fact that the Algerian War casts such a shadow over recent French history. Algeria was legally a part of France and contained a million European settlers. Its position was, in many ways, more comparable to that of Ireland in 1914 than to that of the overseas colonies from which Britain withdrew after 1945. The number of troops sent to Algeria dwarfed that sent to any other colonial conflict. Violence in Algeria had a special quality – not just because it took place on such a large scale, but also because it pitted Europeans against each other and European victims attracted more attention than Algerian ones. Maurice Audin was the best-known individual to disappear after having been interrogated by the paratroopers, and Henri Alleg's La Question (1958) was, in Britain as well as France, the most famous account of what it was like to be on the receiving end of torture. The British, by contrast, rarely directed violence at people of European origin – unless one counts Cypriots as Europeans, which the army rarely did.
Thomas is careful not to say that the British were "better" decolonizers than the French. He draws attention to similarities and, in particular, to the extent of British violence – something that has been partially obscured by the propensity of British officials to "lose" documents. Overall, however, he does suggest that there were important differences. French domestic politics were more intertwined with empire. Thomas attributes much of this to the colonialism of the Christian democratic Mouvement Républicain Populaire. More generally, the instability of the Fourth Republic was both a cause and an effect of colonial disputes. It was, of course, particularly important that inhabitants of the French empire, unlike those of the British, sent representatives to parliament and that they often supported the small centre parties whose pivotal position gave them disproportionate influence – François Mitterrand's early career was built partly on alliance with the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain. Britain, by contrast, had a simple two-party system and during two crucial periods (from 1945 to 1950 and from 1959 to 1964) governments had secure majorities. In France, disputes over empire brought down governments and a republic and threatened, in 1961, to take the country into civil war. In Britain, disputes over the empire generated a few noisy protests by the League of Empire Loyalists and some sarcastic exchanges in Cabinet between Iain Macleod and Lord Salisbury.
Suez was the exception to this general pattern. On this occasion, it was the British political class that seemed divided and uncertain. The French – who saw Egypt as a sponsor of rebellion in Algeria – had a clearer sense of what they were doing. The expedition was opposed by the British Labour Party while the French were led into Suez by the socialist Mollet. Suez was a turning point for both countries, but they turned in different directions. Shortly before Suez, Mollet had made the extraordinary suggestion that France might join the Commonwealth. After it, the French were contemptuous of British hesitancy. The British concluded from the fiasco that they should never again begin an operation without American support; some of the French concluded that they should equip themselves to finish operations without American support.
For all Thomas's erudition, I did not feel that this was an entirely successful book. "Fight or flight" seems an oddly trite organizing principle. Does this dichotomy tell us much about, say, the circumstances in which the Malayan Federation was granted independence, a couple of years before British soldiers finished their largely successful campaign to wipe out Communist guerrillas? Based on his own archival work, Thomas gives tantalizing glimpses of how, for example, the British military attaché in Paris regarded French tactics in Algeria, but it would have been good to have more of these concrete details. Did it matter that Paul Aussaresses – the most flamboyantly unrepentant of the French officers who presided over torture and murder in Algeria – had fought with British special forces? Is there anything to be said about Basil Liddell Hart – the British military writer who continued to correspond with Colonel Antoine Argoud, even when the latter was on the run after the failed putsch in Algeria? Is there, for that matter, anything to be said about Liddell Hart's son – a languid Old Etonian who whiled away a couple of years fighting as a private with the Foreign Legion in Indochina?
Some episodes cry out for cross-Channel treatment. Consider Madagascar, a topic on which Thomas has published in the past. It was liberated from the rule of Vichy authorities by British and South African forces in 1942. The French are said to have resisted for so long because they believed that six months of active service would enhance their pension. What was the relation between this operation and the Malagasy rebellion of the later 1940s? Was it true, as some seem to have believed, that the population perceived the British as having been more liberal than the French?
Thomas's scrupulousness in summarizing the latest research sometimes obscures earlier scholarship that might have cast an interesting light on Franco–British comparison. He discusses the work of Raphaëlle Branche but not that of Branche's mentor, Pierre Vidal-Naquet – whose book on torture in Algeria was, incidentally, published in Britain almost ten years before it was published in France. The military historian, and pro-Algérie Française activist, Raoul Girardet, associated loss of empire with a "military crisis" that went with increasing marginalization of traditional martial virtues in a world of missiles and nuclear weapons. Might this analysis also tell us something about the bitter hostility between Duncan Sandys, author of the 1957 review, which sought to base British defence on nuclear weapons, and Gerald Templer, Chief of the Imperial General Staff? The French journalist Raymond Cartier argued in 1956 that colonies were simply not profitable. This raises interesting questions about Thomas's suggestion that the French were less prone than the British to see the empire in economic terms. How much did this change in the late 1950s, and how far did the change account for the eventual withdrawal from Algeria?
"Cartiérisme" leads to a broader point. Losing the empire was more painful for the French but – perhaps precisely because the loss was so dramatic and irrevocable – it was France which adjusted better to a post-imperial world, and it was the French who – to use Dean Acheson's words – "found a role". While the British were distracted by the Commonwealth, de Gaulle led the French into reconciliation with Germany and defiance of American hegemony.
Of course, there was no English de Gaulle and, given the solidity of the British party system and the collegiate nature of the British governing classes, there never could have been. I did, however, feel that there was one Englishman who deserves more extensive treatment in a study of decolonization. Thomas consigns Enoch Powell to a single note – dealing with the "Rivers of Blood" speech. It seems odd to say nothing of Powell the young officer in Delhi who dreamt of being viceroy, or Powell the Conservative Party functionary who once lectured an astonished Churchill about how many divisions he would need to reconquer India, or Powell the MP who condemned the brutality of the Hola camp in Kenya. Most of all, though, it is odd not to mention Powell because he admired de Gaulle and shared some of de Gaulle's qualities. Although both men were self-consciously nostalgic, they believed that their countries needed a sharp break with the recent past, which was why Powell came to insist that England must abandon all pretensions to being a world power.
Powell and de Gaulle, however, were not just hard-headed realists. Both understood the importance of myth and appreciated that decolonization needed its myths as much as empire had done. In spite of the humiliations of Vichy, Dien Bien Phu and Algeria, the French managed to preserve, or invent, national myths that sustained them until recently. By the early 1960s, by contrast, the British had come to see their empire as neither good nor bad but simply ridiculous – it is no accident that the founders of Private Eye were largely men who, thanks to National Service, had seen the last days of empire in Jamaica and Malaya. In February 1942, as Britain licked its wounds after the fall of Singapore, Harold Nicolson wrote that "the future historian of the decline and fall of the British Empire will give [one man]… a front row seat in the gallery of our disintegration". That man was David Low – the cartoonist and creator of Colonel Blimp.
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