The avoidance of the conflict zone in artistic representations of the Algerian war did not last and the war became a central theme of many films and novels once the first decade after the war had elapsed. The conscripts became more prominent actors in these representations and, subsequently, the enemy also became more tangible, akin perhaps to the much greater visibility of the Prussian armies in La Débâcle of 1892 in comparison to earlier works. Yet the enemy remained ambiguous and whilst fire is aimed at the FLN in battle, the continued lack of representation of the origins or endings of the war as well as the often complex relationships which make up the stories, suggest that the true enemy is not necessarily the one faced on the battlefield.
Two films from the early 1970s took audiences directly into the arid landscape of the Algerian theatre of war. René Vautier’s Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès (1972) and Yves Boisset’s R.A.S.(1973) both placed the conscript as a central figure in Algeria.151 Avoir 20 ans follows a group of green conscripts on their tour of duty in the Aurès mountains accompanied by Lieutenant Perrin and a young parachutist, Noël.152 Two events stand out in the film: the first is the conscripts’ reaction to de Gaulle’s plea for loyalty to France during the Generals’ putsch in Algiers in April 1961. After hearing him on the radio the conscripts arrest Perrin until a further broadcast from de Gaulle has confirmed the threat’s end. The second is the desertion of Noël in reaction to the treatment of a prisoner. This adventure ends in tragedy with the death of himself, the prisoner and an Algerian family who had helped them. R.A.S., an abbreviation of rien à signaller, or nothing to report, begins in 1956 and follows three conscripts, Charpentier, March and Dax, from their departure held up by protests at the train station, to their posting with the formidable Commandant Lecoq. The film presents a very similar environment to Vautier’s film and depicts the break-up of the three friends with the tragic death of Charpentier and the desertion of March.
Both Vautier’s and Boisset’s films include scenes of conflict between the conscripts and the FLN, torture, killing and Avoir 20 ans also graphically depicts the multiple rape of an Algerian woman. Yet the narrative of victimhood permeates both films and their empathy lies clearly with the conscripts. This is achieved in three interconnected ways. Firstly, the
151 René Vautier, Avoir 20 Ans dans les Aurès (France, 1972); Yves Boisset, R.A.S. (France and Italy, 1973). 152 Noël is played by Alexandre Arcady, director of Le Coup de sirocco discussed in Chapter 2. His ambiguity as a sympathetically-depicted paratrooper is discussed alongside Pierre Leulliette’s semi-autobiographical novel
Algerians themselves lack any real characterisation; they rarely have names, motives or desires and are usually simply a collective mass.153 Even the prisoner who Noël rescues in Avoir 20 ans, whilst honoured with a name, Youssef, is unable to speak French. As such there remains a very palpable divide between Noël and Youssef which is also a divide between the audience and Youssef as his words are not subtitled and thus would make little sense to most of the French audience. Whilst it would be an exaggeration to suggest that the Algerian characters were dehumanised in either of these films, they are certainly not a particular concern and indeed often feel incidental to both narratives. The fate of the conscripts is given far more importance than the fate of a few background figures.
Secondly, related to this is the strong characterisation of the professional army, embodied in the two films by Lieutenant Perrin and Commandant Lecoq. The conscripts’ victimhood is in relation to this army elite. Both narratives imply that the fault of the conscripts’ postings to Algeria lies with their commanders and by implication, their actions are a result of their unwanted duties. This is the third strand of victimhood: the lack of agency. When Dax kills a sous-officier and subsequently commits suicide in R.A.S., it is Dax’s death which is a tragedy, pushed beyond his limits and driven to extremes by a situation outside of his control. Both March’s and Noël’s desertions are futile gestures, the latter resulting in the death of innocent civilians and thus excusing those who stayed in their posts. Furthermore, Avoir 20 ans ends in a similar manner to its beginning, with Lieutenant Perrin addressing a fresh batch of novice conscripts. The message is clear: regardless of their actions and their protests, the pursuit of war is out of the conscripts’ control. It is a circular process which they have no ability to end.
Vautier and Boisset were both militant left-wing filmmakers, but these films continue to perpetuate the same teleological decolonisation discourse of their earlier counterparts.154
153 Jean-Charles Jauffret has argued that the lack of ‘distinctive, declared enemy’ in the Algerian war altered the culture of war for the French combatants and caused a division between the professional paratroop regiments and the conscripted soldiers. Jean-Charles Jauffret, 'The War Culture of French Combatants in the Algerian Conflict', Martin S. Alexander, Martin Evans, and John F. V. Keiger (eds), The Algerian War and the
French Army, 1954-62: Experiences, Images, Testimonies (Basingstoke, 2002) p. 101.
154 Télérama’s review of the Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès includes a whole paragraph on Vautier’s political activities including acts of resistance under the Vichy regime as a teenager, a prison spell in Tunisia and support for the decolonisation of black Africa in the 1950s. The centre-right journal, Le Figaro’s tirade against Boisset’s film leaves one in no doubt of the director’s left-wing credentials. The left-wing Nouvel Observateur is not impressed by the film either despite, as the reviewer writes: ‘Ce devrait être tout simple: Yves Boisset a fait un film de gauche, “Le Nouvel Observateur” va donc dire du bien du film d’Yves Boisset. Normal et confortable. Les ennemis de nos amis sont nos ennemis.’ The issue in this review is less a political complaint and more a problem with a poorly made film. Jean-Louis Tallenay, ‘Avoir 20 ans dans les Aurès’, Télérama (21
This is particularly clear in the inclusion in both films of the events surrounding the Generals’ putsch of April 1961. The scenes in the films relating to this event deliberately and effectively draw a very distinct dividing line between the conscripts and their military superiors, a separation already clear through previous incidents. The filmmakers are not anti-republican, rather they are opposed to the army elite who are represented as ‘brutal and fascistic’.155 As such, the conscripts’ status as victims is affirmed and the republican narrative of an inevitable decolonisation prevents a deeper questioning of the role and actions of the soldiers themselves. William Cohen makes a very astute point when he suggests that many ‘of the films on the war are projections of what France today wishes its soldiers had done.’156 The futile acts of desertion in Avoir 20 ans and R.A.S. are very clear instances of such a projection and it is such a desire that drives even politically radical filmmakers to reiterate the decolonisation discourse: ordinary French people did not support the war, did not fight the war willingly and consistently foresaw an independent Algeria as an automatic outcome. As such, there remains an avoidance of questioning the war’s origins or its effect on the nature of republicanism itself, particularly in relation to citizenship. The responsibility for war is at most placed in the hands of the professional army (and later, the OAS), or simply denied altogether.
The distinction between the conscript and the professional army is also a regular trope in literature and repeated in many different forms in order to separate the conscript from the brutality of the Algerian war. Philip Dine has identified this separation in his overview of novels which represent the war through into the 1990s. In Philippe Labro’s Des feux mal éteints (1967) the professional army is associated with the terrorist group, the OAS, and the conscript, Seb, shoots himself; in Guy Croussy’s Ne pleure pas, la guerre est bonne (1975) the main character, again a conscript, is against the war being waged by his superiors; in both Robert Pépin’s Pavillon 144 (1981) and Pierre Bourgade’s Les Serpents (1983) the conscript May 1972); Jean Pouget, ‘A Propos de “R.A.S.” : Réflexions luminaires sur le film d’Yves Boisset’, Le Figaro (10 August 1973); Pierre Ajame, ‘A la française !: Du cœur et du courage mais une lourdeur qui rend anodin ce qui se coulait explosif’, Le Nouvel Observateur (20 August 1973).
Jill Forbes notes a shift to much more overt political cinema from the 1970s. I reject the implication that the cinema of the 1960s is thus not political, but certainly in term of cinematic representations of the Algerian war, those of the 1970s are more clearly politically aligned. The same is true for right-wing filmmakers, such as Pierre Schoendoerffer and his 1977 film Le Crabe-tambour. Jill Forbes and Sue Harris, 'Cinema', Nicholas Hewitt (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Modern French Culture (Cambridge, 2003) p. 332. See also Guy Austin,
Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction (Manchester, 1996) pp. 40-42.
155 Philip Dine, Images of the Algerian War: French Fiction and Film, 1954-1992 (Oxford, 1994) p. 229. Stora notes that both these films were made in a post-1968 atmosphere in which comparing figures of authority with the Nazi SS had become part of the generation’s discourse. Stora, La Gangrène et l'oubli, p. 251.
central to the narrative commits suicide after being forced to participate in torture, an end also met by six of the eight conscripts in the short story collection, Trente ans après: nouvelles de la guerre d’Algérie (1992).157
The division between conscript and career soldier is also present in Virginie Buisson’s autobiographical novel, L’Algérie ou la mort des autres, in which the narrator, who begins the story as an eleven-year-old girl, moves to Algeria in 1954 with her family as her father, a high ranking military official, is stationed there.158 Her father, as one would expect in a novel narrated by the young daughter, is seen mainly in a domestic setting, protecting his family and showing no desire to be in Algeria. The division between conscript and professional army occurs outside the home. She shares friendships, and later sexual relationships, with individual conscripts she meets. Their commanders and, later, members of the OAS remain impersonal and distant figures. Her relationship with Jacques dominates the final third of the novel and who, as a pied noir, is represented as both a civilian and a conscript:
J’avais une robe rose de collégienne en vacances, tu étais encore en civil. Tu m’as dit qu’il te restait huit mois d’armée et qu’après tu retournerais dans la ferme de tes parents à Sédrata. J’ai aimé que tu ne dises pas la guerre.159
Their summer romance is cut off by Jacques’s return to the war (‘La guerre nous a repris’). The responsibility for their separation is represented as the Generals’ putsch of April 1961 and the rise of the OAS. The narrator’s description of these events is sandwiched in between two references to Jacques’s absence:
Je n’ai plus vu Jacques et j’ai retrouvé l’isolement dans une école qui se barricade.
…
Je ne vois plus Jacques.160
157 Dine, Images of the Algerian War, pp. 116-145; Daniel Zimmerman, ed., Trente ans après: Nouvelles de la guerre
d'Algérie (Paris, 1992). There are sixteen short stories in this collection, eight by French authors, which are the
stories I am referring to here, and eight by Algerian authors. 158 Virginie Buisson, L'Algérie ou la mort des autres (Paris, 1981) [1978].
159 Ibid. p. 81. [I had the pink dress of a middle school student on vacation, you were still in civilian clothes. You told me that you only had eight months left in the army and that afterwards you would return to your parents' farm in Sédatra. I was pleased that you did not say the war.]
He returns in the finale of the book as the OAS-led violence and fear is at its peak and of which he too is a victim: ‘J’ai peur de la mort des autres. J’ai peur pour Jacques, pour mon père qui ne parle pas, pour mes frères qui ne jouent pas.’161 Jacques’s death, at the hands of the OAS immediately after she witnesses them killing a ten-year-old boy, ends the novel. His body is removed by a faceless patrol and ‘ils m’ont forcée à t’abandonner.’162
That the narrator is never in a position to see Jacques in combat evidently makes it easier to portray him as a victim, but the clear division drawn between his superiors alongside the OAS, and the conscripts and civilians in Algeria, ensures that he is as much a victim as those not so actively involved in the war. Akin to the novels Dine reviews, the conscript becomes a victim of the anti-republican professional army and the OAS. As such they maintain a lack of agency and thus responsibility for the pursuit of war itself.
Whilst the artistic representations of conscripts in the 1970s are more willing to place them in the conflict zone, they confirm the narrative already present in the representations from the 1960s. These men are not the heroic citizen soldiers common in republican representations of earlier wars, but marginalised victims lacking in agency. This lack of agency enables Vautier’s and Boisset’s films to overcome the problem of portraying a torturer as a victim, but the more complex and direct representations of the conscripts is most notably balanced by a clear drawing of who they are victims of: not the FLN, not the republic, but the professional army.163
This division between conscript and professional continues into the twenty-first century and is present in Philippe Fauçon’s La Trahison, Laurent Herbiet’s Mon Colonel and even Jean-François Richet’s 2008 blockbuster Mesrine: l’instinct de mort.164 Mesrine caricatures the trend by suggesting at the beginning of the film that the notorious gangster, Jacques Mesrine’s brutality was a result of the brutality he witnessed and was forced to take part in
160 Ibid. p. 83 and 85. [I never saw Jacques again and I found isolation in a school that was barricading itself… I do not see Jacques anymore.]
161 Ibid. p. 86. [I am afraid of the death of others. I am afraid for Jacques, for my father who no longer speaks, for my brothers who no longer play.]
162 Ibid. p. 93. [they forced me to abandon you.]
163 This division between the republic and the army is discussed further in Chapter 3, section 3.2a.
164 Philippe Fauçon, La Trahison (2005); Laurent Herbiet, Mon Colonel (France, 2006); Jean-François Richet,
Mesrine: L'Instinct de mort (France, 2008). I will consider these films in more detail, including the relationship
as a conscript in Algeria. Whilst this relationship will be considered further in Chapter 3, it is worth noting that it is not itself new or unique in representations of the Algerian war and is in evidence with the division between the incompetent generals and the heroic Jean and Maurice in La Débâcle. It is the absence of heroism and, instead, the presence of the rhetoric of victimisation, which makes this relationship distinctive in the case of the Algerian war.