How the Church Under Pius XII Addressed Decolonization: The Issue of Algerian Independence 9781000849066, 1000849066

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Routledge Studies in Modern History

HOW THE CHURCH UNDER PIUS XII ADDRESSED DECOLONIZATION THE ISSUE OF ALGERIAN INDEPENDENCE Marialuisa Lucia Sergio

How the Church Under Pius XII Addressed Decolonization

By paying attention to Algerian independence, this book reconstructs the action of the Catholic Church regarding the issues of the spread of Islam in colonies, to Arab nationalism, Marxist propaganda in non-European countries, and the effects of the Algerian crisis upon the French political system. The complex relations between the Holy See and France, as well as those between the Vatican and the Episcopates and clergy of the overseas territories, are vital aspects of decolonisation, a topic which, to date, has been overlooked by historiography because of the impossibility of accessing documents relating to the pontificate of Pius XII (1939–1958) held in the Vatican archives. The opening in March 2020 of the archives of Pius XII, the Pope who had succeeded in imposing the strategic role of the Holy See upon the international scene, has made a vast amount of unpublished documentary material available to scholars. This book is useful for all students and scholars interested in the Cold War, the history of contemporary Europe, the history of the Church, post-colonial studies, and the religious phenomenon in post-World War II Europe. Marialuisa Lucia Sergio is Associate Professor in Contemporary History at Roma Tre University. Her research interests focus on the Christian-inspired political movements and on the contemporary Roman Catholic Church. Among her latest publications: The European Union of Christian Democrats and the Controversy regarding the Spanish Accession to the EC in the 1970s (2022); Il Secondo dopoguerra in Spagna nelle carte italiane e vaticane (2021); Bonaventura Cerretti and the Impossible Missions (2020), Diario di Alcide De Gasperi 1930–1943 (2018).

Routledge Studies in Modern History

Jewish Self-Defense in South America Facing Anti-Semitism with a Club in Hand Raanan Rein Journalists and Knowledge Practices Histories of Observing the Everyday in the Newspaper Age Edited by Hansjakob Ziemer Reenactment Case Studies Global Perspectives on Experiential History Edited by Vanessa Agnew, Sabine Stach, and Juliane Tomann Defrosting the Cold War and Beyond An Introduction to the Helsinki Process, 1954–2022 Richard Davy Narratives of Dictatorship in the Age of Revolution Emotions, Power and Legitimacy in the Atlantic Space Moisés Prieto Political Power and Colonial Development in British Central Africa 1938-1960s Alan H. Cousins How the Church Under Pius XII Addressed Decolonization The Issue of Algerian Independence Marialuisa Lucia Sergio For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge. com/Routledge-Research-in-Modern-History/book-series/MODHIST

How the Church Under Pius XII Addressed Decolonization The Issue of Algerian Independence

Marialuisa Lucia Sergio

First published 2023 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Marialuisa Lucia Sergio The right of Marialuisa Lucia Sergio to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-13622-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-13623-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-23017-5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003230175 Typeset in Times New Roman by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

Contents

List of Abbreviationsvii Preface x Introduction

1

The Roman Catholic Church and colonialism on the eve of the decolonisation processes: a historiographical assessment 1 Colonial nationality and the Islamic question: introductory elements 12 1 The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa from the Second World War to liberation: The beginning of the Algerian question (1939–1945)

24

The Vatican, Vichy government, and colonial regime: Pétain, a new French Salazar? 24 The Catholic Church and France libre in North Africa: a problematic relationship 34 2 How the Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with colonial transition (1945–1949) The constituent debate and attempts to reform the colonial order: The role of the MRP and the Algerian Episcopate, and the problem of the 1947 Statute 49 The establishment of the Apostolic Delegation of French Africa: Holy See, colonialism, and missionary experience suspended between continuity and renewal 60

49

vi  Contents 3 The Holy See and the start of the independence processes in North Africa: The Evangelii praecones encyclical put to the test by decolonisation (1950–1953) 70 The Vatican and the Tunisian question 70 Catholic mobilisation following the Casablanca uprising and the Moroccan question 78 4 The handling of the Algerian crisis by the Holy See and the Faure government (1954–1955)

94

The Vatican and the Catholic world in the aftermath of the Toussaint rouge: cries and whispers 94 The ecclesiastical hierarchies and the mirage of a “third way” 104 5 The Holy See and the Mollet government: Distrust and adaptation strategy. The Fidei donum encyclical (1956–1957)

127

The degeneration of the Algerian conflict and the discovery of oil. The strategic importance of the diocese of Laghouat 127 Relations between the Holy See, the Algerian Episcopate and the Apostolic Delegation in Dakar: the origins of the Fidei donum 142 6 The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 152 French Church in crisis over the torture issue and tensions between the Algerian Episcopate and the army 152 The Vatican from the coup d’état of 13 May to the Evian Accords: Ralliement to the Fifth Republic and the humanitarian emergency 164 Conclusions

180

Index

197

Abbreviations

AA. EE. SS.

Fondo Sacra Congregazione degli Affari Ecclesiastici Straordinari (Archives of the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs) AAS Acta Apostolicæ Sedis AAV Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (Vatican Apostolic Archive) ACA Assemblée des cardinaux et archevêques de France (Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops of France) ACPF Archivio Storico di Propaganda Fide (Propaganda Fide Historical Archives) ADSS Actes et documents du Saint-Siège relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale AGMAfr Archives générales des missionnaires d’Afrique (General Archives of the Missionaries of Africa) ALN Armée de libération nationale (National Liberation Army, jaysh al-tahrır al-watani) AML Amis du manifeste et de la liberté (Friends of the Manifesto and of Liberty) ASRS Archivio Storico della Segreteria di Stato – Sezione per i Rapporti con gli Stati (Historical Archives of the Section for the Relations with the States of the Secretariat of State) AUMA/AOMA Association des oulémas musulmans (Association of Algerian Muslim Ulama) CCEFI Comité Chrétien d’Entente France-Islam (Christian Committee of France-Islam Agreement) CCIF Centre catholique des intellectuels français (Catholic Centre of French Intellectuals) CDU Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (Christian Democratic Union of Germany) CESPS Centre d’études supérieures de psychologie sociale (Centre for Higher Studies in Social Psychology)

viii  Abbreviations CFLN CNAEF CNIP COPARE CSP DCF ENA FADRL FLN JEC JECF J. O. J.O.A.N. JWO MNA MRP MTLD N.C.W.C. OAS OCRS PCA PCF PPA SDECE

Comité français de la Libération nationale (French National Liberation Committee) Centre national des Archives de l’Église de France (National Centre of the archives of the Church of France) Centre nationale des indépendants et paysans (National Centre of Independents and Peasants) Comité de parents pour la réforme de l’enseignement (Parents’ Committee for Education Reform) Comité de salut public (Public Safety Committee) Démocratie Chrétienne de France (Christian Democracy of France) Étoile nord-africaine (North African Star) Front algérien pour la défense et le respect des libertés Algerian (Front for the Defense and Respect of Freedoms) Front de libération nationale (National Liberation Front, Jabhat al-Taḥrīr al-Waṭani) Jeunesse Étudiante Chrétienne (Christian Student Youth) Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne feminine (Female Student Christian Youth) Journal officiel de la République française Journal Officiel de l’Assemblée nationale Journal de Wladimir d’Ormesson (diary by Wladimir d’Ormesson, French National Archives) Mouvement national algérien (Algerian National Movement) Mouvement républicain Populaire (Popular Republican Movement) Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratiques (Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties) National Catholic Welfare Conference Organisation armée secrète (Secret Armed Organisation) Organisation commune des régions sahariennes (Common Organisation of the Saharan Regions) Parti communiste algérien (Algerian Communist Party, al-hizb al-shuyū’ı ̄ al-jazā’iri) Parti communiste français (French Communist Party) Parti du peuple algérien (Algerian People’s Party, hizb al-shāab al-jazā’iri) Service de documentation extérieure et de contreespionnage (External Documentation and CounterEspionage Service)

Abbreviations ix SFIO SRI TOMs UDMA UDRS UPC

Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière (French Section of the Workers’ International, the future Socialist Party) Service des relations avec l’islam (Islamic Relations Department) Territoires d’outre-mer (Overseas territories) Union démocratique du manifeste algérien (Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto) Union démocratique et socialiste de la Résistance (Democratic and Socialist Union of Resistance) Union des Populations du Cameroun (Union of the Peoples of Cameroon)

Legenda Pos. Posizione (position) fasc. fascicolo (folder) f foglio (sheet) ff fogli (sheets) r recto v verso NS Nuova Serie (New Series) Vol. Volume Arabic names are transliterated in the form used in the quoted primary sources and the international bibliography. The translation from Italian to English is by Marilyn Scopes

Preface

As the introduction to this book explains, the historiography of French North Africa’s decolonisation is being totally revised, both in France itself and across the English-speaking world. Until now, this revision lacked the standpoint of the Holy See, whose archives remained inaccessible to researchers. The opening by Pope Francis in 2020 of archives from the pontificate of Pius XII (1939–1958) allows us to partially fill this void. By drawing extensively on the archives of the Roman congregations and of the national archive centre for the French Church, Marialuisa Sergio – Associate Professor of Contemporary History at Roma Tre University – provides a first overview of the Vatican’s and French Catholic Church’s stance regarding the start of the Algerian War (1954–1958) and in passing the independence of Tunisia and Morocco in 1956. She eloquently demonstrates how the Holy See – while not identifying itself with French colonial policy, whose harsh treatment of its subjects it lamented – was unable to completely distance itself from it, for politico-­ religious reasons that extended far beyond the Maghreb. Even before the end of the Second World War, Rome was concerned at the spread of communism, not just in Eastern and Central Europe under the influence of Soviet armies, but also in Third World countries eager to free themselves from colonialism. In a way we now know was wrong, Rome saw Moscow’s hand behind the resurgence of Islam, which was seen not as an interlocutor but rather as a bitter rival, especially in Africa. It was this dual fear of communism and Islam that dictated Rome’s entire stance towards decolonisation. Countries moving towards independence needed to be protected from the influence of Cairo and of Moscow beyond so, despite its disadvantages, French control in North Africa served as a guarantee. Hence a dual track policy, both for the long and the short term, of which the two underlying reasons were not however really compatible. Long term, Rome was convinced of the inevitability of decolonisation and showed little interest in supporting the vested interests of colonial powers, including France. To ensure Catholicism’s survival beyond colonialism, since Pope Benedict XV (1914–1922), the Holy See had sought to entrench it by promoting members of the indigenous elite within the clergy and hierarchy. But while such indigenisation was well advanced in sub-Saharan

Preface xi Africa, in the Maghreb it met with fierce resistance from Islam to proselytism. Hence a call for help from the metropolitan clergy in contradiction, at least to all appearances, with indigenisation. One of Marialuisa Sergio’s key contributions is to highlight the role of Mgr. Marcel Lefebvre, archbishop of Dakar and apostolic delegate to Frenchspeaking Africa, and also – or maybe especially – of Mgr. Léon-Étienne Duval, archbishop of Algiers from 1954 onwards, in drafting the Fidei donum encyclical of 1957 which asked for French secular priests to be sent, not just to black Africa as is often mentioned, but also to Algeria and the Sahara where priestly recruitment from the European community was clearly inadequate and the missionary work of religious congregations was tending to wane. Short term, Rome took cover behind French domination, although not without concerns over the obvious weakening of France since its defeat by the Third Reich in 1940, compounded by its defeat by the Viet Minh in 1954 which confirmed its inability to regain a foothold in Indochina. It also had concerns about French Catholicism, which was shown by religious practice surveys to be in decline, although this didn’t preserve it from repeated unrest amongst its intellectual and clerical elite – disturbances that Rome saw fit to clamp down on shortly before the outbreak of the All Saints’ Day Algerian rebellion in 1954 (case of the worker-priests and their Dominican supporters in February of that year). In 1941, the Vichy government neglected the Vatican’s offer to give Catholicism privileged status within the French Empire, like that agreed in 1940 with Salazar’s regime, which the Holy See considered similar to the one established at Vichy. Meanwhile, despite being a known Catholic, General de Gaulle seemed far less congenial to Rome’s diplomats. Not only had he brought the communists to power, but he also intended to purge an episcopate overly sympathetic to Vichy. One bishop who paid the price for supporting Pétain was Mgr. Henri Vielle, the Vicar Apostolic of Rabat in Morocco. Despite justifiable doubts regarding the stability of the Fourth Republic, when it came to the Maghreb, the Holy See backed the reformism of the Popular Republican Movement – a Christian democratic party in all but name – by supporting structural reforms like those set out in the Defferre framework law of 1956, which aimed to safeguard both the metropole’s presence in overseas France and greater autonomy for former colonies. But there was no question of independence. This remained Rome’s position right through the Fourth Republic’s ultimate crisis in May 1958, when it continued to support its last government – led by Christian Democrat Pierre Pflimlin – rather than a return to General de Gaulle who was not remembered warmly in the palaces of Rome. It took several weeks or even months for the French high clergy to endorse the Fifth Republic and its leader. The Holy See’s key representative in Algeria was none other than the Archbishop of Algiers, Mgr. Duval, and Marialuisa Sergio’s work provides a well-argued reassessment of his role. He was certainly an early critic of the use of torture by French forces in Algeria and an advocate for improved

xii  Preface conditions for the Muslim population, thereby incurring the wrath of French Algerian extremists. And yet his reports to Rome showed extreme concern at the resurgence of Islam in Algeria and the possible communist influence behind it. As in Vatican circles, which saw them as a resurgence of the “progressivism” denounced between 1949 and 1955, he was also highly critical of the anti-colonial movements amongst the metropole’s Catholic Left (as expressed in the publications “Esprit” and “Témoignage Chrétien”) and in general of any seemingly ill-timed interference in Algerian affairs by metropolitan France. To consolidate the European strain of Christianity, to whose imminent disappearance he was oblivious, Mgr. Duval made insistent requests for priests from the metropole. While in favour of social reforms for the Muslim population, never did he imagine – or at least, not until 1958 – that it might gain independence. Backed by Rome, he appears less daring and more conformist than his legend, fuelled as it was by both his left-wing thuriféraires (admirers) and his far-right opponents. It was therefore difficult to find a middle ground between the colonial repression that Roman circles disapproved of without expressly saying so, and an independence whose name no one yet uttered in 1958. It is difficult also to foster a situation conducive to reforms that would gradually (the keyword throughout) lead to the emancipation of Algeria, following that of Tunisia and Morocco. This centrist position steadfastly resisted pressure from many fronts. The Vatican did not change its centrist position either in the face of pressure coming from several Muslim authorities on the Internuncio at Cairo, for Rome to stop supporting the French cause in Algeria and not least at international forums, or in the face of that coming from French nationalists like Mgr. Lefebvre, who saw military victory in Algeria as the prerequisite for preserving Christianity in Africa. Marialuisa Sergio reveals that his appointment in 1948 as the apostolic delegate to French-speaking Africa (except Algeria and Tunisia) was the subject of much debate in Roman circles, where he was pitted against a Belgian priest, Maximilien de Fürstenberg, and the newly appointed Bishop of Constantine and Hippo, Mgr. Duval. If the latter had been chosen instead of Mgr. Lefebvre, the history of the Church in Algeria, and Africa generally, might have taken quite a different turn. But historians study actual facts and events rather than random theories that are suggested and then abandoned. The first to work on this subject, using material recently made accessible in Rome and France, Marialuisa Sergio does justice to her profession. Documents in hand, she challenges existing preconceptions about the supposed anti-colonialism of Rome and its representative Mgr. Duval. Neither could imagine in 1958 how the future of Algeria would unroll. To find out how they stood regarding the subsequent shift towards Algerian independence, won in 1962, we will need to await the opening of the Roman archives for the pontificate of Pope John XXIII (1958–1963). Étienne Fouilloux

Introduction

The Roman Catholic Church and colonialism on the eve of the decolonisation processes: a historiographical assessment The processes of the national independence of French Africa represented a decisive challenge for the Roman Catholic Church which, during the second post-World War period, was struggling with the decline of colonial Europe and the crisis of its cultural models grounded mainly in the connection, until then deemed indissoluble, between Christian civilisation and the primacy of the West. The complex relations between the Holy See and France, as well as those between the Vatican and the Episcopates and clergy of the overseas territories, were a vital aspect of the difficult course of decolonisation, a topic which, to date, has been overlooked by historiography because of the impossibility of accessing documents relating to the pontificate of Pius XII (1939–1958) held in the Vatican archives. The opening, in March 2020, of the archives of Pius XII the Pope who, during the Second World War, had succeeded in imposing the strategic role of the Holy See upon the international scene, has made a vast amount of unpublished documentary material available to scholars. This access permits us to reconstruct the role of the Catholic Church during the process of decolonisation. Within this context, the independence of Algeria was emblematic for Catholicism, which, in North Africa more than in the home country, had assumed a very strong connotation associated with the colonial ideal of the plantatio ecclesiae (the plantation of the Catholic Church within non-­ evangelised territories) meaning the construction of “another France” on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. In this sense, the Catholic Church with the army, administrative structures, and the colonial political institutions participated in a joint ideologie of Frenchification of the Maghreb which exalted the Christian missions as a tool capable of fostering the European “civilisation” of the area. The historiography regarding the Algerian war of independence has limited itself, to date, to underlining above all the relatively atypical character of the Church of Algeria, inherited in part from several innovative DOI: 10.4324/9781003230175-1

2  Introduction sensitising religious experiences like that of the Little Brothers and the Little Sisters of Jesus and la Mission de France, presented as a kind of Algerian way towards Islam-Christian dialogue precursor of Vatican II (Henry, 2020). The documents of the Vatican Archives, focused principally on the political and diplomatic situation, reveal, however, a scenario more multifaceted and contradictory than that outlined by the interpretative paradigm of binary counterposition between an assimilationist France and a decolonising Church. This book, based on this documentation, intends to reconstruct the political and diplomatic position of the Roman Catholic Church regarding French decolonisation through the magnifying glass of Algerian independence, keeping in mind the variety of levels of intervention, parallel but not superimposable, of the Holy See, the Metropolitan Church, the dioceses, and civilian society, to be interpreted within the vast framework of international geopolitical relations, the institutional transformation of the set-up of overseas territories within the ambit of the French Union, as well as the theology of the revision of missionary models and a more general social and cultural crisis which saw the Catholic world split up because of diverse, conceptions incompatible with relations between religious identity and national membership, between Christian Europe and the post-colonial Mediterranean. The cardinal reference points of the situation are the Vatican City, home to the Holy See’s Secretariat of State, the centre of gravity of Pontifical diplomacy, and the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide, responsible for the Catholic Church’s missionary action; the Papal Nunciature in Parigi, that is the Vatican’s permanent diplomatic representative to the French government; the Cairo Internunciature, where the net of the negotiations of the North African independist movements unfolded; Algiers, the site of the Archdiocese which directly experienced the drama of the Franco-Algerian war; Tunis, Carthage in the language of theology, the primatial see of the Church of Africa; finally, the African Apostolic Delegation of French Africa in Dakar, an observation post fundamental for a comprehension of the political and social change of the African continent rife with instances of national emancipation. As French historian Claude Prudhomme, one of the most authoritative scholars of colonial and missionary history, observed, the analysis of the role of Catholicism in processes of “nation building resulting from decolonisation” constitutes “an unparalleled point of observation” for the study of the encounters and clashes between the cultures of missionary countries and the European culture destabilised by the crisis of its claim to universalism (Prudhomme, 2007: 26). He noted, however, that one of the main limitations of the historiography of Catholic missions, especially that of France, consists in the difficulty of placing the investigation “at the centre of the system”, that is, in Rome, where the Papacy “has a real […] almost

Introduction 3 always the last word because it is the only source of legitimacy”. He added that “observing the mission from Rome also means understanding the link between mission and politics […] and how Catholicism manages its gradual internationalisation. The historiographical stakes are therefore important” (Prudhomme, 2007: 27). Despite these opportune methodological indications, the study of the Catholic presence in colonial contexts has been approached, to date, almost exclusively in terms of the theological and ecclesiastic history of the missionary experience (Pirotte, 2009: 45). A brief examination of the academic literature dealing with the link among Catholicism, missionary enterprise, and colonialism up to the Second World War is very useful when seeking to place the decolonisation of French Africa within a long-term perspective, indispensable when striving to understand the contributing causes of political and religious processes between 1939 and 1958, the chronological axis of this work. First of all, the historiography of this topic underlines the coincidence between the expansionist cycle of European colonialism during the second half of the 19th century and one of the most complex phases of the history of the Holy See, which was engaged at the time in the difficult process of redefining its international policy following the loss of its temporal power when the Papal States came to an end in 1870 (Malgeri, 2019). On that historical juncture, one of the main concerns of the Holy See was the maintenance of its international role outside of Europe, an area marked by potential conflict between national interests, Christian universalism, and the role of the missions. The new wave of colonial expansion which arose during the “age of imperialism” brought new international diplomatic pressure to bear on the Vatican’s Secretariat of State demanding that it promote the “nationalisation of the missions”, meaning that they wanted the Vatican to send missionaries from the colonising mother countries to missionary countries to foster European political control over them. This prompted the Catholic Church to seek a compromise between its universalistic evangelising perspective and the narrow nationalistic interests of the European powers while avoiding an overly evident overlap between the logic of colonialism and the dynamics of missionary endeavour (De Giuseppe, 2011). In the specific case of relations between France and the Vatican, however, the revival of the Second Empire’s expansion into Asia and Africa provided the Catholic Church with new spaces for missionary advancement in exchange for concessions to colonial nationalism. The Holy See saw in France’s territorial penetration an opportunity to advance its pastoral action, while Paris considered evangelisation a phenomenon functional, even morally so, to the implementation of its policy of affirmation of its language and culture and maintenance of the pax colonialis at the service of the patriotic values of the metropolis (Ilboudo,1988; Gadille, Spindler, 1992; Prudhomme, 1994).

4  Introduction In the period between the two world wars, however, the pontificates of Benedict XV and Pius XI drew up a new order of principles and priorities of Catholic missions less compatible with Eurocentric thinking. In the case of the pontificate of Benedict XV, historiography has highlighted the extra-­ European extension of the First World War so that it involved the fate of the colonies and Catholic missions at geopolitical and strategic levels (Pollard, 2005: 140–162; Sergio, 2019). In this context, the promulgation of the apostolic letter Maximum illud on 30 November 1919 marked an ecclesiological turning point prospecting the formation of indigenous clergy, more respectful of cultural differences and more independent of political power (Kroeger, 2013; Pollard, 2014: 114–115). In the case of the pontificate Achille Ratti (Pius XI), historians have examined the contradictions present in the attitude of the Holy See, Propaganda Fide, individual missionary congregations, and Catholic culture in general towards fascist imperialism and its invasion of Ethiopia. On the one hand, Pius XI, in his encyclical Rerum Ecclesiae of 28 February 1926, affirmed the need to separate the interests of the colonial nations from those of the Catholic Church by pursuing a strategy of strong Roman centralisation of the governing bodies of the Catholic missions to free them from the political conditioning of the States and accentuate the supranational dimension of the Church and its position of neutrality (Canavero, 1998); on the other, the majority of the Italian Episcopate which was close to the fascist regime praised Mussolini’s colonial adventure as the enterprise worthy of a “missionary patriot” (Ceci, 2010; Sergio, 2018: 53–54, 180, 183–184). The outburst of the Second World War made the contradictions of the Catholic magisterium regarding the colonial question more evident and made it more urgent than ever to implement what Benedict XV and Pius XI had proposed in favour of a separation of the missions from the European mother countries and a clearer stance regarding political decolonisation. However, regarding issues that arose prepotently during the pontificate of Pius XII, historiography continues to present a lack of in-depth investigation, with the exception of well-documented volumes like Mauro Forno’s Le culture degli altri (The cultures of others) (Forno, 2017) and Elizabeth A. Foster’s African Catholic (Foster, 2019) where, with keen sensitivity towards the intellectual dimension of the problem, examined the network of missionary congregations, Catholic students’ associations and intellectuals, which before and during decolonisation, mobilised and discussed the topic of the constitution of an authentically African Church and the role of Catholicism during the political transition towards independence. This historiographical review of the relationships between the Catholic Church, colonialism, and missionary action served to understand the religious precursors of the decolonisation of French Africa, in particular, those regarding the independence of Algeria. In this case, too, it is helpful to examine some of the main topics debated by recent historiography if we wish to obtain a better understanding of the

Introduction 5 background of the political and religious dynamics that, starting from the beginning of the French colonial experience and up to the Second World War, led subsequently to the completion of processes of independence. Situated at the crossroads between colonial and religious history, the specific topic of Catholicism in Algeria occupies a grey area, which has been neglected by scholars of colonialism and religion alike. First of all, we should note that, at least until the mid-1990s, the historiographical investigation of colonialism and independence in Algeria focused almost exclusively on the political question of the decline of Catholicism in French Algeria following the development of Islamic society and the formation of the nationalist movement (Stora, 1994: 52–58). According to a now generally accepted pattern of periodisation proposed by Daniel Rivet, after the phase of nationalist and apologetic historiography set in the period of colonial Algeria and a subsequent Marxism and Third Worldism inspired anti-colonial historiography prevailing in the 1960s and 1970s, focused on the socio-economic deconstruction of the colonial system, since the 1980s political and institutional historiography began to prevail (Rivet, 1992). Since the end of the 20th century, after 1992 and the accessibility of the military archives of Vincennes and the ECPAD (Établissement de communication et de production audiovisuelle de la Défense), the topic of the decolonisation of Algeria imposed itself upon the attention of historians in particular as the “Algerian war” as related to the administration of justice and the use of torture (Branche, 2001; Thénault, 2001). For a long time, the Association française d’histoire religieuse contemporaine (AFHRC), founded in 1974, had also neglected the colonial issue, with the exception of a study-day in 1976 dedicated to “the overseas exportation of religious models” (“exportation des modèles religieux outre-mer”) (Langlois, 2016: 12). It is only within the ambit of the history of the missions that the connection between the history of religion and that of colonisation is highlighted for the first time, thanks to the studies of Jacques Gadille, Claude Prudhomme, and, more recently, by a pupil of the latter, Philippe Delisle, who focused on contacts between different faiths and cultures and the concept itself of the religious mission (Delisle, 2003; Prudhomme, 2004). Renewed research into missiological questions has brought to light one of the most important Algerian congregations, the Society of Missionaries of Africa (White Fathers), founded in 1868 by the Archbishop of Algiers, Msgr. Charles-Martial Lavigerie (Cellier, 2008; Nolan, 2015). Although still rather limited, the bibliography regarding the Catholics of Algeria has been enriched noticeably by the work of Oissila Saaïdia, whose research, taken up and developed in L’Algérie Catholique of 2018 (Saaïdia, 2018), is oriented principally towards the State and Church during the 19th and early 20th centuries (Saaïdia, Zerbini, 2015), the Christian missions and Catholic representations of Islam (Saaïdia, 2004, 2015).

6  Introduction This historiography highlights the double vocation of the Algerian Church, simultaneously at the service of the colonial cultural assimilation and the universalistic evangelising intentions of Catholic missions. The Catholic Church, which returned to North Africa following the French colonial expedition to Algeria in 1830 and after centuries of absence, considered itself the heir of the ancient Christian communities swept away by the barbarian invasions and the Arab-Muslim conquest. From this point of view, the main objective of the missionary initiative of the Catholic clergy was, therefore, to resuscitate the ancient Church of Africa since “there was only one way to prevent an entire people from disappearing: that of rediscovering the faith of its ancestors and becoming a sister nation of Christian France and in a position to transmit these same values to the centre of the African continent” (Renault, 1992: 140). The cross and the French tricolour hoisted on the minaret of the ex-Ketchaoua Mosque, turned by the settlers into the Cathedral of SaintPhilippe in 1832, became the symbols of the link between Church and Nation aimed at cultural assimilation where Christian places of worship contributed to European appropriation of a territory where Muslim subjects seemed to be relegated to the role of extras, “the ringing of bells responds to the call of the muezzin, the bell tower is in front of the minaret, the church is in front of the mosque” (Saaïdia, 2015: 130). The archdiocese of Algiers, erected in 1866 with the bull Catholicae Ecclesiae, and the archdiocese of Carthage (Tunis), restored in 1884 with the bull Materna Ecclesiae caritas and established as the seat of the Primate of the Catholic Church in Africa, at the time were a sort of Christian outpost overlooking the African continent and Islamic civilisation. One of the main architects of this plan for the re-Christianisation of North Africa is undoubtedly Msgr. Charles-Martial Lavigerie, who was at the helm of the archdiocese of Algiers in 1867, founder of the Society of Missionaries of Africa (also known as the White Fathers or Pères Blancs) in 1868 (Renault, 1992: 164–178) and Archbishop of Carthage from 1884. Lavigerie directed his evangelisation towards Kabylia, where an ethnographic “myth” in vogue in France at the time, hypothesised the existence of a residual core of Christianity in the local customs of the mountain tribes despite centuries of Islamisation (Grandguillaume, 2001; Vermeren, 2016). According to the instructions imparted by the founder of the White Fathers, evangelisation was to be implemented by sharing the living conditions of the indigenous peoples (accommodation, food, clothing, and language) and avoiding head-on aggressive proselytism (Saaïdia, 2020). This missionary enterprise was implemented by creating schools and hospitals and establishing two Christian villages, Saint-Cyprien and Sainte-Monique, intended to provide Arab-Christians with the means of survival in rural and indigenous areas and encourage new conversions among the surrounding Muslim populations. But the results of this apostolate were not those hoped for and upon the death of Lavigerie the balance of

Introduction 7 the missionary experience was poor. The management of Christian villages proved to be economically costly and not very effective from the point of view of evangelisation, since the Arab-Christians, perceived as secluded apostates in a world dependent on missionary aid, did not present an attractive model of life to the Muslim population which was reluctant to convert. Catholic schools began to be attended only later. This was not due to religious conviction but because Muslims considered learning French useful for individual promotion in colonial society (Saaïdia, 2020). At the beginning of the 20th century, the White Fathers realised that the time had come to go beyond a model of apostolate limited to bearing witness to Christian life by means of direct contact with the local population and hoped to inaugurate a second phase of missionary action characterised by a more explicit, dynamic kind of proselytism, where dialogue with the Arab world had not seemed to have even begun. When, on 26 April 1901, a revolt of the indigenous population led to the death of some settlers, the “Semaine religieuse” of Algiers resuscitated the traditional religious vocabulary of the French violently disparaging towards Islam and Mohammed, accused of being an “impostor, a false prophet” (Saaïdia, 2017). As for the relationship between Catholicism and Muslim society, the most recent historiographical research carried out on the subject considers the Eucharistic Congress of Carthage, held in 1930 in conjunction with the celebration of the Centenary of the French annexation of Algeria, as the peak of the triumphal exaltation of North-African Christianity, whose contact with the Islamic population remained fundamentally ambiguous and marginal (Henry, 2014). The year 1930 is, therefore, seen as a historical watershed dividing the era of political-religious triumphalism from the subsequent period when criticism and contestation of colonialism and of the ideology of French Algeria began to make headway. Both in France and North Africa, various intellectuals began to advocate dialogue with Muslim culture on an equal footing, like the authors who, in 1935, contributed to the first collective edition of L’Islam et l ‘Occident promoted by Émile Dermenghem and Louis Massignon as a monographic issue of the Cahiers du Sud, a magazine founded in Marseille in 1925 by Jean Ballard, and the bearer, at least intentionally, of a Christian vision empathetic with Islam. As pointed out in a 2015 study, the Cahiers du Sud represented, nevertheless, a cultural project devoid of political awareness, which excluded an analysis of the social and economic conditions of the dialogue between the West and Islam, which deliberately ignored the movements of Arab nationalist decolonisation and the phenomenon of the transformation of Muslim society, proposing, instead, an archaic, stereotyped image of Islam as a spiritual counterpart to a Western kind of civilisation in decline due to modernity and oblivion of the tradition (Baquey, 2014). However, criticism of colonisation begin to emerge, during this same period, due to open reflections by the Church of France on problems regarding the missions. In 1930, the Church in France dedicated the 22nd session

8  Introduction of the Social Weeks held in Marseille to the social problem of the colonies.1 These reflections, which had begun in previous years though only in sectorial terms, appeared in magazines like Revue d’histoire des missions, Etudes missionaires, and Union missionnaire du clergé, for the first time arousing the interest of the Catholic public concerning issues like the education of African clergy or coexistence in overseas territories. Colonial issues were explored by a group of so-called social Catholics (catholiques sociaux), which included missionaries who were experts in African questions like Father Francis Aupiais, academics like the geographer Jean Brunhes, the jurist Eugène Duthoit, and the rector of the Academy of Algiers, Georges Hardy, former director of l’École Coloniale, the national school for the instruction of administrative directors of French overseas agencies. This was a heterogeneous circle of specialists that arose spontaneously to address problems raised by the proposals made by Albert Sarraut (Minister of the Colonies from 1920 to 1924), the advocate of a plan for the reform of colonial policy, which he himself called a “mirror of one’s own national consciousness”. His reform aimed at healing – by means of a programme of public works intended to favour economic and social progress – the “shocking contradiction” (“contradiction choquante”) of the distance between the metropolis and the overseas territories.2 The “social Catholics” met on several occasions to share ideas and experiences regarding missionary and colonial problems, especially during the retreats in Juilly Oratorian College, organised by Georges Hardy from 1926 on, or the Colonial Days (journées coloniales) promoted by Action populaire, the association created by the Jesuit fathers to deepen the Church’s social doctrine. They also came together during the Social Weeks, in particular that held Marseille in 1930 and mentioned above. Ultimately, Joseph Folliet, founder of the Compagnons de Saint-François, a youth movement for peace and friendship among peoples close to the Catholic Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne (JOC) and Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne (JEC) organisations, condensed a theoretical corpus based on the theses of the social Catholics which he presented in his doctoral thesis of scholastic philosophy at the Institut Catholique de Paris, published in 1932 and entitled Le Droit de colonisation. Étude de morale sociale et internationale.3 This work was considered for a long time the origin of a new Catholic missiology prepared to question the historical and cultural foundations of colonialism and the prerogatives of France and the expression of a position favouring the rights of colonised countries (Durand, 2005: 145). However, in this case too, there is no lack of historiographical contributions highlighting the limits of this attempt to criticise colonialism seeing that it did not go beyond the hypothesis of the solidarity-based hoped-for sharing of natural resources in a perspective of a closer synergy between a metropolis/colonies (Balard, 1998: 229–240). These initial attempts to carry out an in-depth investigation of colonial issues and open up to an understanding of Islam, at all events, did not

Introduction 9 correspond in North Africa to a significant revision of the position of the Catholic clergy in favour of the Muslim population, still largely indifferent or unprepared to face the challenge of exploring new religious pathways.4 Throughout the entire colonial period, the Catholic intention of approaching the world of Islam in North Africa was contradictory, suspended between coexistence and dreams of religious reconquest. Attempts at interreligious dialogue were inspired, as we know, by the spirituality of Father Charles de Foucauld, a hermit since 1901 in BéniAbbès in the Algerian desert on the border with Morocco. Aware that the difficulties encountered when the Catholic Church tried to proselytise Islamic areas derived from not having taken into account the fact that Islam was a monotheistic faith with a specific dogma and cult capable of fully satisfying the human being’s natural need for religiosity, de Foucauld opposed traditional direct methods of evangelisation. On the contrary, he proposed an approach where the role of the missionary needed to prepare, in the long term and with profound patience and action, the ground upon which to transform the Muslim mentality. As his first biographer René Bazin narrated, de Foucauld summed up his thinking regarding the apostolate among the Muslims in Morocco as follows, “the work to be done […] is, therefore, a work of moral greatness to raise them up morally and intellectually using every means possible to approach them […] and using friendly relations every day to tear down their prejudices against us; by means of conversation and the example of our lives their ideas will change”.5 De Foucauld’s philosophy was the basis of the first centres set up in the 1920s in Morocco and Tunisia to study the issue of an Islamic-Christian dialogue. The Institut des Hautes études religieuses, inaugurated in the bishopric of Rabat on 7 February 1929, was based on the Foucaudlian method based on the concept of mission as bearing witness to the Gospel in their daily lives among the local population without proselytism but by earning the esteem of the people by works of benevolence and charity.6 In Tunisia, the IBLA (Institut des Belles lettres arabes), the best known and most frequently studied centres of Islamic-Christian studies, set up in 1926 by the White Fathers near La Marsa, was conceived to train missionaries in Arabic and Islamic culture before undertaking their work. The aim was to help them to get to know their interlocutors, dialogue with and patiently convince them. After moving to Tunis in 1932 and, under the influence of Father André Demeerseman, the IBLA became a meeting place between Tunisians and Europeans and a centre for cultural and social studies that opened up progressively during the post-war period, to sociology and anthropology (Fontaine, Chikha, 1992: 23–28). In any case, de Foucauld’s method met with mixed success in Morocco. Though it was consistent with the apostolic lines of the Franciscan Victor Dreyer, apostolic vicar of Rabat between 1923 and 1927, who carried out cautious missionary action in Morocco centred on charity, it was viewed

10  Introduction with scepticism by his successor, his fellow Franciscan Henri Vielle, convinced that, because the Foucauldian approach was too slow and ineffective, it was necessary to adopt a dynamic campaign of conversion and baptism aimed at creating an authentic local, not an extension of the French Church (Marguich, 2017). In the late 1930s, however, Vielle, acknowledged the fact that despite having built “a large enough number of churches in Morocco”, he had failed to set up “a native Church of indigenous Christians and priests”. In a ministerial pastoral letter entitled The duty of Catholics in the land of Islam (2 February 1938), he underlined the values of collaboration, mutual respect, and coexistence as the basis of human relations.7 During the final period of the Protectorate, Msgr. Louis-Amédée Lefèvre (apostolic vicar and later Archbishop of Rabat from 1947 to 1968) confirmed these new approaches by attempting, better than his predecessors, the pathway of reconciliation and entente with the Moroccans (Baida, Feroldi, 2005: 53–83). The case of Tunisia was different. There, during the three episcopates of Msgr. Clément Combes (1893–1920), Msgr. Alexis Lemaître (1920–1939), and Msgr. Charles-Albert Gounot (1939–1953), the Church, having abandoned attempts at proselytising and approaching Muslims, addressed itself almost exclusively to the European settlers, while leaving its social institutions, schools, and hospitals open to the Muslim population, without renouncing the advantages of French protection (Soumille, 2017). The Church of Algeria, born in the shadow of colonisation, and initially anxious to reconquer by spiritual means the territories it had surrendered to Islam, followed the same pathway and redirected its efforts promptly and exclusively towards the European populations. However, if the reputation of the bishop of Oran, Msgr. Léon Durand (1920–1945), was that of a “dictator in a mitre”, who openly sided with the more radical colonial right (Bérenguer, 1994: 48), that of Msgr. Augustin-Fernand Leynaud, Archbishop of Algiers between 1917 and 1953 was different. Leynaud was considered the real rebuilder of the Church of Algeria due to his dynamic construction and restoration of religious buildings and the promotion in Algeria of Catholic associations like the scouts and branches of the Catholic Action movement (Gonzalez, 1991: 133–135). Like Lavigerie, whose secretary he had been in 1889, Leynaud enjoyed a reputation as a man of dialogue, due to the development under his pastoral guidance of some interreligious initiatives, like the En Terre d’Islam. La Revue française du monde musulman magazine and the establishment, in 1951, of the Social Secretariat of Algiers under the Jesuit Henri Sanson with a view to promoting, in synergy with the L’Effort algérien weekly directed by Maurice Monnoyer, meetings on the socio-economic problems of the Algerian reality – hunger, shortcomings of the school system, effects of illiteracy, overpopulation (Akbal, 2010). These initiatives, driven by the ambition to promote a spirit of union within a colonial society plagued by religious and ethnic division, were characterised by a utopian approach which progressive Christians called an “illusion of community” (Roche, 2003).

Introduction 11 In the 1940s, the legacy of Father de Foucauld continued to inspire various new experiences of interreligious prayer and apostolate. In 1943, in Paris, Father Jean Daniélou, with Mother Marie de l’Assomption (born Marie-Émilie Taudière), founded the Cercle Saint-Jean-Baptiste, a “circle of spirituality and missionary culture” open to young people of different backgrounds and origins (students, social workers, catechists, and spiritual guides, etc.), with a view to arousing a true “cultural endeavour” aimed at acquiring knowledge of the so-called pagan civilisations intended as previously non-evangelised, non-European cultures.8 In 1947, in Egypt, Louis Massignon and Mary Khalil institutionalised a new model of prayer association of international breadth: the Badaliya. According to Massignon, Badaliya meant literally “replacing, an exchange with a soldier chosen by chance”.9 It was neither “a rule of prayer, nor a systematic method of apostolic permeation” but it urged the “spiritual inclination” of Christian believers to respond to the call of Jesus in place of their Muslim brothers, praying, in fact, in their “stead”.10 Meanwhile, during the Second World War, the Little Brothers of Jesus, the congregation of the Foucauldian inspiration founded by Father René Voillaume, discovered a profound de-Christianisation of the popular masses in the army and a practically generalised proletarianisation of the working class,11 which urged them, at the end of the conflict, to abandon the cloister and bestow new direction to their apostolate. This brought René Voillaume into contact with various activists of the Action Catholique Ouvrière and Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne (JOC) in Algiers. In 1946, on the quays of Marseille, he met Father Jacques Loew, the founder of the worker-priests movement who inspired him to set up the first Fraternité Ouvrière open to a new form of contemplative life based on concretely sharing the everyday life of the poor. The topic of relationships between Catholicism and Islam in missionary ambits has been the subject of numerous studies which, however, fall mainly within the epistemological field of Orientalism, following in the footsteps of the teachings of Louis Massignon and the spiritual tradition of Father Charles de Foucauld. The approach that prevails is theological and aimed almost exclusively at underscoring elements of interreligious dialogue and ecumenism (Geffré, 2006). It is by no coincidence that, starting from the 1970s, the first studies to discover, as the Tunisian historian of Islamic thinking and civilisation Abdelmajid Charfi put it, the “new phenomenon of Islamic-Christian relations” (Charfi, 1975), had been launched by the Pontifical Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies (PISAI) which, since 1975, has been publishing a magazine called Islamochristiana, aimed at promoting Mediterranean relations centred on Euro-Arab confrontations aimed at finding, as historian Algerian Ali Merad called it, a “common language” (Merad, 1975). The aim of these first publications was to provide an opportunity for religious dialogue and, to this end, the initiatives of the Sous-commission pour Islam du Conseil oecuménique des Éslises (COE) and the Secrétariat

12  Introduction pour les relations avec les non-chrétiens de l’Église catholique fuelled what later historiography would call “post-conciliar euphoria”.12 After an initial historiographical assessment attempted at the end of the 1990s by Rudolph Ekkehard (1996), the Service des relations avec l’islam (SRI) team began documenting international talks, meetings, and conferences on the subject (Caucanas, 2015: 146), to go more deeply into the topics of coexistence between nationalities and different religions to promote the cultural conditions of peace. As Dominique Avon claimed regarding this editorial production, the permanence of “a confessional episteme” (“épistémè confessionnelle”) sought to neutralise the conflict in the name of the promotion of what united rather than separated. This, he held, was responsible for the delay that occurred regarding an authentic historiographical problematisation (Avon, 2013). For a long time, publications emphasising conversions to Catholicism or the baptism of Muslims prevailed as cross narratives (Gaudeul, 1990), biographies (Keryell, 2009), epistolaries (Mulla-Zadé, Abd-el-Jalil, 2009), or histories of institutions run by French Catholics to establish relationships free from the conflict of the past (Levrat, 1987).

Colonial nationality and the Islamic question: introductory elements At the end of the historiographical overview proposed here in these introductory pages regarding relationships between Catholicism and colonialism up until the Second World War and on the beginning of Islamic-Christian relations, it appears that recent French historiography, especially that of the years after 2012, the historiographic watershed associated with the 50th anniversary of the Évian agreements, has striven to bring to light the contradictions and ambiguities of Catholicism in North Africa and the IslamicChristian dialogue by providing critiques that help problematise some interpretative topoi crystallized over time, like the alleged North African model of interreligious and intercultural coexistence. This is why, studies of relationships between colonialism and Catholicism appear to intersect some research trajectories that emerged in French post-colonial studies which, in recent years, have sought to decipher French society through the prism of its colonial heritage, reflecting on some underlying continuities which subverted the universalism of the values of the French Revolution in forms of colonial segregation that characterised the Vichy regime and, after the Second World War, the IV and the first phase of the V Republic (for example, Blanchard, Bancel, Lemaire 2005; Le Cour Grandmaison, 2005, 2009; Khiari, 2009). This historiography dialogues with some Anglo-American reflections concerning colonial Frenchness (Gosnell, 2002) and the paradoxical conflict between the universality of French republicanism and the rhetoric of its overseas civilising mission (Conklin, 1997; Stoler, Cooper, 1997).

Introduction 13 It is striking, however, that none of the works on Catholicism in colonised areas and North-African decolonisation has addressed directly, specifically or in depth some topics essential to Postcolonial studies. Among these are the developments of overseas political institutions, with reference above all to the legal status of colonial subjects in terms of the ownership of political rights and citizenship, and again, the theme of relationships between colonial authority and Islamic identity, between Islam and French secularism (laïcité). As one can see from a detailed examination of a considerable amount of documents in the Vatican archives, these were issues that the Church of the time considered crucial and which therefore constitute a significant part of this book, whose methodological approach is a careful reconstruction of the interweaving of events as they emerge from the original documents, on which selective hermeneutical filters of pre-established treatment have not been applied. For a better understanding of the contents of the Vatican documents, it is necessary to provide a brief outline, without claiming to be exhaustive, of the problems of colonial nationality and the status of Islam in overseas France. Under the first aspect, it is necessary to underline the exceptional nature of the legal regime of the colonies compared to the republican order in the mother country based on the principles of citizenship and equality of citizens before the law. The expansion of the borders of the French State was not tantamount to the extension of the republican system. Muslims (and Algerian Jews up to the Crémieux decree of 1870) were, to all intents and purposes to be acknowledged as nationaux (nationals), members of the national State, but not citoyens, belonging to the only politically legitimate community possible, the republic made up of citizens and possessors of political and civil rights. The autochthons of the colonies were attributed specific legal status that acknowledged their membership of a religious-cultural community different from the French, thus differentiating between them and French citizens who were subject to the rules of the civil code and beneficiaries of the so-called civil statute of common law (statut civil de droit commun). The personal statute of local law (statut personnel de droit local) reserved for the non-French natives had the same regulatory function as the civil code but was based on customary (coutumières) norms linked to specific ethnic and religious membership (therefore the Koranic law in the case of Islamic countries such as Algeria). They concerned all legal matters concerning the person directly: marital status (name), capacity (measures adopted to protect the incapable), free union, marriage (its basis, effects, and dissolution), filiation by blood and adoption (their basis and effects), the matrimonial regime and succession. Although conceived in the abstract as an instrument to protect cultural specificities, the statut personnel de droit local in fact legally sanctioned a presumed difference in the “civilisation” of the colonised populations that

14  Introduction demanded their exclusion from the law in force in metropolitan France, due to the recognition of identities considered an obstacle to republican integration based on equal rights. As Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Françoise Vergès have observed, “while basing its legitimacy on the people and only on the people taken as a whole (because of its opposition to the principle of a natural hierarchy), the Republic actually reconstructed [overseas] a society based around a caste system in its empire” (Bancel, Blanchard, Vergès, 2003: 33). In fact, the attribution of personal status also corresponded to a special criminal law, summarised in the Code de l’indigénat of 1881 and applied only to the indigenous population, which included a complex casuistry of special offences (infractions spéciales) not provided for in the French Criminal Code. The Code de l’indigénat increased the number of offences ascribable to the colonised population, while at the same time increasing the penalties to be imposed for offences already covered by the French Criminal Code when committed by autochthons. It provided, among other things, for measures restricting personal liberty through the punishment of the following alleged offences: unauthorised meetings; leaving the municipal territory without a travel permit; and acts and comments deemed disrespectful or offensive towards officials of the colonial administration (Weil, 2002: 233). At political level, the indigenous peoples had limited voting rights, affected by the asymmetry of the double constituency system, emblematic of what has been called the “legal monstrosity” of the overseas system, based on the condition of “nationality without citizenship” of colonial subjects (Schnapper, 1994: 152). Through this electoral system, natives were allowed to take part in local elections, although not in the first constituency reserved for European voters who had the greatest electoral weight, but only in a second constituency for the election of local assemblies that were a representation of minority local populations in proportion to their net demographic superiority. To gain access to citizenship and the full exercise of electoral rights, they had to prove that they were culturally assimilated by choosing to voluntarily renounce their personal status and submit to the “civil and political laws of France” (Sahia Cherchari, 2004). Although the Sénatus-consulte of 14 July 1865 had opened the way for indigenous Muslims to have access to the privilege of French citizenship, albeit through a complicated and strictly individual naturalisation procedure, this ultimately depended on the discretion of the local administration which, according to Patrick Weil, often showed “a rare unwillingness” (“d’une rare mauvaise volonté”) to grant it (Weil, 2005: 9). This is explained in light of the fact that the notion of indigenous was also highly ethnicised as clearly shown by the decision (arrété) of 30 January 1874 of the Court of Appeal of Algiers which specified that the term indigenous referred to “all individuals residing in North Africa who do not belong to the European race” (cited in Urban, 2009: 326). The decision was in accordance with an ethnic approach confirmed by the Court of Cassation in Paris,

Introduction 15 which in 1903 stated that the indigenous population included “all the natives of the African race” (cited in Urban, 2009: 328). That the subtext was racist towards the indigenous population is demonstrated by the fact that even if a Muslim converted to Christianity this was not sufficient to obtain full citizenship under the civil statute of private law (statut civil de droit commun). On the other hand, if a French citizen converted to the Islamic faith, as in the case of the painter Étienne Dinet, his or her citizenship was not called into question (Colas, 2004: 135). The second fundamental issue that emerges from the Vatican documents regarding decolonisation concerns the role of Islam in the Maghreb and its diffusion in the rest of French Africa. To contextualise this problem in advance, it is necessary to consider the regime of exceptions applied to the rules on secularism introduced into the colonies by the 1905 Law of Separation. As a pillar of the colonial order, the Catholic Church in the overseas territories was in many respects shielded from the effects of the Separation Act and instead enjoyed the benefits of the derogatory regime in the colonies. In the metropolis, the Law of Separation, preceded by the breach of diplomatic relations between France and the Holy See in 1904 following the ban on teaching imposed on religious congregations, marked the culmination of a bitter clash between secular and religious ideas, which forged the characteristic French model of secularism in the name of republican values which resulted in the abolition of State expenditure and subsidies in favour of religious practice and the end of the free schools (independent religious schools). Although voted unanimously by the French deputies elected in the Algerian departments (Bellon, 2009), this law was never applied fully in the colonies, where, on the contrary, the State continued to pay an allowance to the ministers of worship of all religions and provided, in specific cases, for remuneration by the general government of Algeria of the priests of some parishes (Saaïdia, 2003). Although, as we have seen, the French authorities saw Christianisation as an instrument of European civilisation, the colonial protection of Catholicism did not translate into a policy of head-on opposition to Islam, the subject, instead, of a strategy of attention and control aimed at preventing and/or neutralising potential religious conflict (Triaud, 2000, 2006). In Algeria, from the beginning of colonisation, between 1830 and 1851, France – having confiscated and declared the hubus or waqf assets belonging to the Muslim community state property, used these assets, to meet the expenses of the exercise of the cult, the construction and maintenance of religious buildings and the remuneration of mosque personnel, in exchange for full State control over the entire Islamic organisation and ministers of worship, maintained using the appointment of the directors of the Medersas, the Koranic training institutes, and of the imams who were granted a stipend (Ainouche, 1987).

16  Introduction The origin of this policy of assimilation and control was rooted in the attitude of distrust towards the Islamic faith identified, according to the famous adage “al-islâm dîn wa dawla” (“Islam is both religion and State”), a theocratic counterculture potentially subversive towards the metropolitan national identity capable of controlling the economic, social, and political field (Saaïdia, 2016). So, in Algeria, the fundamental contradiction between “republican” and “colonial” secularism emerged. The former believed that Islam, once it has been expelled from every sphere of public decision-making, remained a merely private matter; the latter, on the other hand, considered membership of the Islamic faith a matter of State, or, rather, of “public security”, to be governed by administrative interference. In this sense, the separation of the political and religious spheres, established by Article 2 of the 1905 Law of Separation, could not be applied overseas, because it would have ended up by weakening the systems of control upon which colonial rule was based, so the decree applying the Law of Separation in Algeria, dated 27 September 1907, simply introduced some slight changes to the pre-existing law. The ministers of the Muslim cult, although no longer appointed by the governor general of the colony, still had to submit to him; they were no longer paid by the State but continued to receive an allowance and their recruitment was entrusted to the prefect, who could appoint, promote, or dismiss as he saw fit. Algerian Muslims were invited to form local associations to take over the direction of religious affairs, but their leaders were notables close to the colonial administration (Baubérot, 2021). The Algerian case of colonial secularism as far as the Islamic question was concerned is extremely important as it ended up by providing a model that inspired the colonial administration in the rest of French Africa. The pioneer of this policy was the engineer Louis Faidherbe, the administrator of modern Senegal (1854–1865) who, after having served in Algeria in the Engineer Corps (1842–1847 and 1849–1852), set up institutions in Senegal based on the Algerian model: Franco-Arab schools, a “Muslim court”, a colonial infantry corps, the tirailleurs sénégalais, dressed in North African burnous. In Senegal, as in the rest of French West Africa, a kind of State Islam was thus formed to which, as in North Africa, republican secularism and the spirit of the Separation Act were obviously alien and in which the control and exploitation of the Islamic religion responded to the immediate needs of the local administration (Triaud, 2009: 128-129). The scenario described up to now changed radically after the Second World War when the time seemed ripe for a relative democratisation of the colonies. While African political forces borrowed associative models from the metropolis, i.e. trade unions, political parties, and electoral programmes, students from French Africa, in the Maghreb and the subSaharan regions, studied at the universities of the Near East (in particular

Introduction 17 Al-Azhar in Cairo) and acquired a level of the Arabic language that permitted them to refer to a cultured form of Islam that became the source of the legitimacy of political action that no longer depended on recognition by the colonial administration or the charisma of family dynasties and local personalities but on the knowledge that derived from the sources of faith – cities of pilgrimage and Islamic universities – found in countries, like Egypt, which had freed itself of colonialism. From this point of view, the slogan “Islam is our religion, Arabic is our language and Algeria is our country” coined by Abd al-Hamid Ibn Badis is emblematic. In 1931, he founded the “Association of Algerian Muslim Ulemas”, which promoted a religious-cultural programme based on the return of Islam to its original purity, and therefore against superstition and idolatry, in an attempt to reunite the various Algerian Muslim currents in a single block under the banner of the Sunni and Arabicspeaking vision. Compared to the French legal system, the claim of Algerian nationalism took the form of a request for greater secularism as an integral application of the Law of Separation intended to grant the Muslim religion total independence from the State and the constraints of the protective shield of colonial authority. This position was outside patterns of Western thinking, since this claim of secularism, as a clearer dividing line between French political authority and the religion, was based, in any case on a strong form of Islamic identity characterised by a close connection between the Muslim faith and politics. On the contrary, as we shall see, the Catholic Church took an opposite stance aimed at maintaining fundamental prerogatives, especially as regards the school system and education, in the shadow of State authority. Despite enjoying a privileged position due to the benefits granted by the colonial order, the Catholic Church of the overseas territories was always solidary with the Metropolitan Church when challenging the Law of Separation which secularised the public education system and deprived Catholicism of its role as the cornerstone of national values and social order and, during the entire process of decolonisation, it did not fail to polemically address the relationships between religion and politics which the ecclesiastical hierarchies considered a key to the determination of the post-colonial process itself. At the same time, the Catholic Church was extremely critical of the French policy of management of Islamic identity and governmental proposals aimed at reforming the legal system of the French Union (set up after the war on the territories of the former colonial Empire) regarding the implementation of demands of autonomy and self-government associated to the extension of citizenship to the Muslim population. Albeit inclined in the post-war period to carry through the demands of religious decolonisation outlined by the pontificates of Benedict XV and Pius XI, was the Holy See really in favour of a rapid and concrete solution of

18  Introduction the disengagement of France from the African scenario? Was the Catholic Church’s interpretation of the Islamic phenomenon marked by an acknowledgement of its intellectual dignity and strategic importance to post-­colonial transition? Did the Vatican comply with the requests for diplomatic support advanced by the pro-independence movements? These are issues of great historiographical importance, which have remained unanswered to date. This book aims at reconstructing the policy and action of the Catholic Church concerning the issues of the spread of Islam in colonies, Arab nationalism, Marxist propaganda in non-European countries, the legal and political Statute of countries being decolonised, and the destructuring effects of the Algerian crisis upon the French political system. The book begins with 1939, the beginning of the pontificate of Pius XII and the year of the outbreak of the Second World War, which was also a historically decisive factor that triggered the political, social, and cultural processes of the decolonisation of French Africa. The Vatican documentation testifies how concern over the spread of Islam was present among the hierarchies of the Holy See from the initial stages of the Second World War (1939–1940) when the Secretariat of State of the Holy See promoted a wide-ranging enquiry into the spread of the Muslim religion among the Catholic missions of Africa and into the strategies of the Christian apostolate implemented to stem its propagation.

Notes 1 Le problème social aux colonies, C.R. in extenso des cours et conférences. Paris: J. Gabalda, Lyon: E. Vitte, 1930. 2 Albert Sarraut, La mise en valeur des colonies françaises. Paris: Payot, 1923, 84. 3 Joseph Folliet, Le droit de colonisation. Étude de morale sociale et internationale. Lyon: Neveu, 1932. 4 See the testimony of Jacques Fournier in L’Algérie retrouvée 1929–2014. SaintDenis: Éd. Bouchène, 2014: “Ni à Cassaigne (ni à Oran) je n’ai senti une quelconque ouverture sur la société algérienne et ses problèmes. ‘Tu aimeras ton prochain comme toi-même’, nous dit l’Évangile. Il faut croire que dans l’Algérie française, l’indigène n’était pas un prochain” (“Neither in Cassaigne (nor in Oran) did I perceive any openness towards Algerian society and its problems. ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’, the Gospel tells us. You have to believe that in French Algeria, the native was not a neighbour”). 5 René Bazin, Charles de Foucauld, explorer du Maroc, ermite au Sahara. Paris: Plon, 1921, 410. 6 Among the most notable missionary figures, we find the Franciscan Charles-­ André Poissonnier (1897–1938) and Abel Fauc (1901–1982) inTazert; Albert Peyriguère (1883–1959) in El Kbab, where Othon de Launay (1974) in Meknes exerted a strong spiritual influence over Catholic circles in the 1960s and 1970s. 7 Lettre pastorale sur le devoir des catholiques en terre d’islam et mandement datée du 2 février 1938, cited in Moussa Marguich, L’Église catholique au Maroc sous le protectorat français: Rabat-Paris-Rome ou le heurt des logiques (1912–1956). Histoire, monde et cultures religieuses, 44(4), 2017: 33–54, here 52.

Introduction 19 8 Jean Daniélou, Mission chrétienne et mouvement ouvrier. Bulletin du Cercle Saint-Jean-Baptiste, (1950). Axes VI–VII, juin-juillet 1969, 55–60. 9 Louis Massignon, Badaliya, Au nom de l’autre (1947–1962), présenté et annoté par Maurice Borrmans et Françoise Jacquin (Préface du cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran). Paris: Cerf, 2011, 60. 10 Ibid., 72. 11 Denise Barrat and Robert Barrat, Charles de Foucauld et la fraternité. Paris, Édition du Seuil, 1958, 138–139. 12 See for example the studies collected in the dossier edited by Service des relations avec l’islam, Recherche sur les fondements théologiques du partage de foi entre chrétiens et musulmans, vol. 9, 1989, in particular: René Metz, Les relations de l’Église catholique et de l’Islam depuis le Concile Vatican II (1962–1965) à l’année 1988, 23–26, here 29.

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22  Introduction Prudhomme, Claude (ed) (1994). Stratégie missionnaire du Saint-Siège sous Léon XIII (1878–1903). Centralisation romaine et défis culturels. Rome: Collection de l’École française de Rome. Prudhomme, Claude (2004). Missions chrétiennes et colonisations. XVIe-XXe siècles. Paris: Cerf. Prudhomme, Claude (2007). Cinquante ans d’histoire des missions catholiques en France: l’âge universitaire. Histoire et missions chrétiennes, (1)1: 11–30. Renault, François (1992). Le cardinal Lavigerie 1825–1892. L’Église, l’Afrique et la France. Paris: Fayard. Rivet, Daniel (1992). Le fait colonial et nous: histoire d’un éloignement. Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, (33): 127–138. Roche, Anne (2003). Maurice Monnoyer et l’hebdomadaire L’Effort algérien (1951–1956) ou l’illusion communautaire. In: P. Baudorre (ed), La plume dans la plaie: Les écrivains journalistes et la guerre d’Algérie. Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 65–78. Saaïdia, Oissila (2003). Le cas algérien, entre continuité historique et changement. In: M. S. Delisle (ed), Les Relations Église-État en situation postcoloniale: Amérique, Afrique, Asie, Océanie, XIXe-XXe siècles. Paris: Karthala, 143–153. Saaïdia, Oissila (2004). Clercs catholiques et oulémas sunnites dans la première moitié du XXe siècle. Discours croisés. Paris: Librairie orientaliste Paul Greuthner. Saaïdia, Oissila (2015). Algérie coloniale. Musulmans et chrétiens: le contrôle de l’État (1830–1914). Paris: CNRS Édition. Saaïdia, Oissila (2016). L’invention du culte musulman dans l’Algérie coloniale du XIXe siècle». L’Année du Maghreb, 14: 115–132. Saaïdia, Oissila (2017). “Muhammad”. In: J.-D. Durand, C. Prudhomme (eds), Dictionnaire historique du catholicisme. Paris: Robert Laffont, 886–888. Saaïdia, Oissila (2018). L’Algérie catholique. XIXe-XXIe siècles. Paris: CNRS Édition. Saaïdia, Oissila (2020). Les catholiques d’Algérie: minorités d’hier et d’aujourd’hui. Les Cahiers d’EMAM [Online], 32. Online since 05 May 2020, last connection on 30 January 2022. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/emam/2434; DOI: https:// doi.org/10.4000/emam.2434 Saaïdia, Oissila & Zerbini, Laurick (eds) (2015). L’Afrique et la mission. Terrains anciens, questions nouvelles avec Claude Prudhomme. Paris, Karthala. Sahia Cherchari, Mohamed (2004). Indigènes et citoyens ou l’impossible universalisation du suffrage. Revue française de droit constitutionnel, 4(60), 741–770. Schnapper, Dominique (1994). La Commmunauté des citoyens. Sur l’idée moderne de nation. Paris: Gallimard. Sergio, Marialuisa Lucia (2018). Diario di Alcide De Gasperi 1930-1943. Bologna: il Mulino, 2018. Sergio, Marialuisa Lucia (2019). Bonaventura Cerretti and the Impossible Missions. In: A. Melloni, G. Grossi, I. Bernini (eds), Benedict XV. Pope Giacomo Della Chiesa in the world of the useless massacre. Brepols: Turnhout, 1433–1452. Soumille, Pierre (2017). Des catholiques en Tunisie. Une longue histoire de conflits, de négociations, d’incompréhension (XIIIe siècle-1958). Histoire, monde et cultures religieuses, 44(4): 13–31. Stoler, Ann Laura & Cooper, Frederik (1997). Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda. In: Id. (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1–56.

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1

The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa from the Second World War to liberation The beginning of the Algerian question (1939–1945)

The Vatican, Vichy government, and colonial regime: Pétain, a new French Salazar? In the spring of 1938, with the Motu Proprio Sancta Dei Ecclesia (25 March), Pius XI entrusted the Congregation for the Oriental Churches (the congregation of the Roman Curia responsible for dealing with problems concerning Byzantine rite Catholics and the spread of Catholicism among Orthodox Christians) with the ecclesiastical jurisdiction over several countries with a strong Muslim majority, such as Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Transjordan, Palestine, and Egypt (Leone, 1980: 131). The Secretary of the Congregation Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, a well-known biblical scholar and orientalist, was tasked with monitoring the development of relations between the Latin and Greek Orthodox Christians, while opening a dialogue with the Muslim populations. Tisserant took on this new responsibility after a three-week trip to explore the Arab reality in the Maghreb (Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria), which only served to confirm his personal and deep-rooted Islamophobic convictions (Fouilloux, 2011: 341). For Tisserant, that Islam was inferior to Catholicism was indisputable, since in his eyes the Koranic religion was simply blind submission to a tyrannical and omnipotent God, which translated into passive habitual ritual practices contrary to individual freedom, in short a sort of totalitarianism, albeit of a messianic matrix, akin even to Nazism.1 Upon returning from North Africa, the Cardinal was informed by the missiologist Father Albert Perbal that a number of missionary fathers, with the encouragement of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide – the Dicastery of the Roman Curia responsible for missionary activity and the evangelisation of peoples – had set up a “Temporary Commission for the Study of the Needs of the Apostolate in Islamic Lands”.2 As Tisserant had jurisdiction over Egypt, and the Catholic Church already recognised Cairo as the intellectual and theological centre of Islam, he sat on the commission and soon transformed it into a real “Conference on Islamic matters”.3 In May 1939, now under the pontificate of Pius XII, the Congregation for the Oriental Churches and Propaganda Fide agreed on the need to DOI: 10.4324/9781003230175-2

The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa 25 conduct a survey on the state of Islam in the mission countries, considered “indispensable” for a deeper knowledge of the Islamic phenomenon and how widespread it was, and of the apostolic activities undertaken by the Church in response to Muslim proselytism.4 A questionnaire was sent to the Apostolic Vicariates and the Mission Superiors present in the territories with a Muslim majority. It was defined as “absolutely confidential and secret” and the responses were to be sent to the Vatican in “well sealed envelopes” to avoid “indiscretions and reactions”. The respondents had to answer 12 questions aimed at ascertaining the influence of Islam from a political, juridical, and moral point of view, the effectiveness of its propaganda, the number of conversions to Catholicism, and the possible danger of family-related retaliation, the ethics of customs (polygamy and the observance of ritual prescriptions), and the missionaries’ knowledge of Islam.5 However, the initiative received very contrasting reactions from the ecclesiastical hierarchies since, although it was organised by two congregations of the Roman Curia, it did not enjoy the full support of the Vatican. The Secretariat of State – the entity that is the motor behind the Holy See’s political and diplomatic activity – was convinced that European governments, given the delicate geopolitical scenario in 1939, were keen to maintain good relations with the Muslim populations in their colonial dominions. It was feared therefore that Tisserant’s project – a capillary collection of information from the apostolic vicariates in mission lands – could lead to confidential information on the activities of the Catholic Church in non-­ European countries being leaked, which would expose the Vatican to the risk of appearing hostile towards Islam. Secretary of State, Luigi Maglione, replied to Tisserant that the prelates attached to the Sacred Congregation for the Oriental Churches to whom the questionnaire had been sent, however “excellent” they were, “could not ensure that others in their circle will observe the rigorous and absolute secrecy that is necessary to avoid those reactions that [Tisserant himself] rightly fears and wants to avoid”, and added: The reactions produced by the knowledge of the questionnaire could also occur outside the territory in question; and, while today almost all European governments are busy ingratiating themselves with Muslims, such knowledge would arouse a general resentment towards the Holy See, of which the most immediate but also the most serious consequence would be a decrease in the freedom [of Catholics in Arab countries].6 Cardinal Maglione’s response had been anticipated by an intense exchange of views within Vatican diplomacy that underlined both the danger and the futility of Tisserant’s project. Msgr. Domenico Tardini, secretary of the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, responsible for relations between the Church, States, and international organisations, described the initiative on Islam as “a fuse that they want to throw in the

26  The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa gunpowder”.7 Similarly, an internal note of the Secretariat of State, which can be attributed to Cardinal Maglione himself or to a member of his entourage, mocked the claimed secrecy of a correspondence with hundreds of prelates around the world and the reliability of the opinions of the missionary clergy, which was internally very divided on the attitude to take towards Muslim proselytism: Although the Sacred Oriental Congregation recommends that missionary prelates maintain secrecy, I find this absurd. There are hundreds of prelates, some of whom have the prudence of a … missionary. […] Lastly, I would have little confidence in the information provided by the missionaries: some will certainly say that nothing can be done; others will assure that things are going in the best possible way, etc. The extremely long detailed questionnaire will therefore be practically useless and dangerous.8 The Secretariat of State tried to induce Tisserant to scale down his project and to limit the survey only to the opinion of the apostolic bishops and vicars, without involving the vast network of missions. The opinions of the bishops consulted confirmed there was widespread anxiety within the Church about the Islamic phenomenon. The opinions coming from North Africa, in particular from the diocese of Oran and the archdiocese of Rabat, considered Islam almost exclusively from a political and social point of view, while downplaying it in terms of transcendent faith and religious ethics. In his report, the Bishop of Oran, Léon-Auguste Durand, wrote that Islam was not “a religion [but] a Social State […] which lays down rules governing Muslims in all their economic, legal and political relations. A Muslim cannot escape from this Social State under penalty of starvation”. Durand criticised the French State for allowing the establishment of madrasas – the Koranic schools where religious, theological, and legal teaching based on the Koran was permitted – in the colonies. In his opinion, this encouraged among “fervent Muslims” the spread of “pan-Islamism”, i.e. the unification of all Muslim peoples at religious level, described as a growing phenomenon alongside “pan-Arabism”, the political union of Islamic countries advocated by Egypt in all the Maghreb countries. The bishop also spoke of two new emerging categories of Arab intellectuals: “modernists” critical of the Koranic prescriptions they considered inconsistent with the demands of modernisation in North Africa who supported a “Muslim nationalism consisting of the establishment of autonomous Muslim States”, such as a future “Algerian nation”, and “atheist free thinkers” attracted by Marxist materialism and an internationalist approach to political problems.9 Similarly, the Apostolic Vicar of Morocco, Msgr. Henry Vielle, raised the problem of the difficult relations between Catholics and the Islamic world. Firstly, he ascribed it not only to the “spread of xenophobic nationalism” in the Arab world, but also to “an increasingly pronounced chasm between

The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa 27 French society and the indigenous society, as there are no longer any official relations between them other than those of an economic nature”. According to Msgr. Henry Vielle, the nationalist upheaval, which he traced back to the protests against the so-called Berber Dahir of 1930 – a decree discriminating against the Berber tribes perceived by the Moroccan people as an attack by the colonial power on their national unity – was to blame for the failed “attempts at evangelisation”. He also imputed the extreme complexity, in the Muslim context, of the question of individual conversions, which would have deserved “a long and delicate task of social and moral legal transformation” by the French authorities.10 The analysis and processing of the results of the survey carried out by the Conference on Islamic Matters, the study commission set up by Tisserant, immediately revealed two different schools of thought regarding the concrete approach of the Catholic Church to the Islamic question. On one hand, there were those who considered it necessary, first and foremost, to carry out an intellectual activity of study and understanding of Islam, while on the other there were those who wished for the resumption of an active intervention of the Christian apostolate in Muslim countries (Fouilloux, 2011: 343–344). The outbreak of the Second World War, however, seemed to offer the Catholic Church the opportunity to find an institutional solution, so to speak from above, to the Islamic question and the problem of strengthening its missionary presence in the North African colonies. The German invasion of France, the signing of the armistice on 22 June 1940 between the occupying army and Marshal Philippe Pétain, the collapse of the Third Republic and the birth of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime, the exile of General Charles de Gaulle in London, and the establishment of France libre (Free France) alongside the Allies created a completely new scenario. The Catholic hierarchies, who deemed France’s military defeat in June 1940 as the epiphenomenon of a moral defeat caused by the corrupting principles of the Third Republic, above all secularism, welcomed the official ideology of the regime. In fact, they considered the Révolution nationale based on three pillars – Work, Family, and Fatherland – consistent with the Catholic values of the preservation of religion and tradition (Marrus, Paxton, 1981: 197–198). Especially in the field of education, which the leaders of the Catholic Church had always considered of strategic importance, the Vichy legislation showed that it intended to repeal the strictly secular education laws of the Third Republic (Déloye, 1994). In fact, the regime granted considerable financial aid to Catholic education, 400 million francs in 1941–1942, 471 million in 1942–1943, and 380 million in 1943–1944, not only for primary and secondary education but also for the Instituts catholiques (the Catholic universities in Paris, Angers, Lille, and Lyon), considered to be “of public utility” (Duquesne, 1996: 107–108).

28  The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa Directive 414, supplemented by the law of 6 January 1941, once again made teaching Christian values and duties towards God compulsory in primary education, and at the beginning of the same year, under the decree of the Minister of Education Jacques Chevalier of 23 February 1941, parish priests were authorised to teach catechism in State schools for a few weeks (Singer, 2004: 49). Although Chevalier’s successor as Minister of Education, Jérôme Carcopino, eliminated the reference to “duties towards God”, the teaching of the lives of the saints and of the “great Christian spiritual values” was still obligatory, since, as stated in Paul Foulquié’s school manual, Cours de Morale pour les élèves de l’Ecole Primaire Supérieure, éd. des écoles collèges, 1941, “the more a Frenchman is Christian the more French he is”, particularly in terms of subjective morals based on the value of the family and the indissolubility of marriage (Déloye, 1994: 371). The Vichy government transferred to the French colonial territories in Africa all its ideological paraphernalia that was antithetical to democracy and liberalism and aimed at building an authoritarian society, culturally heir to the main historical currents of the French reactionary right, namely monarchism, Bonapartism, Maurrassian-style integral nationalism, and anti-Semitic, anti-Masonic, and corporatist clericalism (Rousso, 1990; Guillon, 1992). Pétain’s regime, with its rejection of the idea of natural equality between men and its elitist and hierarchical message lent itself perfectly to legitimising the structural discrimination in colonial society and ended up gaining an easy consensus among the advocates of the uncompromising defence of French domination overseas. The Church in North Africa reacted favourably to the new regime and through the words of the Primate of Africa, Archbishop Charles-Albert Gounot of Carthage, hailed Pétain as “a revered head of the French State, and a humble and great servant of God and his country” (cited in La Barbera, 2004: 294). In particular, the Algerian Episcopate considered the law promulgated in Vichy on the dissolution of secret societies (13 August 1940) as a severe blow to Freemasonry that they held responsible for the alleged anti-clerical orientation of the old officials of the Third Republic. The latter, in fact, were divested by Pétain’s local representative, the Governor General of Algeria Admiral Jean-Marie Charles Abrial, supported by Maxime Weygand, Minister of National Defence until July 1940 and a fundamentalist Catholic (Cantier, Jennings, 2004: 69–70ss). The Bishop of Oran, Msgr. Durand, in his pastoral pronouncements of 1940–1941, expressed his support for the National Revolution, which was called upon to thwart the false principles of the Enlightenment philosophy, which in his view had always threatened the unity of France under the “damaging influence of the Judeo-Masonic forces”, in the name of the “hateful class struggle” (cited in Cantier, Jennings, 2004: 268).

The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa 29 From the date of the armistice with the Germans, the Archbishop of Algiers Leynaud himself, in line with the traditional Catholic teaching of submission to the constituted power, reiterated in his discourses that obedience to the government was a duty. He also projected onto the figure of Pétain the aura of the “man of Providence” who not only embodied legitimate authority but also acted as an instrument of divine will. On 22 June 1940, Msgr. Leynaud asked the Algerian population to put their trust for the future “in those to whom Providence has granted the power to steer the destiny of the motherland in danger”. On the following 25 June, the day of “national mourning” for the nation’s defeat, he proclaimed that it was the duty of all citizens “to submit themselves to those who have the formidable responsibility of governing, and to rally around them with discipline and trust” (cited ibid: 266). Leynaud continued to praise Pétain and in a pastoral letter written in March 1942 spoke of “Marshal Pétain whom divine Providence sent to France to encourage and raise her up” (cited in Aouate, 1984: 166). The application in the colonies of the anti-Semitic measures of the Vichy regime, such as that of 22 July 1940 that revised the law on naturalisation and deprived 15,000 Jews of their French citizenship, and that of 4 October on the “foreign citizens of the Jewish race” interned in “special camps”, eventually led to the dissent of the episcopal hierarchies. Their dissent, however, was limited to gestures of private solidarity towards the persecuted or very discreet attempts at moral persuasion with the authorities of the regime and never translated into any form of open condemnation (Aouate, 1984: 167). On the other hand, the government’s decision to continue to pay the Church of Algeria and representatives of other religions the allowances they had been receiving since 1907, in spite of the 1905 law separating the State and the Church, sanctioned the recognition of the role played by the local clergy in Frenchifying the Algerian population. The precise purpose of these allowances was in fact to prevent the Algerian Church from being forced to resort to foreign priests who were culturally independent of the French motherland, due to a lack of financial resources (Achi, 2004). In reality, the Algerian bishops’ praise of Marshal Pétain as an instrument of a providential plan for the good of the homeland like many other declarations of the European Episcopate in that period11 was part of the vision of the relationship between religion and politics prevailing at the time among the ecclesiastical hierarchies. They considered the authoritarian Mediterranean regimes a bulwark to defend the faith against the errors of modern thought (from liberalism to atheistic materialism), according to an apologetic pattern that can be traced back to Pius XI’s famous speech of 13 February 1929. In fact, after the Concordat between the Fascist regime and the Holy See was signed in Italy, the pope celebrated the person of Mussolini as a “man of Providence”, finally free from the “worries of the liberal school of thought” and its “ugly and deformed” legal “fetishes”, i.e. the laws separating Church and State.12

30  The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa As in the case of Pius XI’s pontificate, Pius XII’s Church also had an ambivalent relationship with the right-wing regimes of southern Europe. This was particularly so as regards Franco’s Spain (Sergio, 2021), where the civil war had been experienced by the majority of Catholics as an anti-communist “crusade”, and Portugal, where Catholicism was a founding element of the Estado novo, the ideology of António Salazar’s dictatorship. For the Catholic Church, the Portuguese regime was the model par excellence of institutional cooperation among the State, local episcopates, and missions in the colonial scenario. The Catholic missions had already been defined in the 1933 Portuguese Constitution as “instruments of civilisation” in the colonies and, on this assumption, the “Missionary Agreement” of May 1940, annexed to the concordat signed between the Holy See and the Salazarist dictatorship, bestowed on the Portuguese clergy in Africa a series of economic privileges and prerogatives. These included the monopoly of education, with the objective of both teaching the Portuguese language and transmitting the country’s culture (and therefore the culture of the white elites) and the formation of a pool of rural labourers and small artisans useful for the development of the corporate economy of the motherland (Pinto, 1996). It was therefore a missionary model of an unequivocal colonial nature, yet one to which in the encyclical Saeculo Exeunte Octavo of June 1940, promulgated on the 8th centenary of the foundation of Portugal, Pius XII attributed great value, recognising the work of Portuguese penetration into overseas territories as the inspiration for any new missionary vocation.13 Vatican documents show that in 1941 the Holy See tried to export this missionary model also to French Africa, in the firm belief that the political scenario represented by the Vichy regime was favourable to a repetition of the Portuguese experience, with Marshal Pétain acting as a sort of new Salazar. In January 1941, on behalf of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide, Father Calliste Lopinot submitted “a comparative study of the Missionary Agreement concluded on 7 May 1940 between the Holy See and the Portuguese Republic on the one hand and the legislation of the French colonies on the other” to the French ambassador to the Holy See, Léon Bérard. The study served to show the Vichy government the benefits that the adoption of a similar institutional cooperation pact aimed, in particular, at strengthening the educational role of the Church in the colonial school system would bring. The letter referred to an earlier intervention by Cardinal Gerlier to Pétain who had “reiterated the need to remove the obstacles opposing the renewal of France, especially with regard to the education of youth in free schools”. It also mentioned the widespread “impression” in the Church “that the present government is motivated by the best intentions and that thanks to the complete freedom of action they are enjoying, all Catholic initiatives are advancing admirably”.14 In February, after the introduction of the decrees on compulsory religious education and the funding of public schools in the form of a subsidy from

The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa 31 the local authorities, Propaganda Fide and the Secretariat of State drafted a letter to submit to the Vichy government through the French Embassy to the Holy See. In the letter, they asked that the educational prerogatives of the Catholic Church already established in France be extended to the colonies, and that a missionary agreement on the Portuguese model be drawn up. The purpose of the latter was above all to authorise ecclesiastical superiors without the need for State authorisation to open alongside public schools, “écoles de brousse”, i.e. rural village schools and catechism schools, not only for learning the rudiments of religion but also grammar and arithmetic. The argumentation of the Vatican document insisted on missionary action “imbued with pure patriotism” being coherent with “the current head of the French government’s programme of renewal”. It also underlined the instrumentality of Catholic education to colonial governance since “missionary schools are the best places to mould subjects who are loyal to metropolitan France, because they strongly instil the virtues and customs which are at the basis of solid families and indigenous societies engaged in a peaceful collaboration with the colonial government”.15 Propaganda Fide was confident that an agreement between the Vichy government and the Church would be of a “hand in hand” nature. It therefore emphasised the benefits of Catholic teaching from the colonial point of view, that is, the creation, among African subjects, of a climate of social cohesion and spontaneous obedience to authority, so as to neutralise the danger that, by becoming “civilised”, that is, by acquiring knowledge, the natives might develop political ideas antagonistic to French rule. The document reads: Your Excellency [Ambassador Bérard] sees the immense advantage that a frank, loyal and at the same time broad collaboration could bring to the common work of recuperating the indigenous peoples. Better than anyone else, you also know how important it is that education, even the most elementary, be based on the principles of Christian humanism. Seeing the metropolitan government and the missions working together hand in hand, will give a better impression and produce stronger results in native society. The subjects of overseas France will understand that becoming civilised does not mean separating themselves [from the French culture], and when they realise they are no longer being offered two different, divergent and sometimes even hostile cultures, they will only have more courage to collaborate with us and more trust to let themselves be guided.16 In this perspective, only Catholicism was able to play a role in the colonies in safeguarding European “civilisation”, even in the sub-Saharan region, where the Church acted in support of the “civilising nation” in the education of peoples “still in swaddling clothes”, and easy prey to Islamic proselytism that unbridled was spreading from North Africa. After a long

32  The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa negative description of “Mohammedanism”, discredited on account of its “extremely limited dogmatic knowledge” and its “broad and loose moral concepts […] very tolerant towards local superstitions and pagan customs”, Propaganda Fide spoke of the manipulative persuasion of Islamic preaching that “in a quarter of an hour” was capable of inculcating its message “into the most simplistic minds”, and the “tenacity” with which it “guards, chains and defends its neophytes”.17 The Vatican document then added: A black Islamised village is a village impervious to Christian evangelisation. It is lost to civilisation as we understand it. It can also be said to be lost to the civilisation that metropolitan France seeks to penetrate deeply and generously into the native masses. Testimonies abound, in fact, to show, through tangible facts, that Islamisation raises the blacks thus conquered against all European influence. […] Certainly the Church has never asked missionaries to work directly in the service of any colonial power; they are there but as ambassadors of Christ and pioneers of the Gospel; but who does not know how much the mere fact of Christianising a people still in its infancy contributes greatly to facilitating the task of the civilising nation? Are not the best auxiliaries of a guardian or father those who endeavour to inculcate in their children the principles of the Decalogue, that is, of Catholic dogma and morality? We know that Marshal Pétain’s government is inspired by these sentiments and in the light of his recent reforms in the field of education in France, we dare to hope that Your Excellency will have no difficulty in persuading him to look deeper into this problem and to change the attitude of the colonial administrations towards Islam.18 The Vatican’s request to export the colonial model of Salazar’s dictatorship to French overseas possessions, within the framework of the Vichy regime, was motivated by a harsh criticism of the African policy of the Third Republic which, by authorising the opening of mosques and Koranic schools, had pursued a non-confrontational, or even protective, strategy towards Islam. According to Propaganda Fide, Pétain’s regime had to “put a complete end to the tactic of favouring a religion [Islam] that imperceptibly, but undoubtedly, creates a hostile society in colonial society, to disintegrate it in a certain sense and to prepare for a future of strife and unrest, for which above all yesterday’s administrators would take full responsibility”.19 In its letter to the French Embassy to the Holy See, Propaganda Fide enclosed a detailed analysis of the benefits that the Portuguese model would bring to French Africa, concluding that: The Missionary Agreement between the Holy See and the Portuguese Republic shows what freedoms are necessary for the fruitful exercise of the apostolate and claimed for this purpose by the Church. What

The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa 33 Portugal has given, France, ‘the eldest daughter of the Church’, will not refuse. On the contrary, at this time when one is trying to make amends for all the faults in our system of government, also faults committed by civilising our colonies will have to be repaired.20 Ultimately, the congregation in charge of the evangelisation of peoples, in support of its requests, stressed the need to uphold Catholicism as a counterweight to Islam and suggested that the French government recognise that Catholics were entitled to a “Christian Statute” with the same legal value as the statut coranique and statut païen coutumier. A passage in the preparatory material for the draft letter reads: It is not only a question of the good of the Church, but also, if Your Excellency [the ambassador] allows me to say so, of the good of the State, because the education our missions give forms good citizens, whereas the preference given so far to the spread of Islamism will prepare an indigenous nationalist bloc.21 The final letter, signed by the Prefect of the Congregation of Propaganda Fide, Cardinal Pietro Fumasoni Biondi, was indeed sent to the French Embassy to the Holy See,22 but only after being analysed and corrected by the Secretary of State, Cardinal Luigi Maglione, demonstrating that Propaganda Fide was acting on behalf of the Vatican. On 27 March 1941, Maglione wrote to Pietro Fumasoni Biondi that he had carefully examined the question concerning the situation of the Catholic missions in the French colonies and that he considered that the letter prepared for the French ambassador set out “in a complete, clear and delicate way the justified requests, which are likely to make the missionary apostolate more profitable”.23 The Secretary of State, however, asked for even greater emphasis to be placed on the “preference systematically given by the French government to Islamism (the main cause of the inconveniences complained of)” and suggested a change in the sentence concerning “the spread of Islamism [which] will prepare an indigenous nationalist bloc”. According to Cardinal Maglione, this sentence “echoes a more than documented observation and hints at a matter that will not leave the French government indifferent. However, it does not seem to be entirely suitable in a document of the Holy See, which naturally looks at the problems connected with indigenous nationalism with different eyes than those of the French government. The phrase could therefore be replaced with a less explicit one”, namely that Islam “roused the natives against any European influence”.24 Ambassador Bérard replied immediately on 9 April, reassuring the Vatican that he had approached the French government in the hope of contributing to the progress of France, “European civilisation” and the “future of evangelical expansion”.25

34  The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa At the end of May, Bérard was able to inform the Vatican that Admiral Charles Platon, Secretary of State for the Colonies, was ready to establish by decree the extension of measures favourable to Catholic teaching in overseas schools in line with what had already been adopted in metropolitan France. With regard to the possible adoption of a Christian Statute, analogous to the Koranic Statute and the customary statute, he specified that these statutes had no real legal value but were merely “local traditions of which progressive evolution the government seeks to encourage”. The government, in any case, would be taking the greatest interest in what Propaganda Fide reported about the spread of Islam.26 In his reply of June 1941, Cardinal Fumasoni Biondi expressed his great appreciation of the French government’s commitment to education policy in the colonies but did not hide his disappointment at the evasive way in which the interlocutor had treated the Muslim question. The Prefect of Propaganda Fide acknowledged that for Muslims “there is no juridical statute, in the strict sense of a codified book”, although the Koran is “considered by all Muslim Islamic scholars to be a true civil code”. He went on to say that in his opinion this did not demonstrate the futility of a “Christian Statute”, necessary when Catholics in a predominantly Islamic or “pagan” context, find themselves forced, against their will, to observe a local custom that “opposes the religious law that governs their conscience”.27

The Catholic Church and France libre in North Africa: a problematic relationship The debate between the Holy See and the Vichy regime concerning the colonial system and the adoption of a missionary statute had to be interrupted due to developments in the war. In the summer of 1942, as is well known, the Anglo-American Chain of Command began planning Operation Torch, a large-scale landing of troops in North Africa, in a territory under the Vichy government which, although not belligerent, maintained a favourable attitude towards the Axis powers. The French army stationed in North Africa, the so-called Armée d’Afrique, under the command of General Alphonse Juin, although lacking modern equipment, was formed of numerous units that were still efficient and combat ready. In planning the operation, the Allied military strategists therefore had to take into account the political situation on the ground, rendered complex not only by the presence of Marshal Pétain’s loyalists, allegiant to the Axis powers, but also by the rivalry between the opposition groups, i.e. the French National Committee (Comité national français) of France libre organised by de Gaulle that had joined forces with the Resistance, and the group close to General Henri Giraud who supported the ideas of the National Revolution but had been disappointed by the pro-Nazi evolution of Vichy and was therefore eager to return to fighting the Germans. “Giraudism”,

The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa 35 according to the definition of Resistance historian Henri Michel, was therefore a front that emerged from a sort of secession from Pétainism, and which “insinuated itself like a wedge between Vichy and Gaullism” preferring to rely on American aid and an army organised on national soil and not one precariously installed abroad like that of France libre (Michel, 1962: 445–459). The American commanders offered Henri Giraud the leadership of the liberation movement in North Africa in support of the allied manoeuvres that included three Anglo-American landings at Casablanca in Morocco, at Algiers, and at Oran. Operation Torch, which began on 8 November 1942 with the Algiers landing, met with little resistance from French troops who were either captured by the Anglo-Americans or immediately surrendered and joined the Allied forces. The commander-in-chief of the Vichy forces François Darlan himself ordered all French forces in North Africa to cease resistance to the allies and to cooperate. On 10 November, a telegram from Vichy dismissed Darlan who, in the meantime, under pressure from the Americans, assumed the leadership of a new command organisation under Allied control, with the title of High Commissioner for France in Africa (Cantier, 2002: 368–369). On learning of Darlan’s agreement with the Allies, Adolf Hitler immediately ordered the occupation of Vichy France and sent troops into Tunisia. When Darlan was assassinated six weeks later, Giraud ended up taking over as High Commissioner. The new French government in North Africa gradually became active in the war effort alongside the Allies and in June 1943, Giraud agreed to form the French Committee for National Liberation (CFLN) in Algiers along with de Gaulle. The formation of the CFLN marked a decisive turning point because de Gaulle, unlike Giraud, represented a clear break with the Vichy regime, whose officials, still serving in the ranks of the administration, were in fact dismissed. In November 1943, de Gaulle became the sole head of the CFLN and de jure also the head of the French government, recognised as such by the United States and Britain. As soon as the CFLN was established in Algiers, in response to a request from General Giraud, the Holy See entrusted Archbishop Leynaud with the role of intermediary between the new power and the Vatican, above all to monitor what was happening to the Axis POWs (the German and Italian soldiers).28 Initially, de Gaulle himself tried to open a diplomatic channel between France on the side of the Allies and the Vatican. On 15 February 1942, he instructed René Massigli, Commissioner for Foreign Affairs of the French National Committee in London, to contact Cardinal Eugène Tisserant so that he could unofficially identify a French prelate who was resident in the Vatican and willing to guarantee communications between the Holy See and France libre. The objective was to “preserve the great Christian tradition that France has always wanted to maintain in its Empire” and to

36  The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa “safeguard Catholic interests in the colonies” over which the Vichy had just lost control.29 However, this initiative was short lived and relations between de Gaulle and the Church of Pius XII, between the CFLN in Algiers and Archbishop Leynaud, remained rather tense for a long time. This occurred firstly because the Episcopate in North Africa, despite the geopolitical changes brought about by Operation Torch, remained fundamentally loyal to Pétain’s regime, considered the only legitimate power, and secondly because the political experiment of the Resistance, in which anti-German patriots, communists, and progressive Catholics cooperated, aroused fear and distrust in the local ecclesiastical hierarchies. In the autumn of 1943, Archbishop Leynaud informed the Holy See that he was concerned because Guy Menant, a member of the Algiers Consultative Assembly and a former member of the Christian-inspired Parti démocrate populaire, had advocated the need for the various parties of the French Resistance to collaborate with the communists who, in the common struggle against the Nazi invader, had shown themselves to be “no less fervent nor less deserving”. In the same dispatch, the Archbishop also mentioned that the clandestine radio station France catholique “directed by ‘resistant’ priests” had “raised a cry of alarm by asserting that the Church in France would be heading towards schism or heresy if it did not review its position in the face of the current national crisis. Too many Catholic leaders are still too conformist towards Vichy and collaborationists [with the Germans] and are losing the endorsement of the French population and of the majority of the clergy who remain close to the ‘resistant’ population. It is necessary for the [ecclesiastical] hierarchy in France to distance itself once and for all from the reactionary powers and to face up to the serious and urgent social problems which will arise from now on”.30 The Archbishop of Algiers considered such radio interventions inappropriate and “despite repeated invitations” from Radio Algiers refused to intervene on behalf of the Allies via its microphones and speak to the French listeners about how the Church in France had suffered during the war, because it seemed “inadvisable to go down this path”.31 Msgr. Leynaud was against propaganda openly in favour of the collaboration of the Catholic world with the Resistance forces, including the communists, aimed at provoking a definitive break with the Vichy government. In fact, he clashed with Msgr. Jules Hincky, Curate Deacon of Colmar, who had taken refuge in Africa in 1939, and who at de Gaulle’s request, but without the consent of the Archbishop’s curia, had joined the new authorities in Algiers, along with communist exponents. Leynaud informed the Secretariat of State of this with great disappointment, complaining that without consulting him, Hincky had accepted both the position of president of the Alsace-Lorraine Social Commission, responsible for the formulation of the measures necessary for the future re-annexation of these cross-border regions to French territory, and vice-president of the Commission for Education and Culture. The Archbishop, who considered

The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa 37 such responsibilities to be beyond Hincky’s capabilities, wrote to Cardinal Maglione saying, “I believed I had to prevent him from doing so, for fear that he would compromise the Church, at a time when I do not cease to strongly advise my clergy to act with extreme prudence. He obeyed me only reluctantly and threatened to make known to the authorities the cause of my silence”.32 In the meantime, the problem of the North African bishops’ loyalty to the Vichy regime reached its climax in March 1944 when, as Msgr. Leynaud reported to the Secretariat of State, the Purge Committee set up by France libre launched an investigation against the Archbishop of Rabat, Msgr. Henry Vielle, for his pro-Pétainist discourses.33 On 6 March, the Archbishop of Algiers sent a letter full of affection and solidarity to Msgr. Vielle in which he wrote, “I am surprised, saddened and indignant at the untimely visit [of the Purge Committee] that you have received. I know your profound spirit of faith and high conscientiousness as a bishop make you accept generously and patiently this painful trial, in which I participate very strongly. I do not need to tell you that I am with you with all my heart: frater qui adiuvatur a fratre, quasi civitas firma [a brother who is helped by his brother is as a steadfast city; Solomon, Proverbs, 18,19]”.34 The Archbishop of Algiers even went to the Commissioner of Justice of the French National Liberation Committee, François de Menthon, to firmly declare that “this way of acting” towards Vielle was “offensive” to his episcopal role and his “high mission in Morocco” as well as “awkward and harmful” (“maladroite et nuisible”) for French interests and could even create a state of mind unfavourable to the constituted powers in North Africa.35 In addition to the problems posed by the institutional discontinuity between Vichy and France libre, the Algerian episcopate was disoriented by the social changes that the Resistance had brought about in terms of individual and collective behaviour. An example of this was the mobilisation of women that General de Gaulle had desired since November 1940, when the Corps des Volontaires Françaises (French Women Volunteer Corps) was born in London. It was the original nucleus of the Arme Féminine de l’Armée de Terre, the first group of female soldiers in the French army (Crémieux Brilhac, 1996: 91) and a significant milestone in the construction of female citizenship in France (Capdevila, 2000). Archbishops Leynaud of Algiers, Durand of Oran, and Thiénard of Constantine wrote to de Gaulle severely condemning female mobilisation that in their opinion posed “serious risks for the health of future mothers and the gravest dangers for their morality”. They also pointed out that Catholics would be led to “fear that young girls will return from the [battle] fields with tastes that are no longer in line with the role they are destined to play in the family”.36 The mistrust shown by the Archbishop of Algiers towards the Gaullist movement stemmed directly from the prudent conduct of the Vatican which, despite repeated requests from the French National Liberation Committee,37 not surprisingly still had not appointed its own diplomatic representative to

38  The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa France libre, while the Apostolic Nuncio of the Holy See in France, at the time Msgr. Valerio Valeri, remained accredited to the Vichy government. In the spring of 1944, relations between civil and religious powers in North Africa continued to be problematic, to the extent that, as Leynaud reports in a letter of 16 May to the Secretary of State Cardinal Maglione, de Gaulle himself went to the Archbishopric to reassure the ecclesiastical hierarchies with the promise of having “future projects that would benefit the Church”. He also confirmed the participation in the CFLN of the communist leaders, that is of the controversial priest Hincky and the Dominican Father Joseph Delos, the latter tasked by the Justice Commission with the study of questions of a social, economic, and international nature and of problems relative to education38 from the point of view of Christian doctrine. The co-opting of Catholic priests into the CFLN was a form of indirect pressure by de Gaulle on the Vatican, but it did not have the desired effect. In fact, the Church feared that the General wanted to restore the secular laws of the Third Republic and in doing so would nullify the Catholic prerogatives acquired under Pétain’s regime, in particular its predominant role in the educational system. This theme emerged during de Gaulle’s visit to the Archbishopric, when Leynaud criticised the Commissioner for National Education, René Capitant. The Archbishop of Algiers complained that on the fringe of the congress of the North African Federation of Education and the congress of the Federation of Secular Works of the North, Capitant had declared, on behalf of the French National Liberation Committee, that the subject of education would indeed be reconsidered after the liberation of France and the return to Paris.39 As can be read in a note from the Secretariat of State in July 1944, the Holy See supported the choice of the Archbishop of Algiers to maintain a critical distance from de Gaulle’s administration. It also shared Leynaud’s concerns not only about the inclusion of clerics in the General’s entourage, given “the serious issues awaiting resolution, but also the inclusion in the government of several communist members who are apostles of secularism” in the light of the “campaign waged against the free [Catholic] school in favour of a monopoly of State education”. According to the Secretariat of State, “the reply given by Msgr. Leynaud to General de Gaulle seems appropriate. It is at the very least doubtful in fact that the inclusion of clerics (who are not always the best) in governments such as General de Gaulle’s seems to be at present really benefits the Church. The question of teaching is a very serious one and the government being dilatory in dealing with it is not reassuring”.40 In spite of the scant collaboration with the CFLN on the part of the diocese of Algiers, which at the time was acting as representative of the Holy See in North Africa, de Gaulle did not give up writing to Pius XII. In a message of 29 May delivered to the Vatican through François de Panafieu who was in charge of the mission in Rome, he reiterated his “filial respect” and assured the Pope that when he became president of the provisional

The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa 39 government of the Republic (on the following 3 June), he would commit himself to ensuring that the spiritual interests of the French people would once again be a priority.41 It took Pius XII two weeks to reply to de Gaulle because, in Msgr. Tardini’s opinion, the letter was “to be written carefully” as it dealt with “a very delicate and important matter”.42 In his letter, with an implicit reference to communism, the Pope limited himself to expressing the hope of seeing France safe from social unrest.43 At the same time, however, a new episode contributed to rekindling the tension between de Gaulle’s government and the Holy See. On 14 July 1944, in Rabat cathedral, the Franciscan Father Sylvestre Chauleur celebrated a mass in memory of Philippe Henriot, a minister in the Vichy government, who had been assassinated in Paris on 28 June by Resistance fighters. The Franciscan priest and other Catholic faithful who had attended the funeral ceremony were arrested. When the Bishop of Algiers was received by de Gaulle, he criticised this measure as it had caused the Church serious embarrassment and because it gave rise to fears of religious persecution.44 Despite the friction between the North African episcopate and de Gaulle, the Catholic Church, by adopting its proverbial pragmatism which in the course of its history had enabled it to adapt to changes in the established order, gradually began to distance itself from Pétain. As a result, the Maghreb bishops, although still loyal to the Marshal, avoided compromising too much with the losing side, formed of the Service d’ordre légionnaire, the regime’s political and paramilitary organisation, and the Comité d’unité d’action révolutionnaire (CUAR). In the spring of 1944, in fact, a CUAR representative wrote to the Apostolic Nuncio Valerio Valeri to complain that the Bishop of Carthage, Gounot, had suddenly given up taking the Vichy fighters under his protective wing. Until May 1943, the CUAR wrote, Gounot had “affirmed, with his high authority, the imperative need for obedience to Marshal [Pétain], the head of the French State, and to the only legitimate government of France” and had “agreed to take under his personal protection all our Phalangist comrades who had just been demobilised. This generous and humane gesture had done much to ease the anxiety of the families of these Phalangists. […] Now the fact that Msgr. Gounot appears to have ceased protecting our comrades, combined with the recent declarations of this high prelate concerning former General de Gaulle plus the political position to which he seems to be aligning himself, has greatly shocked all those people in North Africa who have relatives or friends who are currently being threatened”.45 Nuncio Valeri, in reporting to Cardinal Maglione the contents of this letter of protest from the CUAR comrades, described Gounot’s “new attitude” as “quite natural”,46 implying that in the light of the progressive defeat of the Axis forces, a distancing of the Catholics from what Vichy had represented was practically inevitable. Among the ecclesiastical hierarchies of the Vatican, North Africa, and metropolitan France, a greater awareness of the need to adapt to changing

40  The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa times matured, which is also evident in the internal debate on the specific issue of the relationship between the Church and the colonial order in the Maghreb. Evidence of this is the discussion around the initiative taken by “certain Catholic figures belonging to the French colonial world, administrators, traders, industrialists and colonists” to “set up a group of Catholic Action called ‘Colonial Catholic Action’”. The project, debated at the Assembly of Cardinal s and Bishops of France in Paris in October 1944, after a meeting of the general and provincial superiors of the missionary societies under the presidency of the titular Bishop of Kastoria Msgr. Stanislas Courbe, was submitted in November to the attention of Propaganda Fide.47 While approving the project, the congregation noted, however, that the adjective “colonial” now sounded completely out of keeping with the changed scenario in the Mediterranean. According to a note of 12 January 1945: The idea of organising in France – where the collaboration of the Catholic faithful with the hierarchical apostolate has been going on for some time with consoling outcomes – the preparation of distinguished personalities of the French colonial world for Catholic Action in the colonies, seems to S.C. [Sacred Congregation] opportune and, therefore, worthy of support. […] While as regards the name they intend to give the group, Colonial Catholic Action, one wonders whether it would not be more appropriate to replace it with for example Catholic Action in the colonies or something similar, to avoid using an adjective which, especially in the present circumstances, could prove more likely to lead to misunderstandings than to adequately define it.48 To fully understand the subtext of this debate among the leaders of Propaganda Fide on the relationship between mission and colonialism, it is necessary to place it in the historical context marked by the Conference on Colonial Problems organised by the CFLN at the beginning of the previous year in Brazzaville, at the time capital of French Equatorial Africa. The idea of convening a conference on the colonial problem had been launched in July 1943 by France libre’s Commissioner for Colonies René Pleven shortly after his arrival in Algiers. His initiative was supported by the Governor General of French Equatorial Africa (AEF) Félix Eboué, Secretary General of the AEF, Henri Laurentie, and Jeanne Sicard, Pleven’s closest collaborator for almost 20 years and a person who was well aware of the realities of colonisation, who in spite of coming from a wealthy family of tobacco farmers in Oran was considered a liberal pied-noir (Bougeard, 1994: 124). The differing opinions of the members of Pleven’s inner circle gave rise to a debate: while for Eboué the priority was the introduction of greater flexibility into the indigénat system, Laurentie had the more ambitious objective of transforming the colonial empire into “an entity resembling a federation” of member States with equal rights (Bougeard, 1994: 130–131).

The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa 41 Nevertheless, apart from these objectives, the immediate aim of the conference, entrusted to the CFLN by the Algiers Consultative Assembly on 14 January 1944, remained that of reunifying the colonial empire under the leadership of de Gaulle while resisting pressure from the United States which insisted that decisions on the future of the European colonies be submitted to arbitration by an international body (Yacono, 1991: 52). It was therefore urgent to respond to the anti-colonialist demands implicit in the idea of the Trusteeship system developed and applied by the Americans since 1941 with a view to the transition of the European colonies first towards autonomy and then towards the achievement of independence (Chand, 1991). Aware of the importance of economic and military aid from the United States, with the Brazzaville initiative the CFLN wanted to send an unequivocal sign of change to American public opinion, which is why in his opening address at the conference on 30 January 1944, General de Gaulle himself spoke of the “fervent and genuine desire for renewal” that was motivating the authorities of France libre in a perspective of progress, intended “morally and materially” as the possibility of peoples in their homeland to “elevate themselves little by little to the point where they will be capable of participating in the management of their own affairs”.49 The backdrop to de Gaulle’s narrative, however, was still the frequently evoked myth of France’s “civilising mission”, which did not contemplate any right of self-determination for the colonised peoples. In fact, even René Pleven himself, speaking on the same day, hastened to specify that France intended to assume its responsibilities towards the African peoples “without sharing them with any anonymous institution” and that the only people “to be liberated” were the French from the Nazi yoke.50 In Brazzaville, in any event, in the presence of 20 or so senior colonial officials (Valette, 1994: 131) and 9 delegates from the Algiers Consultative Assembly, it was necessary to table “at least a brief outline of the inevitable developments and reforms” to be implemented after the war in the overseas territories of liberated France.51 Drawn up by Laurentie in his General Programme for the conference, supported in full by Pleven and “positively received” by General de Gaulle, the draft proposed an evolution towards federalism and autonomy, albeit still within the French framework, the definition of a new economic policy that would reject forced labour and imperial autarchy, and lastly the development of education. Despite these declarations of intent, the results of the conference were modest and contradictory, as they did not address fundamental problems such as citizenship and the political representation of the indigenous population in local consultative bodies. Although enveloped by the mythical aura of an epoch-making event of radical change, in terms of historical reality the Brazzaville conference revealed all the limitations and contradictions of the New France born of the Resistance. Instead of the message it so wanted to convey, that of “announcing the death of the old colonial regime and heralding

42  The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa the transformation of the Empire” (Ageron, 1988: 351, 369), it simply confirmed its traditional inclination towards assimilation, and its inability to understand the general state of popular dissatisfaction, which, during the war, had ran through the entire colonial society like a karst river. In the Maghreb, this malaise, primarily linked to the economic crisis caused by the conflict, was inevitably directed against the French administration by taking on nationalistic connotations, but it was above all a moral unease resulting from France’s loss of credibility as a colonial power. Muslim society was now firmly convinced of the unstoppable decline of France’s international prestige in the face of the imminent advent of a new world order, such as that advocated by Article 73 of the Atlantic Charter of 14 August 1941 on the self-determination of peoples, destined to mark the demise of the old colonial and imperialist system. In Tunisia, the anti-French opposition was led by the Neo-Destour, the Constitution Party co-founded by Habib Bourguiba (its first Secretary General) on 2 March 1934 with the aim of liberating the Tunisian people from the Protectorate. After the war, during which the Bey of Tunis (of the Husaynid dynasty) had taken an ambiguous stance of collaboration with the Nazis who had occupied Tunisia after November 1942, a period of relative truce began between the French rulers and the local leaders. This period of calm was due among other things to some partial reforms thanks to which a number of Tunisian members of the government became the head of certain ministries, such as that of Social Affairs. At the same time, however, Bourguiba, who was in exile in Egypt, was working to create a trans-national network of Maghrebi nationalism for which the Neo-Destour representation was the reference point of the North African community in Cairo (Bessis, Belhassen, 2012: 150–151). In Morocco, where the then clandestine Istiqlal party was founded in December 1943 in Rabat, independence ideas were voiced in the Independence Manifesto of 11 January 1944. A concrete party programme, the objectives of the Manifesto were the immediate abolition of the Protectorate Treaty, the independence of Morocco and the restoration of Sultan Mohammed Ben Youssef’s authority within the framework of a constitutional monarchy with modern political institutions (Berramdane, 1987: 55–57). This notwithstanding, as in Tunisia in the same period, the French rulers tried to quash the independence fervour by negotiating the implementation of certain reform projects with the local leaders. The most important were in the judicial and educational fields followed by the request of the Sultan, one year after liberation in April 1946, to free the imprisoned nationalist leaders. Meanwhile, however, on 22 March 1945, the Pact of the League of Arab States, which while respecting the sovereignty of individual member States sanctioned the principle of an Arab homeland (‫ الوطن العريب‬al-waṭan al-ʿarabī), which could not fail to have the galvanising effect of reawakening feelings of independence throughout French North Africa, including Algeria, was signed in Cairo.

The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa 43 In Algeria, in fact, the American landing had already sparked a revival of nationalist movements in December 1942, when Admiral Darlan had invited the Muslims of French North Africa to participate actively in the Allied war effort. Ferhat Abbas, the nationalist leader who founded the Union populaire algérienne party in 1938, on behalf of “the representatives of the Algerian Muslims” had replied with a Message aux autorités responsables (Message to the competent authorities) which forcefully reiterated the need for a statute recognising the political autonomy of Algeria and equal civil rights for its indigenous population (Esquer, 1960: 79). The French authorities in Algiers had rebuffed the message, which was also sent to the US military authorities, questioning France’s exclusive competence in the colonial question in North Africa. Following this rejection, 56 Algerian nationalists led by Ferhat Abbas himself signed the Manifesto of the Algerian people on 10 February 1943, which denounced the crimes and injustices of colonial policy and became the founding charter of a new movement, Friends of the Manifesto and Liberty (Ageron, 1969: 92). Officially submitted on 31 March, the Manifesto, which called for fundamental constitutional freedoms and rights such as freedom of the press and association, the right to education and recognition of the Arabic language, was examined by a special commission for Muslim economic and social affairs, set up on 3 April. On 26 May, Ferhat Abbas submitted a further reform to the commission that called for the adoption of a statute and the election of a constituent assembly by universal suffrage at the end of the conflict. While the reform commission was examining the proposals contained in the Manifesto and Plan of 26 May, in June the CFLN appointed General Georges Catroux, a convinced assimilationist and supporter of the French civilising mission in North Africa, as governor of Algeria and State Commissioner for Muslim Affairs. A few months later, Georges Catroux ordered the arrest and internment south of Oran of Ferhat Abbas and Sayah Ab del-Keder, president of the Arab section of the Financial Delegations (a sort of local territorial assembly without legislative power) on charges of “wartime disobedience” (Belmessous, 2013: 196). Catroux’s appointment therefore made it immediately clear that the French authorities would vigorously reject any proposal from Algerian nationalism that could potentially disintegrate the unity of the French Republic, of which Algeria was in their view an integral part. At the same time, de Gaulle, in an attempt to prevent new independence claims, announced a series of measures to extend citizenship to certain categories of indigenous Algerians and strengthen their representation in local assemblies. The Ordinance of 7 March 1944 specified the categories of people who would become French citizens by right, i.e. those who had obtained a primary school leaving certificate, former officers, officials and ex-officials, members of financial assemblies, and people in certain political positions (Belmessous, 2013: 197–198).

44  The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa Although de Gaulle’s measures translated into considerable progress, to the extent that they met with firm opposition from the colonists, they were nevertheless in line with an assimilationist approach that extended the rights of the Algerian population only within the framework of French sovereignty. As a result, Ferhat Abbas, the Ulema, and Messali Hadj, the historical father of Algerian nationalism and founder in 1938 of the Algerian People’s Party (Parti du peuple algérien, PPA), heir to the Étoile nord-africaine, decided to join forces. This was the birth of the Association of Friends of the Freedom Manifesto (AML), of which constitutive pact included the objective of creating an autonomous anti-imperialist Algerian Republic. The new movement, more efficient than the old Algerian parties when it came to staging mass protests and demonstrative actions, soon came under the leadership of the most radical current, the Messalist PPA, which after 1946 was to become the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Freedoms (MTLD) (Aron, Lavagne, Feller, Garnier-Rizet, 1962: 256). On 1 May 1945, during Labour Day celebrations, the major Algerian cities became the theatre of large-scale nationalist demonstrations. On 8 May, day of the victory of the Allied forces in Europe, a violent insurrection broke out near Sétif, which was suppressed within a few days after martial law had been declared. French army units in full fighting trim razed 44 villages to the ground and caused tens of thousands of deaths; the French High Command initially admitted to being responsible for the death of 1500 people, while Algerian nationalists’ estimates spoke of 45,000. The Sétif tragedy was followed by a wave of arrests among the exponents of the Friends of the PPA Manifesto. Released from prison thanks to an amnesty, on 16 March 1946 Ferhat Abbas immediately resumed the programme of the Manifesto and inserted it within the framework of a new political party, the Union Démocratique du Manifeste Algérien (Democratic Union of the Algerian Manifesto, UDMA).

Notes 1 Recueil du Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, edited by Sever Pop, Louvain: Centre International de Dialectologie Générale, 1957, 330, 334, 335, 337. 2 Documents cited in Oissila Saaïdia, Clercs catholiques et oulémas sunnites dans la première moitié du XXe siècle. Discours croisés, Paris: Paul Geuthner, 2004, 83–96, specially 84, 95. 3 Ibid., 87. 4 Archivio Storico della Segreteria di Stato – Sezione per i Rapporti con gli Stati (Historical Archives of the Section for the Relations with the States of the Secretariat of State ASRS), Fondo Sacra Congregazione degli Affari Ecclesiastici Straordinari (Archives of the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, henceforth AA. EE. SS.), Stati ecclesiastici, Pos. 593, fasc. 2–11, letter from Cardinal Eugène Tisserant to His Eminence the Secretary of State Cardinal Luigi Maglione, 5 May 1939, f. 2. 5 AA. EE. SS., Stati ecclesiastici, Pos. 593, fasc. 2–11, Questionnaire ff. 3–5. 6 AA. EE. SS., Stati ecclesiastici, Pos. 593, fasc. 2–11, Cardinal Luigi Maglione to Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, 24 May 1939, ff. 6–6v.

The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa 45

7 AA. EE. SS., Stati ecclesiastici, Pos. 593, fasc. 2–11, opinion of Msgr. Domenico Tardini, 16 May 1939, ff. 7–7v. 8 AA. EE. SS., Stati ecclesiastici, Pos. 593, fasc. 2–11, undated archive autograph attached to the letter from Cardinal Luigi Maglione to Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, 24 May 1939, f. 7. 9 AA. EE. SS., Stati ecclesiastici, Pos. 593, fasc. 12–79, Reply of the bishop of Orano Msgr Léon-Auguste-Marie-Joseph Durand, 29 June 1939, ff. 27–29. 10 AA. EE. SS., Stati ecclesiastici, Pos. 593, fasc. 80–98, Reply of the apostolic vicar of French Morocco Msgr. Henry Vielle, 12 March 1939, ff. 92–98. 11 On relations between the European episcopate and fascism, see the critical reflections of Alcide De Gasperi in Marialuisa Lucia Sergio, L’inquilino scomodo: De Gasperi in Vaticano. La democrazia e la Chiesa, in Alcide De Gasperi, Diario (1930–1943), edited by ML Sergio, Bologna: il Mulino, 2018, 13–109. 12 Pius XI, Ai professori ed alunni dell’Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, in Discorsi di Pio XI, edited by Domenico Bertetto, vol. II, Torino: SEI, 1960, 17–18. 13 Pius XII, Epistola enciclica Saeculo exeunte octavo a Lusitania proprii iuris facta, Acta Apostolicæ Sedis (henceforth AAS) 32(1940), 249–260. 14 Archivio Storico di Propaganda Fide (Propaganda Fide Historical Archives, henceforth ACPF), NS, vol. 1498, Father Calliste Lopinot O.F.M., chief advisor of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide to the ambassador of France Léon Bérard, 24 January 1941, ff. 676–677. 15 ACPF, NS, vol. 1498, Draft letter to be addressed to Ambassador Léon Bérard, ff. 680–681, attached to the letter sent by Father Albert Perbal O.M.I to Propaganda Fide, 12 February 1941, f. 679. 16 Ibid., f. 682. 17 Ibid., f. 683. 18 Ibid., ff. 687–688 19 Ibid., f. 686. 20 ACPF, NS, vol. 1498, Calliste Lopinot O.F.M., chief advisor of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide, Missionary Agreement in the Portuguese colonies and legislation in the French colonies, ff. 689–706, here f. 706. 21 ACPF, NS, vol. 1498, 17 February 1941, ff. 667r–673. 22 ACPF, NS, vol. 1498, Cardinal Luigi Maglione to His Excellency the French Ambassador to the Holy See Léon Bérard, 8 April 1941, ff. 674–675. 23 ACPF, NS, vol. 1498, Cardinal Luigi Maglione to the prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide Cardinal Pietro Fumasoni Biondi, 27 March 1941, f. 664. 24 ACPF, NS, vol. 1498, f. 666, Attached to Cardinal Maglione’s letter, 27 March 1941. 25 ACPF, NS, vol. 1498, ff. 709r–NS, vol. 1498, Léon Bérard to Cardinal Pietro Fumasoni Biondi, April 9, 1941, ff. 709v–709r. 26 ACPF, NS, vol. 1498, Léon Bérard to Msgr. Celso Costantini, Propaganda Fide secretary, 28 May 1941, ff. 712–713v. 27 ACPF, NS, vol. 1498, of the prefect of Propaganda Fide Cardinal Pietro Fumasoni Biondi and the Secretary Msgr. Celso Costantini to Bérard, 10 June 1941, reply, ff. 714r–715r. 28 Actes et documents du Saint-Siège relatifs à la seconde guerre mondiale (henceforth ADSS), vol. 7, Le Saint-Siège et la guerre mondiale, novembre 1942 - décembre 1943, Cardinal Maglione to the Archbishop of Algiers Msgr. Leynaud, 7 June 1943, Vatican City, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1973, 406–407. 29 Ibid, vol. 7, 231–232. 30 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part I, France, Pos. 941, fasc. 256–324 (1940–1944), fasc. 256–324, Msgr. Augustin-Fernand Leynaud to the Secretary of State Cardinal Luigi Maglione, 28/29 November1943, ff. 305–305v.

46  The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa 31 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part I, France, Pos. 941, fasc. 256–324 (1940–1944), Msgr. Augustin-Fernand Leynaud to Cardinal Luigi Maglione, 19 August 1943, f. 291. 32 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part I, France, Pos. 941, fasc. 256–324 (1940–1944), Msgr. Augustin-Fernand Leynaud to Luigi Maglione, 14 August 1943, ff. 293–295. 33 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part I, France, Pos. 989, fasc. 2–255, Msgr. Augustin-Fernand Leynaud to Luigi Maglione, 22 March 1944, ff. 9–10. 34 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part I, France, Pos. 989, fasc. 2–255, 6 March 1944, f. 6. 35 Ibid. 36 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part I, France, Pos. 989, fasc. 2–255, Leynaud, Durand and Thiénard to de Gaulle, 26 February 1944, f. 8. 37 On 17 November 1943, René Massigli again had to write to Msgr. Leynaud to reiterate that Free France “the strongest desire to establish direct relations with the Holy See as soon as the situation [of the war] in Rome allows it”; in ADSS, vol. 7, cit., Mr. Massigli all’arcivescovo di Algeri Leynaud, 17 November 1943, 708. 38 ADSS, Le Saint-Siège et la Guerre Mondiale, janvier 1944 -mai 1945, vol. 11, Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1981: Archbishop of Algiers Msgr. Leynaud to Cardinal Luigi Maglione, 16 May 1944, 310–313. 39 Ibid., ff. 311–312. 40 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part I, France, Pos. 941, fasc. 256–324, Note from the Secretariat of State, 31 July 1944, Relazione di Mgr. Arcivescovo di Algeri sulla situazione in Algeria (Report by Archbishop of Algiers on the situation in Algeria), f. 322. 41 ADSS, vol. 11, cit., General de Gaulle to Pope Pius XII, Algiers, 29 May 1944, 336–337. 42 Ibid., Note of Msgr. Tardini, Vatican, 5–11 June 1944, 337. 43 Ibid, Pope Pius XII to General de Gaulle, Vatican, 15 June 1944, 400–401. On 30 June, de Gaulle, who had been visiting the newly liberated Rome since the beginning of the month, was received by Pius XII who reiterated his anguish at the expansion of communism and the action of the Soviets in Poland which threatened Central Europe; see. Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de guerre – L’Unité: 1942–1944, vol. II, Paris, Plon, 1956, 233–234. 44 ADSS, vol. 11, cit., Msgr. Leynaud to Cardinal Maglione, Algiers, 4 August 1944, 484–484. 45 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part I, France, Pos. 959, fasc. 10–13, letter from Jean Scherb to Nuncio Msgr. Valerio Valeri, ff. 12–12v. 46 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part I, France, Pos. 959, fasc. 10–13, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Valerio Valeri to Cardinal Luigi Maglione, 26 May 1944, f. 11. 47 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part I, France, Pos. 964, fasc. 2–10, letter from Msgr. Henri Alexandre Chappoulie to Msgr. Celso Costantini, 8 November 1944, f. 4. 48 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part I, France, Pos. 964, fasc. 2–10, note dated 12 January 1945 and signed by Sigismondi [Msgr. Pietro Sigismondi, the future Secretary of Propaganda Fide], f. 9. 49 Discours prononcé par le Général de Gaulle, Président du Comité Français de la Libération Nationale à l’ouverture de la Conférence Africaine Française le 30 janvier 1944. In Raymond-Marin Lemesle, La conférence de Brazzaville de 1944: contexte et repères. Cinquantenaire des prémices de la décolonisation. Paris: C.H.E.A.M., 1994, p. 21. 50 Cited ibid, 30–36. 51 René Pleven, Compte rendu de l’académie des sciences d’outre-mer, I, 1976, p. 7.

The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa 47

References Achi, Raberh (2004). La séparation des Églises et de l’État à l’épreuve de la situation coloniale. Les usages de la dérogation dans l’administration du culte musulman en Algérie (1905–1959). Politix, 17(66): 81–106. Ageron, Charles-Robert (1969). Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Ageron, Charles-Robert (1988). La préparation de la Conférence de Brazzaville et ses enseignements. In: Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent – Institut Charles de Gaulle (eds), Brazzaville (Janvier-février 1944). Aux sources de la décolonisation. Paris: Plon. Aouate, Yves-Claude (1984). Les Juifs d’Algérie pendant ta Deuxième Guerre mondiale. Nice: Université de Nice. Aron, Robert, Lavagne, Francoise, Feller, Janine & Garnier-Rizet, Yvette (1962). Les origines de la guerre d’Algerie. Paris: Fayard. Belmessous, Saliha (2013). Assimilation and Empire, Uniformity in French and British Colonies, 1541–1954. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berramdane, Abdelkhaleq (1987). Le Maroc et l’Occident (1800–1974). Paris: Karthala. Bessis, Sophie & Belhassen, Souhayr (2012). Bourguiba. Tunis: Elyzad, 150–151. Bougeard, Christian (1994). René Pleven: Un Français libre en politique. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Cantier, Jacques (2002). L’Algérie sous le régime de Vichy. Paris: Odile Jacob. Cantier, Jacques & Jennings, Éric (2004). L’Émpire colonial sous Vichy. Paris: Odile Jacob. Capdevila, Luc (2000). La mobilisation des femmes dans la France combattante (1940–1945). Clio. Histoire‚ femmes et sociétés, 12: 57–80. Chand, Ganeshwar (1991). United States and the Origins of the Trusteeship System. Review – Fernand Braudel Center, 14(2): 171–230. Crémieux Brilhac, Jean-Louis (1996). La France libre. De l’appel du 18 juin à la Libération, Paris: Gallimard. Déloye, Yves (1994). La « divine surprise » de Vichy. In: Id. (ed), École et citoyenneté. L’individualisme républicain de Jules Ferry à Vichy: controverses. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 343–379. Duquesne, Jacques (1996). Les catholiques sous l’Occupation. Paris: Grasset. Esquer, Gabriel (1960). Histoire de l’ Algérie (1830–1960). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Fouilloux, Étienne (2011). Eugène cardinal Tisserant (1884–1972). Une biographie. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Guillon, Jean-Marie (1992). La philosophie politique de la Révolution nationale. In: J.-P. Azéma, F. Bédarida (eds), Le régime de Vichy et les Français. Paris: Fayard. La Barbera, Serge (2004). L’Église d’Afrique face au nouveau régime. L’attitude de Mgr Gounot, archevêque de Carthage et primat d’Afrique. Une ambivalence coloniale. In: J. Cantier (ed), L’Empire colonial sous Vichy. Paris: Odile Jacob, 287–304. Leone, Alba Rosa (1980). La politica missionaria del Vaticano tra le due guerre. Studi Storici, 21(1): 123–156. Marrus, Michael & Paxton, Robert (1981). Vichy France and the Jews. New York: Basic Books.

48  The Catholic Church and colonialism in French Africa Michel, Henri (1962). Les Courants de pensée de la Résistance. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Pinto, João Carlos (1996). Vantagens da instrução e do trabalho. “Escola de massas” e imagens de uma “educação colonial portuguesa”. Educação, Sociedade e Cultura, 5: 99–128. Rousso, Henri (1990). Qu’est-ce que la “Révolution nationale”? L’Histoire, 129: 96–102. Sergio, Marialuisa Lucia (2021). Il Secondo dopoguerra in Spagna nelle carte italiane e vaticane: l’ipotesi di una Democrazia cristiana spagnola nella prospettiva della transizione monarchica (1945–1950). Spagna contemporanea, XXX(59):187–210. Singer, Claude (2004). 1940–1944: La laïcité en question sous le régime de Vichy. Raison présente, 149–150, 41–54. Valette, Jacques (1994). La France et l’Afrique. L’Afrique sub -saharienne de 1914 à 1960. Paris: Sedes. Yacono, Xavier (1991). Les étapes de la décolonisation française. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.

2

How the Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with colonial transition (1945–1949)

The constituent debate and attempts to reform the colonial order: The role of the MRP and the Algerian Episcopate, and the problem of the 1947 Statute In the spring of 1946, when speaking before the first Constituent Assembly called upon to draft the Constitution of the Fourth Republic, Marius Moutet, Minister of Overseas France, stated, “The brutal work of colonialism, […] the maintenance of a sovereignty that would rest on force alone is impossible today. The historical period of colonisation has passed. A nation - ours in particular - will maintain its influence in overseas territories only with the free consent of the people who inhabit them”.1 Moutet’s intervention echoed the widespread awareness of the momentous change that had taken place during the Second World War in the territories of the former French Empire, which now demanded the dismantling of the old models of colonial rule and its reorganisation within the framework of what in the new Constitution would soon be called the “French Union” (Luchaire, 1992; Michel, 1999). Elected on 21 October 1945, the first Constituent Assembly had 63 overseas MPs out of 585 (33 representing the Overseas Territories, 26 Algeria, 2 French Morocco, and 2 French Tunisia). This distribution of seats was the result of the double constituency electoral system which excluded the majority of the inhabitants of the colonies from parliamentary representation and was therefore not truly proportional to the numbers of indigenous populations. Nevertheless, it was an important innovation, since an ordinance of 22 August 1945 had allowed the presence of “non-citizens”, i.e. Muslim, black African, and Malagasy MPs who for the first time were called upon to act as representatives not only of their own territory but also of the entire nation, including metropolitan France, in the future Constituent Assembly.2 However, the debate in the Constituent Assembly on the colonial question continued to swing between two divergent conceptions, assimilation and association. The former traditionally involved a strategy based on subjugation stemming from the alleged “generosity of the French [who] like to protect and educate people who are not like them and whom they therefore DOI: 10.4324/9781003230175-3

50  Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition consider inferior”3 – a strategy built on the denial of the specificity of colonised peoples who could aspire to citizenship only after merging with the colonising people. The latter, on the other hand, recognised the particularities of the overseas societies, and by admitting to the existence of specific social and cultural identities and expressions of civilisations that were different but not inferior to the European one, envisaged autonomous forms of self-government even in view of the consensual separation from metropolitan France (Isoart, 1986). At the centre of this spectrum of positions, the MRP (Mouvement républicain populaire) Catholics advocated their own overseas doctrine, which, often in continuity with the traditional right, took the form of a combination of social Christianity and a “passionately French” patriotism. The latter was largely based on the ideas of MP Louis-Paul Aujoulat, a physician from an Algerian pieds-noirs family but resident in Cameroon, who during his medical studies at the Catholic University of Lille was president of the Missionary League of Students of France and a member of Ad Lucem, a lay missionary association (Turpin, 1997). In the name of the Catholic values of the promotion of the human person, the MRP contested all forms of colonialist economic exploitation but, at political level, adopted a prudent and paternalistic “apprenticeship” approach to citizenship. The aim of this approach was to accompany the native populations, through a gradual participation in the management of their own affairs within local assemblies with limited powers, towards an emancipation “in stages”, proportionate to the degree of evolution and political maturity of each colony (Report on Colonial Policy by Louis Aujoulat, 2nd MRP National Congress, 13–16 December 1945) (Turpin, 2004). In the absence of any real in-depth theoretical analysis that would really cast doubts on the rhetoric of France’s civilising mission at the root of its colonial experience, the first Constituent Assembly was in any case inclined to put the openly assimilatory option on hold in favour of a vaguely progressive proposal, formulated in terms of an unspecified federative organisation directed from Paris, a very gradual concession of local autonomy to the overseas territories and economic and industrial development in accordance with metropolitan interests (Madjarian, 1977). This proposal was put forward mainly by the socialist MPs of the SFIO (Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière) and the communists of the PCF (Parti communiste français), who drew up a draft document to this effect as early as November 1945. In Article 41, the draft Constitution voted by the Assembly on 19 April 1946 defined the French Union as “a freely agreed union” between France and its overseas territories (TOMs) on the one hand, and the associated States on the other. Furthermore, according to Article 44 of the same charter – all members of the nation (ressortissants), including those resident in the TOMs, were to enjoy the “rights and freedoms of the human person”4 guaranteed by the Declaration of Human Rights. This complex regulatory

Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition 51 framework suggested an extension of citizenship to former colonial subjects on the basis of greater equality in the enjoyment of political and civil rights and, above all, with the expression “freely agreed”, the future possibility for overseas territories and associated States to freely choose whether or not to remain in the Union.5 The political will to reform the colonial order seemed to be confirmed by the simultaneous approval in April of the Houphouët-Boigny law abolishing forced labour and the Lamine Guèye law extending the status of citizen to all colonised territories following the abolition of the status of native.6 At the same time, the FIDES, an investment fund for the economic and social development of overseas territories, financed by contributions from metropolitan France, was set up to allow these areas to take out low-cost loans for the implementation of new infrastructure. The draft constitution was put to an advisory referendum on 5 May 1946 but failed for two reasons. Firstly, not only for political motives linked to the institutional redefinition of metropolitan France (unicameralism), but also undoubtedly due to the propaganda of what has been described by the historian Charles-Robert Ageron as “the colonial party” (Ageron, 1978), which did not fail to make its voice heard particularly loudly and aggressively during the work of the second Constituent Assembly, elected on 2 June 1946. On 3 July 1946, representatives of colonial economic interests met in Paris at the Committee of the French Empire headquarters on the occasion of the “États généraux de la colonisation française” (“General states of French colonisation”). The purpose of the meeting was to denounce the behaviour of “those few black MPs [who] have cast an anathema against the white settler” and vented their resentment “against the white race” guilty of having “freed the blacks of the savannah from the atrocious feudalism of their chiefs”, of those “few evolved autonomists, considered, by who knows what irony, as the authentic representatives of the overseas populations, while they are only the expression of the feudalism of the past or the tyranny of tomorrow” (cited in Isoart, 1986: 23). The claim of the colonial lobby was to maintain the “sacred principle of French sovereignty in the territories of the Empire”.7 The reaction to the resurgence of colonial opposition to the reform projects was the formation of an intergroup of parliamentarians representing overseas peoples determined to safeguard the achievements of the first Constituent Assembly. As Senegalese MP Lamine Guèye explained, “The representatives of the TOMs were shocked to see a certain press bringing into question principles that seemed to have been definitively acquired. How could they not have reacted when it was announced that a French Colonisation Congress was to be held in Paris, the aim of which is to defend the interests of those who took advantage of the abuses of colonialism, the consolidation of their privileges, and the perpetuation of forced labour?”.8

52  Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition From that moment on, the Constituent Assembly debate was spurred by the commitment of the overseas representatives to resolve the ambiguities and cultural contradictions inherent in the French Union project. Indeed, as the writer and poet Aimé Cesaire, a Martinique MP, argued, it was no longer possible to reconcile the desire to build a “democratic republic” and at the same time preserve “the colonialist system that brings with it racism, oppression and servitude”.9 On 24 July, Lamine Guèye, on behalf of the intergroup, submitted to the Constitutional Committee a draft “constitution of the French Union” that solemnly rejected “systems of colonisation based on conquest, annexation or domination of the TOMs”. Following this initiative, Ferhat Abbas, determined to “leave the colonial past to the judgement of history”,10 put forward a proposal that went far beyond traditional federalism and paved the way to separatism, which provided for the unilateral relinquishment by France of all sovereignty over the colonised peoples. The proposal specified that the peoples in question were to be granted the freedom to govern themselves and the right to choose, within 20 years, whether to remain in the Union as federated free States or achieve independence.11 Once again, the contribution of the MRP centrists, as in the first Constituent Assembly, was marked by an approach that restrained the federal-type solutions. The aim of the MRP’s constitutional project dated 3 July 1946, drafted by the jurist Paul Viard, dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Algiers and leader of the party’s Algerian federation, was simply to guarantee the supremacy of metropolitan France, its territorial integrity and the primacy of the colonists in the post-war empire (Turpin, 1999: 172–174). In the end, the draft Constitution, approved following the referendum of 13 October 1946, incorporated the assumption of the indivisibility of the French Republic, which confined the overseas territories to the existing legislative framework, without the possibility of any future developments of an autonomous nature. The French Union, enshrined in Title VIII of the Constitution promulgated on 27 October 1946, was in fact “composed, on one hand, of the French Republic comprising metropolitan France, the departments and overseas territories and, on the other, the associated territories and states”. The institutional framework of the Union, consisting of a President, a High Council, and an Assembly, although apparently innovative, did not actually have any real decision-making power. The immobility of the “colonial party” more or less succeeded in aborting the French Union project, by transforming it into a simple operation of institutional restyling of the old Empire, which was incapable of responding to the demand for change that came from the representatives of the overseas populations. It is no coincidence that one of the words that echoed most frequently in the speeches of the indigenous MPs during the work of the Constituent Assembly was “malaise”. Lamine Guèye spoke of “profound malaise in

Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition 53 the overseas territories”,12 and the MP Hachemi Benchennouf referred to Algeria as “the deep malaise” and the futility of “trying to conceal its extent and gravity”.13 On the morrow of the draft Constitution of the Fourth Republic being approved as a result of the referendum, the Catholic Church in its overseas dioceses and vicariates had to deal with the problem of the native populations’ “malaise”, which – given the poor results obtained in the Constituent Assembly – was increasingly assuming a political physiognomy steeped in Islamic nationalism. In the autumn, during a series of meetings held in Algiers from 18 to 24 October 1946, the Intermissionary Council of the White Fathers tackled the issue of North African nationalism and took note of the difficulty for Catholic missionaries to operate “in a period of violent crisis and exaggerated collective susceptibility”. The White Fathers, as we read in the final report of the meetings dedicated to this theme, were aware that nationalism was by now “an expanding power that can only be exacerbated, and to ignore it would certainly be detrimental to the future of our missions”. It is for this reason that “while respecting the acquired and legitimate rights of France and her children”, the missionaries could no longer “refuse the peoples the right to love their country and to try in their own way to ensure its future”. “Our religious action”, the report continued, “will only be effective if it highlights at the same time one of its deepest motivations: love for the people considered for who they are. Our religious action, if it ignores indigenous patriotism on principle, will appear, in the eyes of the elite as a threat to national cohesion, and a devious manoeuvre of dissociation inspired by colonialist interests [the underline is in the original document]”.14 However, the report on the political and religious situation in Algeria also sent in October 1946 by the Archbishop of Algiers Leynaud to the Apostolic Nunciature in Paris was entirely different. In fact, Leynaud spoke of the progressive and constant emergence of Islamic nationalism, interpreted as authentic identity-based independence processes and therefore the real threat to the future of the French and Christian community in North Africa. For the benefit of the Secretariat of State, Leynaud briefly outlined the main political components of the Algerian chessboard in his report. He mentioned, the “integral nationalism” of Messali Hadj who, strengthened by the principles of the Atlantic Charter, aimed at creating an independent Algeria within the framework of the League of Arab States (which came into being in March 1945); the “mitigated nationalism” of Ferhat Abbas and the elected members of the Manifesto Party, at the head of a “movement of total emancipation”, moderate only in a tactical and provisional way, but intended to merge with the more radical positions of Messali Hadj, in the perspective of overcoming the French assimilationist policy; the Algerian communists, a political minority with no real social roots, eager to establish a Soviet-style Republic; and finally, the French community, naturally in favour of maintaining the sovereignty of metropolitan France, which

54  Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition was nevertheless convinced of the plausibility of a reformist solution to the Algerian problem within the framework of a programme of political measures for the decentralisation of power and the participation of the native Muslim population in administrative posts, and of socio-economic measures (housing, medical care, raising of living standards) aimed at a progressive evolution of the region “in a western direction”.15 Msgr. Leynaud did not consider this reformist strategy to be advantageous. In his opinion, by shifting the attention of the French political class to problems only “of a material nature […] water, schools, hospitals” it neglected the impact of the religious factor and allowed “Algerian Muslim nationalism [which] is essentially religious” to spread through the country with the support of Cairo. Therefore, in his conclusions, the Archbishop of Algiers wrote: Islam is flattered and encouraged. France has contributed a great deal to the Islamisation of populations that had only partially accepted the Koran (Kabylia, Moroccan Atlas), and this policy persists instead of being strictly limited to respect for the Muslim religion and customs. In the eyes of Muslims, it appears more as a proof of weakness than a sign of generosity. France’s prestige is lower in Algeria today than it was in the aftermath of the 1940 disasters. Not all Algerian Muslims are Messalists [nationalists, followers of Messali Hadj]. France, thank God, still has many supporters and friends in this country, but they are discouraged by a certain lack of authority, and in the eyes of the nationalist masses appear as ‘collaborators’. They are calling for ‘honest and assertive’ officials. True Christians are always appreciated by Muslims. The intensification of Christian life among the French in Algeria is one of the strongest factors of the French “presence” in the country.16 The Apostolic Nuncio in Paris, Msgr. Angelo Roncalli – later to become Pope John XXIII – took the report received from the Archbishop of Algiers very seriously. Indeed, he sent it “with due concern” to the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, because the considerations contained in it seemed to him “very interesting as they deal with a problem [i.e. Islamic nationalism] that is already topical not only in Algeria but everywhere in Muslim countries”.17 The Secretariat of State, in turn, sent the report to the Secretary of the Congregation of Propaganda Fide, Msgr. Celso Costantini, who when replying to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, acknowledged that “everyone agrees on the importance of Leynaud’s report”.18 Leynaud’s analysis of the political situation in Algeria reveals that he did not realise that the unresolved Algerian national question was an indicator of to what extent any real plan to reform the structure of the former French empire and put an end to the colonialist experience had failed, nor that this failure would come with serious consequences.

Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition 55 In fact, within the debate on the French Union, the Algerian problem had been tabled in August 1946 by Ferhat Abbas. He had demanded the promulgation of a Statute of Algeria which, going beyond the French legislators’ “paternalism filled with an unbearable racial pride”, would finally ensure that the Algerian people enjoyed not only “dignity as regards equal rights and obligations” but also “unrestricted republican liberties” (editorial by Ferhat Abbas in Égalité, 38, August 30, 1946, cited in Zohra Guechi, 1986: 379). On 2 August, the Algerian Democratic Union of the Manifesto (UDMA), the party founded by Ferhat Abbas, put forward a bill to establish the Constitution of an Algerian Republic as a federated member state of the French Union.19 Following this initiative and an interpellation on the part of the pied noir MP for Oran François Quilici, the Algerian socialist MPs presented a draft statute signed by the SFIO parliamentary group, followed five days later by a government draft filed on 24 September by Interior Minister Édouard Depreux. These drafts could not be discussed because of the urgent need to finalise the draft constitution of the French Union in the run-up to the referendum scheduled on 13 October. According to the historian Odile Rudelle, it was above all the Prime Minister at the time, Georges Bidault, co-founder of the MRP (and head of the party from 1949 to 1952), who imposed the postponement of the discussion on the Algerian Statute until after the constitutional referendum of 13 October. In doing so, he gave the colonists, led by the radical MP from Constantine René Mayer, time to organise their opposition to the project. Mayer counted on the support of MRP leader, Maurice Schumann, who fully endorsed the colonists’ three fundamental demands, namely the preservation of the double electoral college, French control over budgetary allocations, and the full executive powers of the French Governor in Algeria (Rudelle, 1999: 312–315). Postponed therefore until after the legislative election held on 10 November 1946, the question of the Statute of Algeria was re-examined under the new government led by the socialist Paul Ramadier, who presented his bill on 29 May 1947.20 Inspired by the theories of Paul-Émile Viard and with a similar socialist project, the bill put forward on 6 February by SFIO MP Maurice Rabier also comprised the inclusion of the Algerian departments in the French Republic. This was in total contradiction to the demands of the UDMA and the “independent Muslim group for the defence of Algerian federalism”, which aspired to a federalist solution, i.e. the creation of an Algerian Republic that would be a member of the French Union.21 Drafting the Algerian Statute proved to be extremely difficult, not least because of the disagreements that arose between the socialists and part of the MRP over the transfer of local power to the native population and the strengthening of the Arab majority’s electoral rights. The SFIO recommended the admission of Muslims to the first constituency of French citizens or at least the equalisation of the two constituencies.

56  Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition In June, Interior Minister Édouard Depreux was forced to explain to the SFIO steering committee that the government’s project, which was very similar to the socialist proposition, had met with strong opposition from the MRP within the Cabinet. In fact, sensitive to the needs of preserving the French minority in Algeria, the MRP had insisted on preserving French sovereignty, on rejecting the equalisation of the two constituencies, and on requesting for the repeal of the ordinance of 7 March 1944, which had entitled various categories of Muslims to vote in the first constituency (Cooper, 2016: 29). Similar opposition also came from Charles de Gaulle who, in a statement to the press on 18 August 1947, reiterated that, “in no way whatsoever should the French be allowed to doubt that Algeria is our domain” (Ageron, 2005: 541). In the end, the final Statute of Algeria, promulgated by the law of 20 September 1947, was limited to the devolution of certain specific powers to the Algerian departments, and the creation of a local Assembly entrusted with only two financial tasks – approving the budget and authorising public loans. The Assembly was composed of 120 delegates: half were elected in the first constituency by universal suffrage for men and women, by French citizens (around 470,000 men and women), and by a few thousand voters with “civil status under local law”, i.e. 58,000 natives integrated on the basis of their profession or diploma, or civil and military decoration (around 11% of the constituency). The other half of the Assembly’s delegates were elected by universal suffrage for men only in the second constituency, composed of 1,200,000 indigenous voters. The maintenance of the double constituency naturally discriminated against the Arab population since, although much more numerous, they elected the same number of delegates as the French minority. During the drafting of the statute, Msgr. Leynaud tried to put pressure directly on Paul Ramadier to prevent the approval of a reform that he felt was too broad and receptive to the demands of the Algerian national movement. In particular, the Archbishop of Algiers contacted the prime minister in June, at the very time when the Depreux project was meeting with opposition from the MRP and from those who, on behalf of the French colonists, opposed any suggestion to extend the electoral representation of Muslims. In line with the sentiments of the French community in Algeria, the Archbishop wrote a letter to the prime minister harshly criticising the draft statute and expressing his concern about the future of French and Catholic Algeria: Deeply attached to Algeria, where I came 65 years ago, and have been Archbishop for 30 years after having been secretary to that great Frenchman, Cardinal Lavigerie, I have the honour, and I believe also the duty, to share my feelings on the new draft statute of Algeria with you. This statute, as presented by the Government of the Republic, seems to me to constitute a real danger for Christianity in Algeria and indeed throughout North Africa.

Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition 57 Will not the first constituency, as is foreseen, deliver the lever of power in the near future into the hands of people who might be hostile to it? From then on, will not the general climate gradually become difficult to breathe in the country for Christian settlers and their families? In this manner, more than a century of work, of sacrifices, of charitable work of all kinds, accomplished by the Church and by France, to maintain the resurrection of Christianity, once so flourishing in these regions, would be lost or compromised. Your Excellency will understand, I am sure, the ardently French feeling that urges me to intervene personally with you in the interest of all Algerians, no one excluded, to whom I give my paternal love.22 Ramadier responded with secular decisiveness, reminding the Archbishop that the Catholic Church would still be able to carry out its apostolate in Algeria even in a context of greater political and religious pluralism: This political reorganisation is designed to open an era for this country in which the different ethnic and political groups can work together for the common good; the political action of Algeria’s Christianity will continue to be exercised during elections at the assembly and within the prerogatives of the latter. Moreover, even if due its size the Catholic population would no longer be able to influence directly political life, there is no reason why, apart from questions of a religious nature, they would not act for the common good of Algeria because of the interests they share with the Muslims. I hope all concerned will make a concerted effort to ensure the smooth running of the country.23 Nuncio Roncalli greatly appreciated Leynaud’s intervention with the French government as he shared his concern about the potential destabilising effects that a new Algerian Statute favourable to the Islamic population could have on the Catholic Church in North Africa, and in August 1947, he wrote to Msgr. Domenico Tardini: You have been able to follow in the newspapers the debates that are still taking place today about the new Statute for Algeria in which the position of the indigenous Muslim element would be strengthened in relation to the European one. The Catholics in Algeria are therefore threatened with serious dangers; their peaceful coexistence with the Muslims is becoming quite problematic. General de Gaulle, in a recent speech [that of 18 August 1947], raised his voice in protest against the weakness of the present government. […] The government certainly finds itself in a difficult position: on the one hand, there are the left-wing parties, which would like immediate action in favour of the North African populations. They include the Socialist

58  Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition Party that at its 39th Congress recently concluded in Lyon did not fail to affirm its sympathy for the Algerian cause, thus increasingly highlighting its pro-communist tendency; on the other, there are the interests of metropolitan France, threatened with losing control of these regions. The step taken by the Archbishop of Algiers therefore seems to me not to be out of place. The tenor of his reply [by Ramadier] needs no comment.24 Leynaud informed the Holy See again on the alleged political drift of Arab nationalism in 1949 when, during the official visit to Algeria of the President of the Republic Vincent Auriol, accompanied by Ministers Paul Ramadier, Jules Moch, and Robert Lecourt, a meeting took place at the Archbishopric of Algiers on the occasion of Pius XII’s priestly jubilee. The letter sent by the Archbishop to the Pope on that occasion is particularly significant because it contains the main points of what was to be the Catholic Church’s strategy of adaptation to post-colonial change throughout the process of political and social transformation of the Maghreb and French Africa in the years to come. On 5 June, following President Auriol’s visit, the Archbishop wrote directly to Pope Pacelli mentioning the formal gestures of friendship that the French authorities, in the presence of the new Governor General of the region, Marcel-Edmond Naegelen, had reserved for the Algerian Episcopate and the homage paid to the Holy Father. Nevertheless, he felt obliged to inform the Holy Father of the serious dangers facing French Algeria: However, Most Holy Father, since I can afford a little examination of our Algerian horizon, I must confirm what I had the honour to write to you some time ago, that is to say that some Muslims who, in Algeria alone number 8 million, against a meagre million Christians, are raising their head more and more to claim their independence and form an ‘Algerian Republic’. This situation is obviously of great concern to the French government, which had created three departments here subject to the same laws as the departments of metropolitan France. Algeria has already been granted a new statute, with an assembly of 120 members, composed of 30 Europeans and 60 Muslims; the first President was a Frenchman, a good Catholic; this year, and it will always be so, it is a Muslim, M. Sayah Abd-El-Kadher. […] If I am taking the liberty of giving you these details, Holy Father, it is to make you understand that it seems to me that the future of Algeria, my second homeland for 67 years, will progressively reserve for us increasing difficulties that we have to foresee.25 In view of the serious political situation and the fundamental weakness of the French government, whose gradual estrangement from the Maghreb was foreseeable, the Catholic Church – according to the Archbishop of

Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition 59 Algiers – should have taken steps to advocate a new style of coexistence between the Christians and the Muslim majority in North Africa based on the practice of social justice: To this end, I do not cease to enjoin my clergy, all our religious congregations and the faithful, without undermining our filial devotion to our homeland, France, to accentuate our fraternal charity, our practice of social justice, our sincere dedication to our Muslim or Israelite brothers; the latter, number less than one hundred thousand. It seems to me that, whatever happens, the best and only way to maintain the presence of the Catholic Church is through our institutions and charitable work. It is possible, in fact, - quod Deus avertat - that the political influence of France will gradually weaken. Nonetheless, if we succeed, thanks to all our efforts, in winning the hearts of our Muslim brothers through Christian and social institutions and true charity, we will be able to achieve, by the grace of God, a twofold objective. Firstly, that of preserving the radiance of Christianity in North Africa and, secondly, that of France that resurrected it 120 years ago, never to die there again, resurgens non moritur. I have allowed myself to be carried away, Most Holy Father. I have spoken to you as a son of this country who cannot stop himself from thinking of a future that is all too uncertain and who, having reached old age, has only one desire: to dedicate my remaining strength to procuring temporal and eternal happiness for all the African souls that the good Lord has deigned to entrust to him.26 In this letter, therefore, while never openly criticising the relationship between the Church and colonial institutions, Leynaud outlined a Catholic strategy for the future based on investing in social, charitable, and educational ecclesial activities to win the hearts of Muslims. The objective was to ensure not only the survival of the Catholic Church, but also the survival of the European values that France had instilled during its civilising experience in territories with a Muslim majority. Ultimately, the Archbishop of Algiers bequeathed to the North African episcopate a strategy of adaptation that the Vatican evaluated with interest but also with caution. There are in fact three versions of Pius XII’s response letter to the Archbishop of Algiers, sent through the Secretariat of State, the first draft of which is dated 22 July 1949, while the third and final version is dated 13 August, demonstrating how the Holy See took more than 20 days to formulate the most suitable reply. The first version reads: The Supreme Pontiff is particularly satisfied with the pastoral activity that Your Excellency continues to carry out in order to increase the influence of the Holy Church, through charity and assistance granted to

60  Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition all without distinction of race or religion, which, foreseeing a politically uncertain future, is an element of peace and reconciliation between the various races that inhabit Algeria.27 The original document shows the changes made by the Secretariat of State that had deleted the phrases “without distinction of race or religion” and “foreseeing a politically uncertain future”, as if to avoid formal papal approval of a pastoral approach based on overcoming ethnic and religious distinctions and on the recognition of the provisional nature of the colonial order. In the second draft of the reply, dated 29 July, the Secretariat of State let the Archbishop of Algiers know “how satisfied the Supreme Pontiff is with the activity you have carried out in order to gradually increase the influence of the Catholic Church in the exercise of charity and assistance to those who suffer, charity being the most reliable element of peace and reconciliation between different peoples”.28 In this penultimate version, however, the reference to peace and reconciliation between peoples was deleted. The third and final version of the letter was finally reduced to a laconic message informing Msgr. Leynaud of the “satisfaction” with which the Pope followed the activity carried out by the diocese of Algiers “to gradually increase the influence of the Catholic Church, charity and assistance given to all those who suffer”.29 The caution with which the Holy See approached the situation in the French overseas territories can also be explained in the light of the need to establish new bases for relations between Catholic missions and government institutions in the aftermath of the constitution of the French Union. In fact, the Holy See could not meet the birth of the French Union with indifference, since the institutional reorganisation of the former colonies of French-speaking Africa prompted the Catholic Church to reconsider the creation of an Apostolic Delegation in those territories, a project already envisaged in 1940 but shelved when Germany invaded France.

The establishment of the Apostolic Delegation of French Africa: Holy See, colonialism, and missionary experience suspended between continuity and renewal The post-war transition in French Africa posed the Holy See the problem of a coordinating structure between the Catholic congregations, the Vicars and the Apostolic Prefects, and between the Vatican and the local Churches. Moreover, the Apostolic Delegation, although formally devoid of diplomatic functions – unlike the Nunciature – could play a useful unofficial role of intermediation between the Holy See and the governors general of West and Equatorial Africa. On its part, the French government itself recognised the importance of institutional cooperation with the Holy See in the overseas territories, to the point that Cardinal Henri Laurentie had already met

Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition 61 Cardinal Tisserant in December 1944 to start talks on the establishment of a papal representation. Prior to that meeting, in 1941 in Equatorial Africa, Governor Félix Eboué had seized the opportunity of a religious policy to collaborate with the social and educational works of the Catholic missions by granting subsidies in exchange for a certain degree of control (de Benoist, 1988). This explains why the Quai d’Orsay was extremely interested in closely following the formation of the Delegation in the post-war period. In fact, it intervened with the ecclesiastical hierarchies both in the choice of the seat, which fell on Dakar, and in the selection of the person who would become the Apostolic Delegate, who according to the wishes of the government in Paris, should be of French nationality. It was due to the interference of the French political authorities that the selection of the prelate to be in charge of the new Apostolic Delegation was so complicated. The debate within the Vatican reveals the difficulty the Church had in positioning itself in the face of the changed post-war African scenarios, as it was poised between the need to update the missionary apostolate and continuity with the logic of power inherent in a hierarchical conception of the relationship between religion and politics. From the Vatican correspondence, it emerges that the Holy See’s direct political interlocutor was the MRP, thus confirming how close the Catholic party was to the ecclesiastical hierarchies in a two-way relationship of mutual influence. The Holy See’s initial choice for the post of Apostolic Delegate of French Africa fell on the director of the secretariat of the French Episcopate, Msgr. Henri Alexandre Chappoulie. From the 1930s, Chappoulie had been director of the Missionary Union of Clergy and of the Paris section of the Pontifical Work of Propagation of the Faith, an international Catholic association that assisted priests and clergy in mission areas. In 1943, he had defended a doctoral thesis on Rome and the Indochina missions in the 17th century (Rome et les missions d’Indochine au XVIIe siècle). His dissertation had focused on the preparation of indigenous clergy in the colonies and the study of the so-called Roman Instructions (Instructions romaines) of 1659, i.e. the directives of Propaganda Fide for the development of evangelisation among peoples not yet Christianised based on a religious apostolate respectful of the constituted authorities but not compromised in local political and economic affairs (N’Zouzi, 2017). While Chappoulie’s appointment was a choice of renewal in terms of missionary conception, it was rather problematic in terms of relations between Church and State. It could in fact have appeared polemical towards the new republican political class since the prelate had acted as a delegate of the French Episcopate to the Vichy regime during the war. In January 1947, Nuncio Roncalli entered into a series of talks with a number of politicians to “remove the difficulties that might make the nomination of this [Chappoulie] unwelcome to the French government, given his relations with Vichy. I therefore began to probe into the matter with

62  Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition those who are thought to be the least disposed towards his person”.30 The first person the Nuncio met was the MP Francisque Gay, co-founder with Georges Bidault of the MRP, who – unlike other party colleagues – had been a convinced anti-fascist and therefore, in Roncalli’s words, had in the past shown himself to be “rather harsh in his judgement of the Armistice Bishops”. Gay reassured Roncalli by stating that he saw “no reason at all for Government opposition to the appointment of Msgr. Chappoulie as Apostolic Delegate to Africa”, as well as by recognising the latter’s qualities as “a man very well suited for that mission”.31 Subsequently, Roncalli received two leading figures of the MRP at the Nunciature, André Colin, the “very influential and highly esteemed” Secretary General of the party, and Pierre-Henri Teitgen, Deputy Prime Minister. The latter promised, “officially in the name of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs [Georges Bidault] and of the Government that the Holy See’s decision to appoint Msgr. Chappoulie as Apostolic Delegate of French Africa would not only meet with no difficulty, but would be fully appreciated. If any difficulty should arise, Teitgen will undertake on behalf of the Government to support the appointment at any cost and against all odds. The eminent qualities of Msgr. Chappoulie command the respect and goodwill of all the French. The fact that he was a link between the Ecclesiastical Authority and the Vichy Government in no way alters the unanimous sympathy for him who, in such a delicate office, knew how not to compromise himself and to render loyal services which were then prolonged in the subsequent relations he had with the Government that succeeded the Vichy one”.32 As emerges again from Roncalli’s correspondence, Chappoulie’s candidacy enjoyed the support of the leaders of the French Church, namely the Archbishop of Paris Cardinal Emmanuel Suhard and the President of the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops of France, Cardinal Achille Liénart the Bishop of Lille. Liénart emphasised Chappoulie’s qualities as a missionary preacher, describing him also as “an excellent priest, whose piety, conduct, prudence and reputation leave nothing to be desired”, and whose “attachment to the Holy See and to ecclesiastical discipline, especially with regard to political parties, has always been perfect, filial, convinced and enlightened as well as devout”.33 However, the appointment had two major drawbacks: one was the resistance of the majority of French bishops, who wanted Chappoulie to remain in Paris as director of the Secretariat of the Episcopate, a position for which he was considered irreplaceable34; the other was the strong opposition from a major figure in the Vatican hierarchy, Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini, at the time Substitute for the General Affairs of the Secretariat of State, the section of the previously mentioned organism responsible for the direction and coordination of the offices of the Holy See (a sort of Ministry of the Interior). “After careful consideration”, Montini rejected Chappoulie’s candidacy, justifying his decision by calling into question the presumed precarious health of the candidate and his valuable role as Secretary of the Assembly

Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition 63 of Bishops and Cardinals of France. However, the main issue he raised was the need to make a choice that openly broke with past appointments to the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, as the dividing line between missionary apostolate and complicity with the colonial policy of the European powers had not always been evident, so that it was necessary to choose a non-French apostolic delegate: The candidate is certainly a priest of excellent spirit and training, but I do not believe his state of health would be strong enough for the office in question. Moreover, I must add that it would not be possible, at least for the moment, to divert him from the work that he is entrusted with and which requires a series of qualities and a preparation that are not easy to replace. I also leave it to Your Excellency to consider whether it would be appropriate for the nationality of the person elected to be the same as that of the political rulers of the region: the population, whose civil conscience is awakening, could confuse the interests of the Catholic Church with those of the colonising power in a single judgement.35 Following Montini’s indication, the Nunciature of Paris and the Congregation of Propaganda Fide began to consider the possibility of appointing a non-French prelate, and their choice fell on Maximilien de Fürstenberg, Rector of the Belgian Pontifical College.36 However, this solution was soon abandoned in the face of opposition from the government in Paris fearful that the establishment of the Apostolic Delegation might become a sort of religious counterbalance to the presence of the State in the former colonies. In fact, as Roncalli reported to Fumasoni Biondi: These gentlemen in Paris are particularly sensitive to this matter, all the more so in recent weeks when overseas France has already been giving them so many concerns. In my humble opinion one could […] confidentially agree with Ambassador Maritain, who is an intelligent person, on the advisability, all things considered, of appointing a Belgian prelate.37 Nonetheless, at the beginning of 1948, during two “confidential” talks with one of the MRP leaders – Foreign Minister Georges Bidault – Roncalli was told that the tension that had built up in Paris over the colonial problems in the months leading up to the birth of the French Union risked thwarting the establishment of the Apostolic Delegation in the overseas territories and also that it was therefore necessary for the Vatican to adopt as conciliatory an attitude as possible with the government. In fact, the Foreign Minister explained to the Nuncio that “several new circumstances have arisen concerning the situation between French Africa and metropolitan France” and with them some “internal

64  Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition reluctance” on the part of the government in office “to appreciate the gesture of the Holy See, even if the Delegate were to be a Frenchman imagine if he were not!!”.38 Bidault wished to avoid any “discontent, misunderstandings and difficulties” with regard to the Church within the Government, which, although “perhaps not serious in themselves” could “become embarrassing”. For this reason, the Foreign Minister said to Roncalli that, “it would be advisable to wait a little longer before deciding on the foundation of the special Apostolic Delegation for French Africa”. The Nuncio deferred to the suggestion and replied to Fumasoni Biondi saying: However, since this is a simple matter of waiting for more favourable circumstances and not of opposing or postponing [the project] indefinitely, I am convinced it would be better not to risk the possible consequences of political unease, albeit only hypothetical. I also believe it would be a good idea to prevent any deterioration of the good understanding that we now enjoy on the whole: an understanding that allows us to prepare ourselves, seriously and prudently at the same time, for a more effective claim to the rights of the Christian conscience in terms of freedom and public education.39 Pius XII therefore waited until the autumn of 1948 to establish, with the brief Expedit et Romanorum Pontificum of 22 September, the Apostolic Delegation in French Africa, with jurisdiction over Morocco and all French colonies, with the exception of Tunisia and Algeria, which were under the jurisdiction of the Apostolic Nunciature in Paris. Meanwhile, during the selection of the ideal candidate for the role of Apostolic Delegate, two very diverse figures who both would become central to the post-colonial transition of French Africa emerged – Msgr. LéonÉtienne Duval, Bishop of the Algerian diocese of Constantine, and Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre, Apostolic Vicar of Senegal and father of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, a French religious institute dedicated to the work of evangelisation in mission territories. When they were young in the 1920s, both had attended the French Seminary in Rome, during the most critical period of the religious crisis linked to the Vatican’s condemnation of Action française, the movement that had sprung up around the magazine of the same name founded by Charles Maurras in 1899. Maurras had been a proponent of an “integral nationalism” derived from the ideologies of French “traditionalism” but with strong subversive, anti-democratic, and anti-Semitic connotations that were precursors to fascism. The condemnation of Action Française had also had repercussions on the French seminary run by Father Henri Le Floch, a priest of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit. Le Floch, who held firm anti-modernist, anti-liberal, and anti-democratic positions very close to those of Charles Maurras and

Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition 65 Action Française, had been urged by the Vatican to leave his post as rector of the seminary in July 1927, following a request from the French government (Airiau, 2009). The two young seminarians were at opposite ends of the spectrum; Lefebvre was so profoundly influenced by the teachings of Le Floch that he entered the same congregation of the Holy Spirit a few years after being ordained as a priest, while Duval felt close to the “Republicans” (Impagliazzo, 1994: 25–32). The latter, after a period of priesthood in his home diocese of Annecy, was sent to Algeria after being appointed Bishop of Constantine in February 1947. His pastoral leadership was immediately characterised by great attention to social questions and the economic inequalities visible in the great poverty of the region’s countryside and bidonvilles. The name of Msgr. Duval for the eventual nomination as Apostolic Delegate of French Africa had been an insight of Msgr. Roncalli who, in October 1947, had written to Fumasoni Biondi to say: While going through the list of the Bishops of France, I came across the name of H.E. Msgr. Léon Duval, Bishop of Constantine in Algeria, who seemed the only one worthy of consideration, and who possessed the requisites to be deemed an excellent choice. […] A man of profound piety, irreproachable conduct and unquestionable reputation, Msgr. Duval has shown an ardent zeal, and a prudence made up of firmness and meekness, which won him the admiration and affection of all, clergy and people alike. A good preacher, he has revealed a remarkable spirit of organisation and initiative. With a pleasant and dignified appearance, he is still young and still enjoys good health, despite the difficult North African climate. The only difficulty may lie in the fact that he has only been Bishop of a diocese for a year, and albeit not as desolate as Oran, it is still a difficult one, especially in these months of deaf agitation and political intolerance, but despite this he has already carried out an admirable work of reorganisation.40 In his letter, Roncalli also underlined “the advantage of Duval’s direct knowledge of Rome” and the importance of the consensus he enjoyed from the MRP – “in fact, the Minister of Foreign Affairs [Georges Bidault] was thinking of recommending Msgr. Duval for the appointment of Coadjutor of the Archbishop of Carthage”.41 With these details, Roncalli pointed out two peculiar characteristics of the bishop, both useful to gain insights into the man himself and his future attitude during the Algerian war. Duval did not appear as an isolated prelate rowing against the tide, as at times he was depicted in the historiography on decolonisation to exalt his presumed non-conformism. On the contrary, he was a man close to the Vatican hierarchies, in excellent relations with the Nunciature in Paris, and at the same time, as will be seen later, in accordance with the moderate politics of the Catholic centre.

66  Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition Nonetheless, on the eve of the establishment of the papal representation in French Africa, Pius XII decided to appoint Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre as apostolic delegate. There are no specific documents to clarify the reasons for the Pope’s choice, which practically nullified all the preparatory work carried out up to that time by the Nunciature in Paris and Propaganda Fide to identify the most suitable candidate with the best and strategic characteristics to hold such an extremely delicate position. As stated in the document that reported “the sovereign decisions taken by the Holy Father”, the territory of the Apostolic Delegation in Dakar was to “comprise all the missions dependent on the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide, including Madagascar, which in Africa fall under the authority of the French Republic. The reasons which dictated the need to establish the Apostolic Delegation were the development and the importance which the missions in French Africa have been gaining especially in recent years; the need to achieve a more organic co-ordination of the various missionary activities in order to give them greater impetus; and the opportunity of having a representative of the Holy Father both in loco and in other missionary fields”.42 The figure of Lefebvre did not seem to promise either the renewal embodied by Msgr. Duval or the political independence that a non-French prelate such as Msgr. Maximilien de Fürstenberg could have ensured. In any case, the choice of a prelate who had been culturally formed in the school of Action Française was not without significance. Indeed, Lefebvre’s appointment could also be interpreted as an echo of the Vatican’s heavily negative judgement of post-war France because of its social and cultural transformation linked to secularisation and the spread of Marxism among the working classes. At the end of the 1940s, the Vatican’s judgement of post-war France was in fact conditioned by a heavily negative assessment of the country’s social and cultural transformation stemming from secularisation and the spread of Marxism among the working classes. In a report of 1949 entitled Tendencies in French Catholicism, probably to be attributed to Nuncio Roncalli himself, the author drew conclusions from the notes sent to the Nunciature by the Dominican priest, Father Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, and described France as a country that would have to limit its vindictive excesses against the pro-German collaborationists of the Vichy regime with an adequate policy of amnesty. He added that France also needed to face up to the influence of Marxism, which was reflected in the anti-hierarchical polemic of the progressive clergy against a “bourgeois Church that is the enemy of the poor”, a polemic fuelled by intellectuals such as Emmanuel Mounier and François Mauriac, who were responsible for polluting Catholic orthodoxy with “a certain religious sentimentality [that] tends, in effect, to replace the content of dogma, the very doctrine of the Church”.43 The only positive element found in the French political and social situation was the election success of the Catholic MRP party. According to the author of the report, in fact, “the presence of M. Robert

Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition 67 Schuman at the head of the government [at that time Prime Minister from November 1947 to July 1948 and again in September of the same year] is a definite commitment and corresponds to the desire of a large part of the French people. […] The Catholic current is always lively among them and, consequently, France does not forego its vocation as a Christian people for whom religious freedom is a condition of life”.44 The spread of communist ideology was also observed with concern in missionary circles in Algiers, particularly among the Little Brothers of Jesus inspired by Charles de Foucauld, where, according to a memo from the Archbishop of Aix en Provence, Charles-Marie de Provenchères, dated 23 January 1949, “there was danger of materialist and Marxist contamination”.45

Notes 1 Journal officiel de la République française (henceforth J.O.). Débats de l’Assemblée nationale constituante, 24 March 1946, 1037. 2 J.O. Ordonnances et décrets, 23 August 1945, Ordonnance n° 45.1874 du 22 août 1945 fixant le mode de représentation à l’Assemblée nationale constituante des Territoires d’outre-mer relevant du ministère des Colonies, 5266. 3 Henri Labouret, Citoyenneté d’empire. In: L’homme de couleur, Paris: Éditions Cardinal Verdier- Plong, 1939, 348–349. 4 J.O. Documents de l’Assemblée constituante, 6 April 1946, Deuxième séance du 5 avril 1946, 1 514; Annexes n° 565, n° 811, pp. 554, 780. 5 Ibid. 6 J.O. Documents de l’Assemblée constituante, 6 April 1946, Deuxième séance du 4 avril 1946, 1 537. 7 Michel Deveze, La France d’outre-mer. Paris: Hachette, 1948, pp. 265–267. 8 Assemblée nationale constituante, élue le 2 juin 1946. Séances de la Commission de la constitution. Comptes-rendus analytiques. Paris: Imprimerie de l’Assemblée nationale constituante, 1947, 181. 9 J.O., 19 September 1946, Deuxième séance du 18 septembre 1946, 3795. 10 Ibid, 3803. 11 Ibid, Séances de la Commission de la Constitution, compte-rendus analytiques, 215. 12 J.O., 23 March 1946, 999. 13 J.O., 1 March 1946, 492. 14 Archives générales des missionnaires d’Afrique (henceforthAGMAfr), North Africa, Dossier 448, “Capi di missione”, fasc. Corrispondenza. Capo di missione (Padre Lanfry), Consiglio Intermissionario dei Padri Bianchi, alla sua prima riunione ad Algeri fra il 18 e il 24 ottobre 1946 (Intermissionary Council of the White Fathers, first meeting in Algiers between 18 and 24 October 1946), 448.018–448.021. 15 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part I, France, Pos. 989, fasc. 22–33, Note sent Msgr. Augustin-Fernand Leynaud on 19 October 1946, ff. 23–29, here ff. 24–25. 16 Ibid, ff. 28–29. 17 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part I, France, Pos. 989, fasc. 22–33, Msgr. Angelo Roncalli to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, 9 November 1946, f. 23. 18 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part I, France, Pos. 989, fasc. 22–33, Msgr. Celso Costantini to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, 7 December 1946, f. 32. 19 J.O., Documents parlementaires, 2nd ANC n° 358.

68  Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition 20 Vincent Auriol, Journal du septennat, 1947. Paris: Tallandier, 2003, 83, 243, 338, 373–384, 390. 21 J. O., Doc., AN 1947 n° 1352. Proposition de MM. Benchenouf, Ben Ali Cherif, Cadi, Laribi, Mekki, Smaïl. 22 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part II, France, Pos. 2, fasc. 15–20, letter from Msgr. Augustin-Fernand Leynaud to Paul Ramadier, 17 June 1947, f. 17. 23 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part II, France, Pos. 2, fasc. 15–20, letter from Paul Ramadier to Msgr. Augustin-Fernand Leynaud, 1 August 1947, f. 18. 24 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part II, France, Pos. 2, fasc. 15–20, Msgr. Angelo Roncalli to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, 20 August 1947, ff. 16–16v. 25 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part II, France, Pos. 2, fasc. 57–70, letter from Msgr. Leynaud to Pius XII during his priestly jubilee on the situation in “our dear Algeria”, 5 June 1949, ff. 58–61. 26 Ibid, ff. 60–61. 27 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part II, France, Pos. 2, fasc. 57–70, draft letter by Secretariat of State of His Holiness, 22 July 1949, f. 67. 28 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part II, France, Pos. 2, fasc. 57–70, draft letter by Secretariat of State of His Holiness, 29 July 1949, f. 65. 29 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part II, France, Pos. 2, fasc. 57–70, draft letter by Secretariat of State of His Holiness, 13 August 1949, f. 63. 30 ACPF, NS, vol. 1651, ff. 7–821, Msgr. Angelo Roncalli to Msgr. Celso Costantini, 11 January 1947, f. 7. 31 Ibid, f. 8. 32 ACPF, NS, vol. 1651, Msgr. Angelo Roncalli to Cardinal Pietro Fumasoni Biondi, 23 March 1947, ff. 18r10–18v11. 33 ACPF, NS, vol. 1651, Information gathered about Msgr. Henri Chappoulie. Attachment to the letter from Msgr. Angelo Roncalli to Cardinal Pietro Fumasoni Biondi, 23 April 1947, ff. 24v–25r13. 34 ACPF, NS, vol. 1651, Msgr. Angelo Roncalli, 23 April 1947, f. 24r12. 35 ACPF, NS, vol. 1651, Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini to Msgr. Celso Costantini, 8 August 1947, ff. 7–520. 36 ACPF, NS, vol. 1651, Cardinal Pietro Fumasoni Biondi to Msgr. Angelo Roncalli, 15 December 1947, ff. 11–601. 37 ACPF, NS, vol. 1651, Msgr. Angelo Roncalli to Cardinal Pietro Fumasoni Biondi, 12 January 1948, f. 122r02. 38 ACPF, NS, vol. 1651, Msgr. Angelo Roncalli to Cardinal Pietro Fumasoni Biondi, 28 January 1948, f. 131r04. 39 Ibid. 40 ACPF, NS, vol. 1651, Msgr. Angelo Roncalli to Cardinal Pietro Fumasoni Biondi, 28 October 1947, ff. 78–7922. 41 Ibid. 42 ACPF, NS, vol. 1651, Propaganda Fide to Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini, 29 September 1948, f. 145r08. 43 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Affari generali, Part II, Pos. 12, fasc. 70–91, Tendenze del cattolicesimo francese, ff. 71–90, here f. 85. 44 Ibid, f. 71. 45 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Affari generali, Part II, Pos. 12, fasc. 226–275, Memo of the Archbishop of Aix en Provence Charles de Provenchères, 23 January 1949, f. 268.

References Ageron, Charles-Robert (1978). France coloniale ou parti colonial? Paris: PUF. Ageron, Charles-Robert (2005). De Gaulle et l’Algérie. In: Id. (ed) De « l’Algérie française » à l’Algérie algérienne, vol. 1. Saint-Denis: Éditions Bouchène, 537–548.

Holy See and the Fourth Republic dealt with Colonial Transition 69 Airiau, Paul (2009). Le Séminaire français de Rome. Histoire et missions chrétiennes, 2(10): 33–67. Cooper, Frederick (2016). Citizenship between Empire and Nation Remaking France and French Africa, 1945–1960. Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press. de Benoist Joseph Roger (1988). Félix Éboué et les missions catholiques. In: Brazzaville, janvier-février 1944. Aux sources de la décolonisation, colloque 22-23 mai 1987. Paris: Plon, 180–187. Impagliazzo, Marco (1994). Duval d’Algeria. Una Chiesa tra Europa e mondo arabo (1946–1988). Roma: Edizioni Studium. Isoart, Paul (1986). L’élaboration la Constitution de l’Union française: les Assemblées constituantes et le problème colonial. In: Charles-Robert Ageron (ed). Les chemins de la décolonisation de l’empire colonial français, 1936–1956. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 15–31. Luchaire, François (1992). Le statut constitutionnel de la France d’outre-mer. Paris: Économica. Madjarian, Grégoire (1977). De l’empire à l’Union française. In: La Question coloniale et la politique du Parti communiste français (1944–1947). Paris: La Découverte, 149–165. Michel, Marc (1999). L’empire colonial dans les débats parlementaires. In: Serge Berstein (ed). L’année 1947. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 189–217. N’Zouzi, Bernard (2017). Le catholicisme face au défi des mutations du monde moderne. Henri-Alexandre Chappoulie et les problèmes d’outre-mer, 1900–1959. Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan. Rudelle, Odile (1999). Le vote du statut de l’Algérie. In: Serge Berstein (ed). L’année 1947. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 309–325. Turpin Frédéric (2004). Les droites et la question coloniale au sortir de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. In: Gilles Richard, Jacqueline Sainclivier (eds). La recomposition des droites: en France à la Libération, 1944–1948. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 125–135. Turpin, Frédéric (1997). Le MRP et l’Outre-Mer (1944–1962). France-Forum, 2(316): 64–69. Turpin, Frédéric (1999). Le Mouvement Républicain Populaire et l’avenir de l’Algérie (1947–1962), Revue d’Histoire diplomatique, 2: 171–203. Zohra Guechi, Fatima (1986). La presse algérienne et l’Union française. In: CharlesRobert Ageron (ed). Les chemins de la décolonisation de l’empire colonial français, 1936–1956. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 377–385.

3

The Holy See and the start of the independence processes in North Africa The Evangelii praecones encyclical put to the test by decolonisation (1950–1953)

The Vatican and the Tunisian question At the end of the 1940s, relations between the Holy See, metropolitan France, and French Africa appeared to be marked by a double and in some ways contradictory tendency. While on one hand the Vatican hoped for the preservation of a stable social order in France, safe from the communist threat, among other things thanks to the consolidation of the Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP) as the pivot party of the political system, it also wished to support a missionary renewal in the overseas territories in order to respond effectively to the challenges posed by the rapid disintegration of the European colonial system brought about, as we have seen, by the consequences of the Second World War, i.e. the international recognition, enshrined in the Atlantic Charter, of the right to self-determination of peoples and the resulting surge of independence movements. Already in his Discourse on the Catholic Missions of 24 June 1944, Pius XII had recommended that the missionary fathers adapt pastoral and evangelising action to the evolution of historical situations, to avoid “transplanting specifically European civilisation into mission lands”, in order to teach and form non-European peoples, “who sometimes boast a very old and highly developed culture of their own”, so that they are ready to accept willingly and assimilate “the principles of Christian life and morality”, which fit into any culture, provided it be good and sound, and which “give that culture greater force in safeguarding human dignity and in gaining human happiness”.1 On the 25th anniversary of Pius XI’s Rerum Ecclesiae, the Evangelii praecones encyclical of 2 June 1951 was built on these directives by indicating the objectives of the indigenisation of the local clergy, through the training of autochthonous priests and the appointment of local church hierarchies. It also spoke of the development of charitable activities, through the missionary cooperation of Catholic lay associations, not only aimed at redressing social injustices but also, and above all, at preventing the spread of communist ideology and the collectivisation of private property in the hands of the “arbitrary power of the State”.2 DOI: 10.4324/9781003230175-4

Start of the independence processes in North Africa 71 By slackening its preferred ties with the old Europe, the Holy See thus seemed to be accelerating the establishment of local Churches and increasingly exalting its universal and supranational role. The undisputed protagonist of this process was the Secretary of Propaganda Fide, Msgr. Celso Costantini, who until 1952 was a leading figure in Pius XII’s missionary policy and a resolute advocate of the indigenisation approach through the development of the liturgy in the vernacular and the creation of an indigenous hierarchy in the overseas territories (Simonato, 1985; Gabrieli, 2017).3 Historiography has already highlighted the shortcomings of the application of the Evangelii praecones encyclical in missionary contexts, due firstly to the dialectic between those urging reforms who were making headway through Propaganda Fide and certain missionary congregations who were resistant to change (Giovagnoli, 1984). Similarly, it called attention to the progressive dissension between Pius XII and Msgr. Costantini concerning the timing and degree to which local churches were to be established. The Secretary of Propaganda Fide wanted the process to be swift and extensive, while the Pope wanted it to be slow and progressive so as to avoid a repetition in Africa and the rest of Asia of what had already happened in China where, following “a policy of excessive indigenisation” in the form of the “sinification” of the episcopal hierarchies, the authorities of the People’s Republic of China had broken off relations with both the new bishops appointed in 1951 and the Holy See (Riccardi, 1988: 128). It was in the context of the latter’s differing views on the missionary strategy that Msgr. Filippo Bernardini was appointed as the new Secretary of Propaganda Fide in December 1952, a decision that coincided with the softening of the till then clear line separating the colonial cause and the missionary cause theorised by Costantini.4 However, dissension among the leaders of Propaganda Fide is not the only element of ambiguity in the missionary policy of the Catholic Church in the wake of the Evangelii praecones encyclical. The task of establishing the ecclesiastical hierarchy in French Africa, i.e. the transformation of prefectures and apostolic vicariates into dioceses and archdioceses, and the indigenisation of the clergy through the appointment of local bishops and priests to replace European ones, fell to the newly created Apostolic Delegation of Dakar. Msgr. Lefebvre worked to this end, but without ever forgoing the typically reactionary ideological characterisation of his apostolic action inherited from Action Française, voiced through polemical attacks on the “progressive” Church and on secular and liberal France. In the last months of 1951, therefore shortly after the promulgation of Evangelii praecones, Msgr. Lefebvre proved to be very active in denouncing the threat of the propagation of liberal ideas in the missionary context. In his opinion, both the Archdiocese of Lille, headed by Cardinal Achille Liènart, in which the lay missionary movement Ad Lucem was operating, and the French Seminary in Rome which, unlike at the time of Msgr. Le

72  Start of the independence processes in North Africa Floch, was in the hands of progressive theologians, proponents of serious doctrinal errors, were to blame. According to Lefebvre, the progressive clergy insisted on “making it appear that the missionaries want neither the evolution of the indigenous people, nor the elevation of the indigenous clergy to high functions, for selfish reasons, in short [making] it appear that the missionaries lack true generosity and Catholic intelligence with regard to African problems: all this is abominable calumny. […] The laity, especially those in Ad Lucem, encouraged by their ecclesiastical assistants, do the same thing and often speak out against the missionaries, thus encouraging division, especially among African students. They say they enjoy the support of Cardinal Liénart. This situation is likely to discourage many mission leaders and sow discord”.5 Lefebvre also spoke, in his typical language inherited from Charles Maurras, of “indifferentism”, “eclecticism”, and “Protestant influence” to denounce the influence of the United States and international bodies such as the UN, UNESCO, and FAO, guilty of promoting an ideology of development in the Third World inspired by false Western values.6 To fully understand the reach and effectiveness of the “religious decolonisation” of the Roman Catholic Church, it is also necessary to extend the scope of historical analysis beyond the activity of the Vatican bodies dedicated to missionary activities, namely Propaganda Fide and the Apostolic Delegation in Dakar, and to examine also and above all the role of Vatican diplomacy in the French colonies, where the Holy See was particularly careful not to sour relations with France and not to give the impression of lowering its guard in the fight against communism, at a time when Moscow was in the forefront when it came to criticising colonialism. These dynamics emerged with particular clarity within the context of the decolonisation of North Africa, which in the early 1950s was considered in relation to the international crisis caused by growing tensions in the French Protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia. The political actors in this process were mainly the Moroccan Istiqlal Party and the Tunisian Neo Destour party, which compared to the Algerian independence movements were better structured in terms of organisation and doctrine. This international crisis related to the emancipation processes in the French protectorates also involved the Holy See, at the time called upon to come to terms with the coherence between its pledge to the theological revision of its missionary models and the caution of Vatican diplomatic relations both with France and with the Arab movements on grounds of political expediency. As will be seen from the Vatican documents, France had advised the Holy See to interpret the colonial crisis as a clash of civilisations, as a Western Christian power’s struggle to defend its values and prerogatives, while the Arab movements were trying to envisage the MuslimChristian dialogue and the possibility of an interreligious coexistence in the Mediterranean.

Start of the independence processes in North Africa 73 Prior to this, the movements that were members of the Committee for the Liberation of the Arab Maghreb had tried to fulfil their national aspirations with a dual strategy, simultaneously aimed at increasing their autonomy vis-à-vis France through negotiation and bilateral means, and achieving full sovereignty by bringing their claims for independence to the attention of the international community. On 12 October 1950, Sultan Mohammed V sent a memorandum to the President of the French Republic outlining a series of requests from Morocco comprising the right to appoint the Protectorate’s highest officials directly, the revision of regulations concerning press censorship, the reform of the administration of justice, and the recognition of the freedom of association for workers.7 On 31 October, the French government made its point of view known with a memorandum in which it reiterated its wish to maintain the Protectorate treaty in force, while granting the promise of less interference on the part of the colonial authorities as regards the appointment of pashas and qa’id, i.e. the representatives of the executive organs in the cities and the countryside, respectively, as well as the establishment of joint commissions to study unsolved problems related to the legal system and union rights.8 Faced with a negligible number of French concessions, the Sultan expressed not only his disappointment but also his hope that a future agreement with France would lead to a new bilateral convention to replace the 1912 Treaty that had established the Protectorate.9 France, however, subordinated any policy recognising even the partial autonomy of Morocco to the preventive repression of the independence movement. In February 1951, the Resident-General in Morocco, Marshal Alphonse Juin, demanded that Mohammed V publicly should distance himself from the national claims of the Istiqlal Party and warned of an uprising of the Berber tribes against the Sultan. Under pressure due to France’s threats and faced with the Berber revolt incited by the Resident-General’s office, (meanwhile numerous tribes had set up camp at the gates of Fez, Salé, and Rabat), on the evening of 25 February, the Sultan gave in and issued a communiqué (Abitbol, 2014: 508–536). In the document, he condemned the methods of the Istiqlal Party and thanked France for the help given to Morocco on its pathway to political, social, and economic evolution. He also warned the people against the independence movement’s pernicious leaning towards communism that was in conflict with the principles of the Muslim religion and the tradition of the Sultanate.10 These events resounded throughout the Arab world (Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq), which witnessed multiple demonstrations of solidarity with Morocco’s population and culminated in Egypt’s decision, on 6 October 1951, to raise the Moroccan question before the United Nations. Never before had an Arab government brought the North African issue to the attention of the UNO (Ikeda, 2016: 51). The plenary session of the General Assembly began to examine the question on 13 November 1951. A

74  Start of the independence processes in North Africa month later, on 13 December, with 28 yes votes, 23 no votes, and 7 abstentions, the recommendation of the United Nations General Committee to postpone the inclusion of the Egyptian item entitled Plainte pour violation par la France au Maroc des principes de la charte et de la Déclaration des droits de l’homme on the final agenda was approved (Berramdane, 1987: 77). Despite the momentary stalemate at the UN, the repercussions of the Franco-Moroccan crisis in the Arab world called into question the validity of any attempt to transcend the colonial status quo through negotiation, such as that pursued by the Tunisian Neo Destour Party, which had entered the Protectorate’s government for the first time in August 1950 thanks to the participation of Salah Ben Youssef, founding member and Secretary General of the party, in his capacity as Justice Minister. Due to its collaboration policy, the Neo Destour Party was soon accused by pan-Arab circles of betraying the Tunisian national cause as well as participating in an “unholy alliance” with French colonialism in defiance of the Cairo pact establishing the “Committee for the Liberation of the Arab Maghreb”, according to which no negotiations with a colonial power were permissible before the proclamation of independence.11 On their part, the French colonists considered any dialogue with the Neo Destour a threat to the interests of the motherland, so much so that the Resident-General Louis Périllier had to clarify with the press that the colonial Protectorate system was in no way under discussion but simply undergoing a few “adjustments” and “mitigations” (aménagements e assouplissements).12 Despite reciprocal recriminations and after countless tense negotiations, the dialogue between Salah Ben Youssef and the French authorities resulted in the decrees issued on 9 February 1951 providing for a 50% increase in the number of Tunisians recruited to cover administrative posts (El Mechat, 2017: 60–61). A reform limited in scope, it only marginally effected the status quo of the Tunisian Protectorate, which was granted neither internal autonomy within the French Union nor international sovereignty by Paris. The Neo Destour submitted further demands in a memorandum dated 31 October 1951 concerning the setting up of a true parliamentary regime with a Cabinet and elected assembly formed entirely of Tunisians. Minister of Foreign Affairs Robert Schuman rejected their demands in a note of 15 December 1951 and this was the final blow to the negotiations. In the note he highlighted France’s merits in the “civilisation” of Tunisia, and claimed the rights of French citizens to participate in the running of local political institutions in the name of a principle of “co-sovereignty”, a situation considered by the Tunisians unacceptable as it was in contrast with the spirit of the agreements between the two countries, as well as “anti-juridical”, or rather inexistent in international law.13 On 14 January 1952, Salah ben Youssef and his fellow Cabinet member Mohammed Badra, Minister of Social Affairs, decided to appeal to UN

Start of the independence processes in North Africa 75 Secretary General Trygve Lie, urging the Security Council to find a solution to the Franco-Tunisian dispute in accordance with the principles and aims set out in the UN Charter (Ikeda, 2006: 55). The reaction of the new Resident-General Jean de Hauteclocque was drastic: the heads of the Neo-Destour and six communist leaders, including the party’s Secretary General Maurice Nizard, were detained and placed under house arrest. On 28 January, French troops, including paratroopers, legionnaires, and mobilised colonists besieged the Capo Bon region, where the violent repressive “cleansing” operation (nettoyage) did not spare women, the elderly, or children.14 The French delegation at the UN also raised an objection pointing out the inadmissibility of the Tunisian appeal as it came from a country without international sovereignty, which could only act before the Security Council at the initiative of the Resident-General of France himself. In the first days of March 1952, the Arab-Asiatic nations on the initiative of the Pakistan government re-submitted the Tunisian question before the UN, and after much insistence, in the following October, it was included on the agenda of the 7th regular session of the General Assembly. The debate opened on 6 December in New York without the participation of France, as Robert Schuman had asserted that the United Nations had no authority to deal with an exclusively “French” internal problem.15 Meanwhile in Tunis, during the night between the 4 and 5 December, a group of unknown gunmen assassinated the union leader Farhat Hached, founder of the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail that was politically akin to the Neo Destour. This event triggered a chain reaction throughout the Arab world, in Algiers, Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, Karachi, and in particularly in Casablanca in the nearby Protectorate of Morocco, where the trade union confederation Union Générale des Syndicats marocains, an offshoot of the Istiqlal Party, had staged a general strike in solidarity with the Tunisian population. In the repression of the riots in Casablanca, carried out jointly by the police, colonial troops, and Foreign Legion units, hundreds of demonstrators lost their lives, and in the aftermath, the Istiqlal Party was dissolved and its most prominent members were either arrested or sent into exile (House, 2012). On 31 January 1952, a few days after Salah Ben Youssef’s intervention before the UN Secretariat, the representative of the Tunisian NeoDestour Party in Rome, Abdelhadi Mejdoub, personally delivered to the Vatican Secretariat of State a letter urgently requesting Pope Pius XII to intervene in support of Tunisia’s claims to independence and in defence of the human rights violated by the colonial authorities. The argumentation used by the Neo Destour set forth the interreligious dialogue between Christianity and Islam, the worldwide ethical prestige of the Holy Father for the believers of all faiths, and the need to prevent the “brutal violence” perpetrated by the “most Catholic” France alleged “favourite daughter

76  Start of the independence processes in North Africa of the Church”, from bringing shame on Catholicism to the benefit of the destructive forces of “materialism, brute force, terrorism, and violent rebellion”.16 Abdelhadi Mejdoub’s document went on to say that up to then the Neo Destour had not allowed “movements marked by xenophobia or religious fanaticism to be unleashed” because it felt “part of that Western world of which the Supreme Head of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church is the highest spiritual leader”, and therefore they placed “their hopes” in the “Pastor Angelicus” whose word, “heeded and powerful” in favour of Tunisia’s cause, could represent “a small stone in the grand edifice of greater understanding in the future between the two religions that worship the same God”.17 The Secretariat of State did not reply to Neo-Destour’s appeal but there again a few days before the French Ambassador to the Holy See, Wladimir d’Ormesson, had forestalled any diplomatic action on the part of the Vatican with a message discrediting Abdelhadi Mejdoub, accusing him of being a pro-Nazi collaborator during the German occupation of Tunisia.18 At the beginning of the following May, Salah Ben Youssef, at the time living as an expatriate in Cairo, approached the Vatican hierarchy to request the Holy See’s support for Tunisia’s cause at the United Nations. During a meeting with the Apostolic Internuncio in Egypt, Msgr. Albert Levame, Ben Youssef delivered a memorandum dated 9 May to him, denouncing the French government’s repressive measures that were “in stark contrast to the basic principles of Christian and Islamic morality”, and asking the Pope, in the name of the “strong ties that have always united Christianity and Islam as a bulwark against the most barbaric forces of spiritual degradation, atheism and materialism”, to “persuade France to acknowledge its errors and admit to committing atrocities”.19 Msgr. Levame made known to Msgr. Tardini in his report of 14 May that he had rejected Ben Youssef’s appeal because, as he argued, his interlocutor had no mandate in his country to make official requests to the Vatican specifying “that, at most, he could have conceded his appeal as a personal solicitation, and as such submit it [to the Secretariat of State], without however any assurance that it would be accepted”.20 The French Embassy to the Holy See on its part was quick to respond with a counter-memorandum sent to the Secretariat of State a few days later accusing the Neo-Destour, the Moroccan Istiqlal Party, and the Algerian Manifesto Party of acting under the “heavy and irrevocable” influence of the Kremlin, with the sole purpose of putting an end to the presence of France in North Africa and disseminating “Marxist materialism” among the Muslim populations.21 The memorandum underlined how the French government had never ceased to accompany its “protégés towards self-­ government” with gradually more concessions to administrative autonomy, and therefore that it had every right to ask the Holy Father to speak out in defence of France by exercising his “moral authority” over the Catholic

Start of the independence processes in North Africa 77 delegates at the United Nations, particularly those of Latin America, who, due to their historical anti-colonial and anti-European legacy, were inclined to sympathise with the Arab countries.22 Caught between two fires, the Vatican decided to maintain an unbiased stance as regards the incandescent situation in North Africa, where its main interest was to preserve the presence of Christian communities. An internal communiqué of the Secretariat of State suggested that in view of the forthcoming UN General Assembly both the Tunisian and the French memoranda be conveyed to the Nuncios of Brazil and of Chile, since the Holy See acknowledges not only the role played by French colonialism in the North African unrest but also the plausibility of a communist threat in the Arab world: The position of the Holy See – the note reads – is extremely delicate. On one hand, there is a Catholic nation that with the intention of protecting its colonial interests calls attention to the looming threat of communism in its overseas territories, where there is a state of great unrest which this nation itself has caused; on the other, there is the Arab world that is closer than ever before to the Apostolic See but where numerous Christian communities do not enjoy any form of legal protection. A false step in one direction or the other could have drastic consequences. […] Maybe it would be possible to write to the Nuncios of Brazil and Chile just to inform them of the steps taken by the representatives of France and of the Arab countries without hiding the fact that the Holy See is concerned about the spread of communism in the Arab countries.23 On 8 December 1952, the Latin American countries did indeed submit a very open-ended motion,24 approved on 17 December during the first session of the General Assembly. Different from that submitted by the ArabAsian countries in support of the aspirations of North Africa, it emphasised hopes for a resumption of French-Tunisian negotiations with a view to a progressive self-government of Tunisia that would safeguard the legitimate interests of France (Ikeda, 2016: 80–81). From the Vatican documentation following the attack on Farhat Hached however, it appears that the neutrality of the Holy See aroused considerable concern among the Arab independence movements. In February 1953, in a bid to raise awareness among the Vatican hierarchy, the Neo Destour, through the trade unionist Mourad Boukhris, leader of the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail, sent a dossier to Msgr. Levame on the assassination of Farhat Hached. The document stated that the killing had been carried out by the pro-French terrorist organisation, Main Rouge, on behalf of the French government.25 The revelations of the dossier that would be officially disclosed in France only after the declassification of the SDECE documents in 2013 at the request of the Hached

78  Start of the independence processes in North Africa family26 were considered credible by the Papal diplomacy, to the extent that the Holy Father had to be directly informed.27 A note from the Secretariat of State reads: It is certain that if the information contained in the documents in question is accurate – and there does not appear to be sufficient reason to doubt their accuracy – indisputably also Farhat Hached is one of the many victims of the relentless reason of State that in our case is called colonialism.28

Catholic mobilisation following the Casablanca uprising and the Moroccan question The assassination of Farhat Hached and the brutal repression of the ensuing clashes in Casablanca prompted the French Catholic world at home and in the Maghreb, to tackle the challenging issue of the relationship between Christian conscience and colonialism directly and thoroughly. In the wake of the events in Tunis and Casablanca, the Centre catholique des intellectuels français (CCIF), the clandestine anti-fascist association of Catholic historians and philosophers founded in 1941, decided to devote much of its activity to denouncing colonial policies in the Maghreb, including 15 debates, 2 issues of its periodical Recherches et débats, and a Week of French Intellectuals (Toupin-Guyot, 2002). In addition, the CCIF promoted a joint action with the Comité Chrétien d’Entente France-Islam (CCEFI), which on 9 December had issued a communiqué paying tribute to the memory of Farhat Hached who had been “cowardly murdered” and condemning at the same time “the indignity and futility of the acts of hate” committed by the French in Tunisia and Morocco (de Peretti, Borrmans: 68). To ensure the success of their plans to raise public awareness, the Secretaries General of the CCIF and the CCEFI, respectively, Robert Barrat and André de Peretti, along with Louis Massignon, asked François Mauriac, who had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in Stockholm, to help them.29 While still in the Swedish capital, he was informed of the “sinister events in Casablanca” thanks to an “unconfutable dossier” sent to him at the French Embassy there.30 Mauriac met Peretti and Barrat on 12 January 1953 during a preparatory meeting31 attended among others by Father René Voillaume, the Franciscan monk Abd-El-Jalil, and the Marquise Henryane de Chaponay, Princess of Orléans, who had been living in North Africa since 1943 and was actively involved in the Moroccan independence movement. During the meeting, however, some participants such as the philosopher Jean Guitton and the orientalist Robert Montagne, Director of the Centre des hautes études d’administration musulmane, who although certainly cannot be classed as conservative Catholics, criticised the hypothesis of direct political mobilisation. This was proof that, at the

Start of the independence processes in North Africa 79 beginning of 1953, even some of the most progressive Catholic intellectuals were still not ready to openly take a breakaway position on the colonial question (Toupin-Guyot: 135). Nonetheless, the Marquise Henryane de Chaponay, through the intercession of the auxiliary Bishop of Paris, Pierre Brot, sent a letter to the Holy Father containing a comprehensive consideration on the dialogue between the Christian community and the Islamic culture inspired by the teachings in the encyclical letter Evangelii Praecones and the pastoral letters written by the Archbishop of Rabat Msgr. Amedée Lefèvre.32 De Chaponay blamed the escalation of the hatred between Arabs and Christians, which was further widening “a chasm already too wide”, on the “indifference” of the Catholics in North Africa towards the suffering of the “people with whom they stand side by side”, and recommended a policy of proximity, “of glances”, towards the Arab population (“vis-à-vis […] une politique d’égards”).33 The letter accompanied by a detailed dossier on the violence of the French in Casablanca was received coolly by the Holy See. Msgr. Pierre Veuillot, the then head of French Affairs at the Secretariat General, merely commented that de Chaponay had given “a different version of the events in Morocco to that provided by the French authorities” and advised Tardini to respond with simply an “acknowledgment of receipt”.34 To the message addressed to the Marquise, the Holy Father added only a paternal blessing for her “noble family”.35 Mauriac meanwhile published a resounding editorial in Le Figaro urging Christians to “act against this racism born of profit-seeking and fear that gives rise to collective crime”,36 but above all, on 26 January, in front of more than 500 people, he chaired a lively debate organised by the CCIF on “Les problèmes de l’Afrique du Nord devant la conscience française”. During the meeting, Robert Barrat spoke of several hundred deaths during the clashes in Casablanca and called for a commission of enquiry to be set up to assess the exact number of victims.37 The CCIF meeting aroused vehement controversy, especially on the part of the Comité central de la France d’outre-Mer, a pressure group for the defence of colonial interests chaired by former ambassador to the Holy See François Charles-Roux, member of “Présence française”, the lobby of colonists, industrialists and officials of the Moroccan Protectorate (Brunschwig, 1959). Charles-Roux sent a letter to more than 900 prominent members of French society in which he harshly criticised the activities of the CCIF and accused them of bringing France into disrepute to the detriment of its essential needs overseas.38 Unexpectedly, this reproach was shared by Msgr. Jean Rodhain, who in 1946 had founded Secours catholique, a pioneering charitable organisation and a service of the Catholic Church committed to combating poverty and social injustice. On 17 March 1953, Rodhain sent the Ecclesiastical Assistant of the CCIF, Father Émile Berrar, a sternly worded letter accusing the organisation’s leaders of having provided not only disproportionate but

80  Start of the independence processes in North Africa also unverified figures regarding the number of people who died during the incidents in Casablanca. He added that this had contributed to propagating “despicable defamation” that in the eyes of international public opinion had depicted the image of a “national catastrophe” for France comparable to that suffered in Indochina.39 Subsequently, Rodhain sent the Secretariat of State a copy of this letter attached to a memorandum in which he associated the anti-colonial campaign in North Africa to the alleged negative influence of certain Eastern European priests spying for the Eastern bloc, welcomed and protected by Msgr. Amedée Lefèvre in Rabat. They included a stateless priest originally from Estonia, Ignace Lepp, former militant communist activist in France, Germany, and Russia who at the time was director of the Catholic newspaper Maroc-monde with ties also in Algeria.40 This climate of suspicion and recriminations within the Catholic world regarding the colonial problem was certainly not conducive to a peaceful diplomatic exchange between the leaders of the Arab independence movements and the Vatican hierarchy. In February 1953, the leader of the Istiqlal Party, Allal El Fassi, met Msgr. Levame in Cairo to ask him for an explanation regarding the contents of a document of the Embassy of the French Republic to the Holy See that had been delivered to the Sultan Mohammed V in the autumn of 1952. The document gave rise to concern in the Istiqlal Party as it appeared that, in view of the upcoming UN vote on the North African question, the Holy Father had authorised Msgr. Domenico Tardini “to draw the attention of the representatives of the Holy See in South America to the inappropriateness of a short-sighted policy that in the name of an outdated, anti-colonialist ideology, could have disastrous repercussions on Christian values and which these States themselves would soon regret”.41 According to this document (however judged by the Secretariat of State to have been “manipulated”42), the French ambassador to the Holy See, Wladimir d’Ormesson, had convinced Tardini that Arab nationalism was “increasingly identifiable with the most secular and xenophobic forms of Islam” and that it was in the Vatican’s interest to acknowledge that “in North Africa, France was taking a stance on matters that were crucial for Catholicism”.43 In a long letter delivered to the Internuncio in Cairo, Allal El Fassi expressed his “astonishment” at the news received by the Sultan “regarding the efforts of France’s diplomats to obtain effective support from His Holiness the Pope” aimed at legitimising a colonial policy of “robbery” and “bloodshed” “in blatant opposition to the principles of charity and human brotherhood that underpin Islam and Christianity alike”.44 The head of the Istiqlal Party, after having promised the Holy See that all religions would be equally respected in a future independent Morocco, denounced the “falsehoods” of the colonialists who acted “under the fallacious pretext of making the Christian faith triumph” “by combating Islamic heresy”.45 In addition, El Fassi praised the anti-colonial commitment of

Start of the independence processes in North Africa 81 progressive Catholicism particularly in the persons of Massignon and Mauriac, but which unfortunately had not met with a favourable response from the Protectorate’s most authoritarian French Catholics.46 In short, the Moroccan leader was asking the Holy Father to take an unequivocal stance without further hesitation and therefore “in all conscience to adopt the attitude that divine teachings prescribe and which impose interest for sincerely human reciprocal support between all men without distinction and regardless of the religion they profess, against colonialism in general, and the colonialism of certain Christian countries in some Muslim countries in particular”.47 In his reply, Msgr. Levame found his interlocutor’s remarks about the Church’s alleged “extraneousness” regarding the colonial question unjust and cited the Holy Father’s most recent pronouncements on the matter from the Apostolic Constitution Exsul Familia (1 August 1952) in defence of refugees and migrants, many of whom were victims of frenetic decolonisation processes. He also used as an example the interventions of the “French intellectuals” and the Archbishop of Rabat, who in that very period had expressed their solidarity with the Moroccan population, as if they were ascribable to the entire Catholic world.48 The Nuncio, however, condemned the lack of reciprocity between the dialogic approach of the Holy See, defined as “the only power to support the wishes of the Arab States, as in the much debated question of the internationalisation of Jerusalem and the Holy Places”, and the nationalism of the “Islamic States” which still had to “do everything in their power to ensure that the equally just desires of the Catholics living in (their) territories be taken into account”.49 The Nuncio went on to add: And I thought I should not miss the opportunity to insist with Mr Allal el-Fassi, whom I deem to be an intelligent, cultured and influential person, on the convenience of this kind of relationship right here in Egypt, a nation which willingly proclaims itself the mouthpiece of Arab claims but which, at least so far only in the words uttered by the Prime Minister, head of the revolutionary armed forces and holder of power [Nasser], has it expressed favour towards the wishes of the Catholics, which however is not matched by the actual attitude of high-ranking officers and too many illustrious Muslim fanatics, comprising many representatives of al-Azhar University.50 Mistrust of Arab nationalism and concern about the spread of political Islam and the success of communist propaganda are the main issues that emerge from reports on the administration crisis of colonial France sent in 1953 to the Holy See from two strategic posts for the Catholic Church in African, the Apostolic Delegation in Dakar, and the Archdiocese in Carthage.

82  Start of the independence processes in North Africa The reports written by Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre in Dakar and Father André Demeerseman in Tunis, both important religious figures but with greatly differing and at times opposing political and religious visions, began with divergent opinions regarding France’s conduct in the African colonies but drew the same conclusions with respect to the objectives to renew the Church’s actions to face the challenge of decolonisation. The analysis of the Archbishop of Dakar falls within a historical framework characterised by the radical changes to legislation and regulations in overseas France, due to the combined effect of the drive of African national movements towards attaining autonomy and the reformist tendencies in part of the political debate of the IV Republic as regards trade union and school education policies. On 15 December 1952, the “Overseas Labour Code” abolishing forced labour and restrictions on trade union freedom in French Africa was approved. It reduced the working week to 40 hours and established equal salary for all workers “regardless of their origin, gender, age and condition” (Art. 91). The Code was obtained following intense industrial action on the part of the CGT both at home and in the colonies. It marked an ideological and cultural turning point of French trade unionism, namely the development of an original combination of the international ambition of socialism and the contribution of pan-Africanism and the national demands of the peasant world, beyond the most dogmatic Marxism that considered only the factory workers in industrialised nations as the driving force behind all revolutions (Delanoue, Dewitte, 1983). The reform of Africa’s labour market, with the first metropolitan trade unions that protected workers’ rights, also involved an attempt to modernise the Education System (Service de l’Enseignement; see Gamble, 2010: 148–149), still based on segregationist criteria dating back to the colonial school system of the III Republic. A system that offered secondary education only to city dwellers or the so-called assimilated, and Africanised, primary school education, to use an adjective of that period, meaning devoid of any scientific content, to young natives who were “obedient and devoted to the assimilation cause” (Sar, Fofana, Banny, 1956: 75). Alongside State schools, the mission-run schools, mainly State-subsidised and found in rural areas, sought to “win the natives over and convert them to Christianity. This was an opportunity seen by the official powers as a way to make it easier for the population to accept the colonial occupation as a fact and that they had nothing to fear from this teaching service aimed at forming a resigned population”. As Louis-Paul Aujoulat pointed out during an MRP conference in 1945, this school system had to “avoid at all costs the development of unregimented masses who were not really aware of their role” (Sar, Fofana, Banny, 1956: 80). In 1950, as part of a project to reform France’s overseas system, an attempt was made to overturn this old education paradigm with the creation of the Institut des Hautes Études in Dakar. The institute comprised

Start of the independence processes in North Africa 83 four pre-university preparatory schools (law, medicine, science, and letters) and transformed the French West African school administration into “Metropolitan Academy”, a facility supervised by the National Education Ministry and therefore subject to more stringent quality control compared to that of the colonial authority, determined to maintain the low teaching standards of primary and rural schools prevalent until then (Gamble, 2010: 161). Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre’s report of 30 July 1953 harshly condemned the elements of reform introduced by the French administration in the fields of work and education that he perceived as a sign that the governing authorities had yielded to the subversive impetus of the more progressive political forces which, in his opinion, were dragging Africa into the orbit of communism.51 In his opinion, the influence of communist countries and in particular of the Soviet Union in French Africa was “undoubtedly the most universal and immediately the most evident” and was exerted “through the trade unionism of the CGT” against which “the French government is proving to be very weak”.52 Besides these “foreign influences”, it was “necessary to take into account the new surge of action of the French Freemasonry particularly on the part of the Service de l’Enseignement. Since M. Aujoulat’s departure from the French Overseas Ministry, the French Freemasons have imposed their position more than ever and are waging a serious fight against the mission-run schools”.53 In addition, Msgr. Lefebvre drew a bleak picture of the ever-increasing influence exerted by the Arab League on Islamic countries due to radio broadcasts from Cairo and their impact on African students. On this issue, the apostolic delegate wrote, “The French Government believes it can curb this influence by developing a religious Islam or a marabout [Islamic spiritual revival movement] that would be more loyalist without realising that it is inevitably paving the way for a political Islam. The French government’s way of doing things is disastrous from the point of view of the existence of the Church”.54 In view of the fragility of French colonial power, the Church should have reorganised its apostolic instruments so it was no longer dependent on a European power that would soon lose control of Africa. Lefebvre’s suggestion was to see to the Christian education of young people between 17 and 25 years of age through the creation of Catholic cultural centres in the largest cities and above all on the training of African clergy that was crucial for the “future” of “Christian civilisation”. In his opinion, this training had to take place in Rome or in Europe and exclusively in seminaries with no ties whatsoever with the seminarians’ countries or missions of origin. This recommendation was to prevent the seminarians from forming national groups that could have fomented feelings of ethnic belonging easily transformable into political claims among the “evolved”, i.e. educated Africans. “If these clerics have nurtured xenophobic sentiments, once back home they will share them with others and with the evolved and will tend to become political leaders instead of priests and apostles”.55

84  Start of the independence processes in North Africa As in Msgr. Lefebvre’s reports, the need for the Church to play a central role in managing the decolonisation process was also stressed in the Report of October 1953 sent by André Demeerseman of the White Fathers, Vicar General of the Archdiocese of Tunis, to the Apostolic Nuncio in Paris, Paolo Marella, who forwarded it to Tardini with the comment that the report was “well written, interesting, and worth reading”.56 On the other hand, Demeerseman’s commitment in favour of interreligious dialogue differed greatly and he disapproved of the French administration that in his opinion had ignored the demands for justice from populations desperate for their identity and dignity to be recognised (Demeerseman, 2014: 255). Although his opinions were harshly criticised and gave rise to retaliation towards the White Fathers from the so-called Prépondérants, the French colonists from the wealthy farming and trade classes (Demeerseman, 2014: 245, 259), Demeerseman did not hesitate to offer help and solidarity to the people who were victims of the military reprisals in the Cape Bon area in early 1952, especially in the village of Tazerka (Demeerseman, 2014: 239, 245, above all 242–243). It is therefore no surprise that the report sent to the Nunciature of Paris, unlike the one written a few months earlier by Lefebvre, was based on a strong denunciation of the “capitalism strengthened locally by colonist prejudice” and of the economic exploitation of the Tunisian proletariat by the French landowning classes in the cities and the countryside of the protectorate.57 On the contrary, the emphasis of the, in his opinion, heinous, “terrorist” and “totalitarian” nature of the independence protest against France, fuelled by communism and Destourians, is surprising, as is the ethnographic description of an alleged Arab and Islamic anthropology with immature and passionate traits. Here are some extracts from his report: The Church has a privileged role to play in this Muslim country, which without her is incapable of resisting the onslaught of Marxism. The Muslim, in fact, does not possess a sufficient feeling of human dignity and is already prepared to blend in with the community whatever it may be. […] For over a year now, Tunisia has adapted itself to a state of resistance similar to that of the French resistance: bloody riots, bombs, individual attacks. Tunisian nationalism led by a totalitarian party, the Destour, is spreading across the country, above all in cities and towns, thanks to its militants and its ideology shared by the educated elite. Those Tunisians who wish to proceed step by step and are against the use of violence have been reduced to silence and pay money extorted from them to avoid persecution. Those who are pro-French are blacklisted and fear for their lives. […] The working class masses support the terrorists who act indiscriminately. To them we have to add the 16,000 students of the Great Mosque

Start of the independence processes in North Africa 85 who are all dedicated to politics, not to mention the women in cities who also seem to foster nationalism. […] Then again, despite its reputation, the Muslim mentality is the perfect prey for a communism that encourages nationalist extremism with all its power. Islam, which is essentially centred on the community, neither forms personality nor character, and Muslims are instinctively ready to let themselves be absorbed into a totalitarian system for the good of the community.58 It was in fact the gravity of this situation that prompted Demeerseman to suggest that the Holy See should sever its ties with the European colonial experience so that it could credibly present itself as a moral point of reference and a balancing factor in such a complex and turbulent social context. The action of the Church should not appear to the Tunisians as “a threat to national cohesion” and as a “devious move to divide inspired by colonialist interests” but should “know how to make itself cautiously independent of racial prejudice”.59 Only a Catholic presence independent of colonialism could nurture the “hope of improving the Muslims” present “in the various circles of Christian and Church sympathisers” “who suffer due to the religious and moral mediocrity of Islam” and “who desire to exchange points of view with men of the Church to allow their children, as of now, to enjoy the benefits of an education in a Christian climate”.60 In short, in 1953, the Catholic Church was well aware that France was increasingly losing control of its colonial system in overseas territories and that to cope with rapid and radical changes it had to be ready to rethink the forms of its presence in European colonies. The appointment of a new apostolic nuncio in Paris in January 1953 to replace Angelo Roncalli, who had in the meantime been consecrated cardinal and appointed Archbishop-Patriarch of Venice, seemed to support this drive for renewal, much awaited in metropolitan France itself where many felt the need for a new relationship between the Vatican and French society. Contrary to common belief, due to the anti-historical and retrospective logic that conjures up an image of the Roncalli of the 1940s and 1950s as the progressive “good Pope” of the Council, in his capacity as Apostolic Nuncio, Roncalli was so conservative (Fouilloux, 1988; Gugelot, 2007) that Wladimir D’Ormesson, French Ambassador to the Holy See, noted in his diary that “the departure of Msgr. Roncalli from Paris will be greeted with an enormous sigh of relief by the government, by the M.R.P., by the Archbishop of Paris and by all sorts of other people. He wasn’t stupid, far from it, but he was very Italian in a negative sense…. The foreign ministry hated him. He contributed to giving the clergy and the laity a bad image of Rome. The social clergy hated him. His departure from Paris will be a good riddance”.61 The Archbishop of Paris Card. Maurice Feltin even feared that, once promoted to Curia cardinal, Roncalli would become “the fulcrum of all the French reactionaries who will come to do

86  Start of the independence processes in North Africa us harm”.62 The new Apostolic Nuncio, Msgr. Paolo Marella, until then Apostolic Delegate in Australia, had the reputation of being pragmatic, “shrewd and quick-witted”, but not reactionary and intransigent, although his personal friendship with Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, pro-Secretary of the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, the Vatican body stemming from the tribunal of the Holy Inquisition deputed to safeguard the orthodoxy of Catholic doctrine, led to fears that he might even act in Paris as “an agent of the Holy Office and a qualified informant of the Vatican”.63 As soon as he was installed at the head of the Nunciature, Marella’s first mission was indeed to firmly repress the experience of the worker-priests, the priests employed in factories to bear evangelical witness to the values of solidarity and social justice. In September 1953, Marella immediately made it clear to the bishops of France gathered at the Archbishopric of Paris that Rome’s decision to condemn the worker-priests, motivated by their alleged Marxist deviation, was irrevocable: “It is His Holiness’s decision, and whatever our sentiments, we owe him obedience” (Vinatier, 1985: 72–73). Marella’s intervention caused a sensation because it seemed to bring France, proudly secular and Gallican, under the shadow of Vatican power and it was no coincidence that Jean Lacroix rhetorically asked himself in “Esprit”: “By what right can a foreign ambassador [the Nuncio] bring together French citizens [the bishops], preside over their meetings and give them secret instructions?”.64 Despite the media incident linked to the excommunication of the priest-workers, the Nunciature in Paris maintained cordial relations with the French institutions, in particular with the French Embassy to the Holy See, which involved Marella in the selection of the majority of French bishops, in a form of cooperation unknown to his predecessor. Among the new appointments, one of the most significant was that of Léon-Étienne Duval, Archbishop of Algiers, transferred from Constantine in February 1954. The appointment of Duval, sponsored by the MRP leader Georges Bidault,65 had been strongly desired by Pope Pius XII himself who wanted a bishop with reformist tendencies to succeed the now elderly AugusteFernand Leynaud at the head of the difficult Archdiocese of Algiers. A symptom of this situation was the correspondence of the Holy See at the end of the year concerning the succession of the now elderly and dying Auguste-Fernand Leynaud at the head of the difficult Archdiocese of Algiers; in fact, Pius XII insisted on the appointment of the Bishop of Constantine, Léon-Etienne Duval, considered a reformist. As the diplomat, Msgr. Giulio Barbetta, wrote on behalf of Pius XII to Duval in a letter of 7 December, with this appointment the Pope wanted to “provide a Christian solution to Algeria’s religious and social issues”.66 The pontiff’s choice fell on Duval following a survey conducted by the Holy See among the principal senior figures of the Church in Africa. As can be deduced from Barbetta’s final report of 19 December, it appears that the opinion of the Superior General of the White Fathers, Msgr. Louis

Start of the independence processes in North Africa 87 Marie-Joseph Durrieu, was particularly important. In fact, according to Durrieu, Duval was “undoubtedly worthy and capable of governing the Archdiocese of Algiers. He has fully entered into the mentality of North Africa, first of all with regard to the Europeans who live there, but above all with regard to their relationship with the Muslims”.67 One of the most interesting aspects of the Vatican documentation declassified in March 2020 is undoubtedly that concerning Duval’s action, which appears in a new light compared to the image crystallised in the historiography on Algerian decolonisation. For a long time, in the absence of historiographic studies based on archival documentation, the history of the Algerian episcopate in the decolonisation period mainly relied on the accounts of prominent figures of the Algerian clergy who in the 1980s and 1990s wished to contribute to intellections on the meaning of their individual and collective experience. This is the case of the book-interview of Cardinal Léon-Etienne Duval, Archbishop of Algiers from 1954 to 1988, which includes interviews with the journalist Marie-Christine Ray (Ray, 1984), and the writings of two prelates closely associated with him. These are the memoirs of Msgr. Jean Scotto, pied-noir curate of Bab-el-Oued, a neighbourhood in the province of Algiers, during the War of Independence, who would become Bishop of Constantine from 1970 to 1983 (Scotto, 1991), and the contribution of Msgr. Henri Teissier, at the time of the Algerian conflict a seminarian at the Parish of Hussein Dey (Mission de France) under the supervision of Father Scotto, subsequently a student of Arabic language and literature in Paris and Cairo, and finally, after Independence, director of the Centre diocésain des Glycines, a training centre in the diocese of Algiers (from 1966) and Bishop of Oran (1972–1981) and author of texts of pastoral guidance for Catholics in North Africa on the value of the Christian presence in Muslim countries (Teissier, 1984, 1991, 1998). These sources recount, from the point of view of those directly involved, the story of the Catholic Church in the throes of a dramatic turning point; the majority of Christians of European origin decided to leave the Maghreb and at the same time the local episcopate pledged to remain at the service of the now independent Algeria from an evangelical viewpoint while respecting a coexistence based on interreligious friendship. In reality, the methodological observations made by Benjamin Stora regarding the “profusion of autobiographical writings that has invaded the editorial field for twenty years” concerning the Algerian War are also valid for religious testimonies, and as he pointed out “the absence of history has been partly filled by vigilant custodians of memory” with claims to truth (Stora, 2004). In the specific field of religious studies, only in 2012 did researchers from the Institut de recherches et d’études sur les mondes arabes et musulmans (IREMAM – Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’homme) in Aix-en-Provence, in particular Abderrahmane Moussaoui and Jean-Robert Henry, begin a collective investigation that was published in 2020. Based on a systematic

88  Start of the independence processes in North Africa historiographical treatment of memory-based sources, it proposes a history of the Catholic Church in Algeria that is careful not to give a heuristic value to subjective testimonies, at times tending towards an apologetic narrative that yields to the vocabulary of martyrology, but rather to ascertain whether the Christian minority saw the watershed of Independence as an overcoming or as a sublimation of the colonial era. This is the key question: was it the choice of a neo-colonial Church or a Third-Worldist or simply post-colonial one? (Henry, 2020). Prior to this collective work, two books based on archival research had appeared in Italy and France. The first was a biographical itinerary of Léon-Étienne Duval by Marco Impagliazzo published in 1994, whose main sources were documents from the Archbishopric of Algiers and Duval’s personal archives, made available by the Archbishop himself, and the second by Sybille Chapeu published in 2004 was dedicated to the network of progressive Catholics linked to the Mission de France. Impagliazzo’s book emphasises how Duval managed to distance the Church from the warring factions by constantly calling for pacification and condemning mutual violence. Duval, accused of being a defeatist and a traitor by the French minority in favour of colonial Algeria, defended the values of justice and peace ignored both by the more extremist French military circles and by the extremists of the National Liberation Front (Impagliazzo, 1994: 65–99), thus earning for the Catholic Church a status of legitimacy to survive with dignity in the new independent Algeria where, having become a cardinal in 1965, he promoted human rights and the development of African peoples (Impagliazzo, 1994: 175–224). Sybille Chapeu reconstructs the role of Mission de France, an institution created by the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops of France in 1941 on the initiative of Cardinal Suhard with the aim of evangelising the most de-Christianised working-class regions of France through an original theological and pastoral formation that taught priests the Marxist theory and prepared them to work in factories, ports, and building sites alongside the poor and exploited. Sybille Chapeu’s detailed and informative book reconstructs, among other things, the action of the philosopher Francis Jeanson, writer and secretary at Les Temps Modernes who, with his group of Sartrean or communist intellectuals critical of the overly cautious leadership of the PCF towards the NLF, and in synergy with the priests of the Mission de France, in particular Robert Davezies, coordinated a clandestine organisation, known as Réseau Jeanson, which provided logistical support for the operations of the Algerian independence front (Chapeu, 2004: 125, 154–155). Lastly, the book by Darcie Fontaine, Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria, extends the analysis to the Algerian and metropolitan Protestant cultural and religious world, focusing however, as far as the Catholic reality is concerned, largely on the same scenario described by Sybille Chapeu, and on the documentation of the Mission de France and the Duval archive (already published by Marco

Start of the independence processes in North Africa 89 Impagliazzo), although her interpretation of the said documentation seems at times to be somewhat forced (Fontaine, 2016). In his book, Marco Impagliazzo, drawing on personal and direct conversations with the former Archbishop of Algiers, describes Duval as a typical representative of Pius XII’s pontificate on politically neutral positions of a moderate kind, albeit inspired by an unwavering ecumenical and pacifist spirit (Impagliazzo, 1994: 124–135), while Fontaine places him among the ranks of the progressive and independentist Church without any specific documentation to support this interpretation. The story of the Mission de France in Algeria, defined by Sybille Chapeu as a “page of Franco-Algerian history” (Chapeu, 2013: 40), in Fontaine’s sometimes apodictic treatise becomes the focal point of the “Christianity” committed alongside the pro-independence Algerians to following a unidirectional path of emancipation that leads to the Second Vatican Council and to Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio encyclical on the development of the Third World promulgated in 1967.

Notes 1 Discorsi e Radiomessaggi di Sua Santità Pio XII, VI, 2 marzo 1944 – 1° marzo 1945, Vatican City: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1961, 47–52. 2 A.A.S. 43 (1951), 497–528. 3 Cfr. C. Costantini, S.S. Pio XII grande pontefice missionario. Roma: Tipografia del Senato, 1956; Id., Réformes des mission au XX siècle. Tournai – Paris: Casterman, 1960. 4 See Carlo Falconi, Il pentagono vaticano. Bari: 1958, Laterza, 183. 5 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 4 fasc. 16–20, Marcel Lefebvre’s note for H.E. Msgr. Giovanni Battista Montini, 5 December 1951, ff. 18–19. 6 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 4, fasc. 21–24, Marcel Lefebvre’s note for Msgr. Domenico Tardini, 23 November 1951, ff. 22–23. 7 These claims are also set forth in a report sent by the Moroccan leader of the Istiqlal Party, Allal El Fassi, to the Arab League in April 195l; see Martin Abel, Die Marokko -Krise. Zeitschrift für Geopolitik (XXII), 1951: 221–233, here 224. 8 Le Conseil des Ministres met au point cet après-midi un projet de convention franco- marocaine. Le Monde, 1 November 1950. 9 Jacques-H. Guérif, Le Sultan du Maroc accueille avec réticence la réponse française a son mémorandum. Le Monde, 2 November 1950. 10 Le désaveu public de l’Istiqlal par le Makhzen met fin à la tension franco marocaine. Le Monde, 28 February 1951. 11 Benjamin Rivlin, The Tunisian Nationalist Movement: Four Decades of Evolution. Middle East Journal, 6 (2), Spring, 1952, 167–193, here 182–183. 12 Henri De Montety, L’attention et les polémiques se concentrent aujourd’hui sur les pouvoirs de contrôle du secrétaire général. Le Monde, 4 October 1950. 13 La Question tunisienne. Chronique de politique étrangère, 6(4), (July 1953), 479–502. 14 Henri DE Massals, Le cap Bon où la Légion a procédé à de rudes opérations de “nettoyage” est par un loyer d’agitation. Le Monde, 4 February 1952. 15 See Roberto Rubinacci, La Tunisia nell’ultimo decennio. Oriente Moderno, 33(5), (May 1953): 201–229, here 227.

90  Start of the independence processes in North Africa 16 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 5, fasc. 49–59, letter from Abdelhadi Mejdoub to His Holiness the Pope, 31 January 1952, ff. 52–56. 17 Ibid. 18 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 5, fasc. 49–59, letter from Ambassador Wladimir d’Ormesson to the Vatican Secretariat of State, 22 January 1952, f. 57. 19 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 5, fasc. 60–69, memorandum by Salah Ben Youssef, 9 May 1952, ff. 65–66. 20 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 5, fasc. 60–69, Report sent from Internuncio Msgr. Albert Levame to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, 14 May 1952, ff. 63–64. 21 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 5, fasc. 126–142, memorandum sent from French Embassy to the Holy See to the Vatican Secretariat of State, 23 May 1952, ff. 129–130. 22 Ibid. 23 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 5, fasc. 49–59, Note from Vatican Secretariat of State (dated May 1952), ff. 132–132v. 24 UN General Assembly Documentation Official Records, vol. 7 1952–53, First Committee,193, 206, 231. The Latin American countries that presented the resolution include Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. 25 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 6, fasc, 2–16, Mourad Boukhris, 5 February 1953, f. 7; Boukhris’ document is attached to the letter sent from Internuncio Msgr. Albert Levame to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, 6 February 1953, f. 6. 26 In a “very urgent” telegram addressed to the French Foreign Ministry sent on 16 May 1952, found in July 2013 among the declassified documents, the Resident-General Jean de Hauteclocque states that “only the annihilation of Farhat Hached will allow us to rest assured”; a report dated 3 December 1952, further revealed that Farhat Hached was controlled by an SDECE team sent from Paris; see Pierre Houpert, Le 5 décembre 1952, le syndicaliste tunisien Farhat Hached est assassin. Jeune Afrique, 5 December 2016. 27 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 6, fasc. 2–16, Note from the Vatican Secretariat of State for the Holy Father, 11 March 1953, f. 3. 28 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 6, fasc. 2–16, Note from the Vatican Secretariat of State (March 1953), ff. 4–4v–5. 29 François Mauriac, Nouveaux mémoires intérieurs. Paris: Flammarion, 1965, 245. 30 François Mauriac, Bloc-Notes. Paris, Seuil, 1993, tome I, 303. 31 André de Peretti, François Mauriac et les problèmes d’Afrique du Nord. Recherches et Débats, 70, February 1971: 167–180, here 172. 32 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 6, fasc. 76–87, letter from Marquise Henryane de Chaponay to Pius XII, undated, ff. 79–79v. 33 Ibid. 34 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 6, fasc. 76–87, letter from Msgr. Pierre-Marie Veuillot to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, 17 January 1953, ff. 76–77, here f. 78. 35 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 6, fasc. 76–87, letter from Msgr. Domenico Tardini to Marquise Henryane de Chaponay, 7 February 1953, f. 77. 36 François Mauriac, Vocation des chrétiens dans l’Union française. Le Figaro, 13 January 1953, cited in Jean Lacouture, François Mauriac. Paris: Seuil, 1980, 456. 37 C. J., MM. Mauriac, De Peretti, Barrat demandent une enquête sur les avènements de Casablanca. Le Monde, 28 January 1953.

Start of the independence processes in North Africa 91 38 Barrat Robert, Justice pour le Maroc, préface de François Mauriac. Paris: Le Seuil, 1953, 96–97. 39 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 6, fasc. 27–42, letter from Msgr. Jean Rodhain to the ecclesiastical assistant of the Centre catholique des intellectuels français Msgr. Émile Berrar, 17 March 1953, ff. 33–36. 40 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 6, fasc. 27–42, note by the Vatican Secretariat of State, 1 April 1953, ff. 31–31v. 41 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 5, fasc. 2–14, Report attributed by Istiqlal to the French ambassador to the Holy See, dated 15 October 1952, f. 13. 42 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 5, fasc. 2–14, note by Msgr. Domenico Tardini, 13 March 1953, f. 3. 43 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 5, fasc. 2–14, Report attributed by Istiqlal to the French ambassador to the Holy See, dated 24 September, and 2 October 1952, f. 12. 44 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 5, fasc. 2–14, letter from Allal El Fassi to Internuncio Msgr. Albert Levame, 16 February 1953, ff. 8–11. 45 Ibid. f. 9. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., f. 10. 48 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 5, fasc. 2–14, letter by Internuncio Msgr. Albert Levame, 16 February 1953, ff. 6–7. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 6, fasc. 55–61, note by Marcel Lefebvre, Sur la situation actuelle politique dans les territoires de la délégation (On the current political situation in the territories of the delegation), 30 July 1953, ff. 57–59, attached to Lefebvre’s letter to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, 10 August 1953, f. 56. 52 Ibid. f. 58. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., ff. 58–59. 56 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 8, fasc. 15–173, letter from Nuncio Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, 15 September 1953, f. 20. 57 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 8, fasc. 15–173, Report by André Demeerseman, Informazioni sullo stato della Arcidiocesi di Cartagine (Information on the state of the Archdiocese of Carthage), sent to the Nunciature of Paris and to the Sacred Consistorial Congregation, 15 September 1953, ff. 21–105, here f. 88. 58 Ibid., ff. 88–91. 59 Ibid., ff. 98, 100. 60 Ibid., f. 101. 61 Manuscript diary by Wladimir d’Ormesson, deposited in the French National Archives. References to the Journal de Wladimir d’Ormesson (diary by Wladimir d’Ormesson) are noted as follows: JWO, followed by the date. JWO, 29 November 1952. 62 JWO, 6 January 1953. 63 Letter from W. d’Ormesson a G. Bidault, 23 October 1953, cited in Bernard Berthod, Pierre Blanchard, Les rapports diplomatiques entre la France et le Saint-Siège. Wladimir d’Ormesson et le nonce Paolo Marella, 1953–1957. Chrétiens et sociétés, 6, 1999: 81–105. 64 Jean Lacroix, Nonciature et diplomatie. Esprit, 21 December, 1953: 786–787, here 786.

92  Start of the independence processes in North Africa 65 JWO, 7 November 1953. 66 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 7, fasc. 2–30, letter from Msgr. Giulio Barbetta to Msgr. Léon-Etienne Duval, 7 December 1953, f. 27. 67 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 7, Msgr. Giulio Barbetta’s report, 19 December 1953, ff. 25–25v.

References Abitbol, Michel (2014). Histoire du Maroc. Paris: Tempus. Berramdane, Abdelkhaleq (1987). Le Maroc et l’Occident: 1800–1974. Paris: Éditions Karthala. Brunschwig, Henri (1959). Le parti colonial français. Outre-Mers. Revue d’histoire, 162: 49–83. Chapeu, Sybille (2004). Des chrétiens dans la guerre d’Algérie. L’action de la Mission de France. Paris: Les Éditions de l’Atelier-Éditions ouvrières. Chapeu, Sybille (2013). Des prêtres français aux côtés des nationalistes algériens. Plein droit, 96(1): 36–40. Delanoue Paul, Dewitte, Philippe (1983). La CGT et les syndicats de l’Afrique noire de colonisation française, de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale aux indépendances. Le Mouvement social, 122: 103–121. Demeerseman, Gérard (2014). André Demeerseman (1901–1993). À Tunis, soixante ans à l’Institut des Belles Lettres Arabes (IBLA). Paris: Éditions Karthala. El Mechat, Samia (2017). Le protectorat en Tunisie ou la reforme à contre-coeur 1945–1954. Outre-Mers, 2(396–397): 51–67. Fontaine, Darcie (2016) Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fouilloux, Étienne (1988). Extraordinaire ambassadeur? Mgr Roncalli à Paris (1944–1953). Revue Historique, 279(1): 101–128. Gabrieli, Christian (2017). Un protagonista tra gli eredi del celeste impero. Celso Costantini delegato apostolico in Cina (1922–1933). Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane. Gamble, Harry (2010). La crise de l’enseignement en Afrique occidentale française (1944–1950). Histoire de l’éducation, 128: 129–162. Giovagnoli, Agostino (1984). Pio XII e la decolonizzazione, In: A. Riccardi (ed), Pio XII. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 179–209. Gugelot, Frédéric (2007). Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli. Journal de France. Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 138: 220–221. Henry, Jean-Robert (2020). Abderrahmane Moussaoui, L’Église et les chrétiens dans l’Algérie indépendante. Études et témoignages. Paris: Karthala. House, Jim (2012). L’impossible contrôle d’une ville coloniale? Casablanca, décembre 1952. Genèses, 1(86): 78–103. Ikeda, Ryo (2016). The Imperialism of the French Decolonisation Policy and the AngloAmerican Response in Tunisia and Morocco. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ikeda, Ryo (2006). French policy towards Tunisia and Morocco: The international dimensions of decolonisation, 1950–1956. PhD thesis, London: London School of Economics and Political Science. Impagliazzo, Marco (1994). Duval d’Algeria. Una Chiesa tra Europa e mondo arabo (1946–1988). Roma: Edizioni Studium. Ray, Marie-Christine (1984). Le Cardinal Duval: “Évêque en Algérie”. Entretiens du Cardinal Léon-Etienne Duval, archevêque d’Alger. Paris: Centurion.

Start of the independence processes in North Africa 93 Riccardi, Andrea (1988). Il potere del papa. Da Pio XII a Paolo VI. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Sar, Alioune, Fofana, Ibrahim, Banny, Konan (1956). Esprit et situation de l’enseignement en Afrique Noire. Présence Africaine, 6 (11): 71–83. Scotto, Jean (1991). Curé pied-noir, évêque algérien, Souvenirs recueillis par Charles Ehlinger, Préface d’André Mandouze. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Simonato, Ruggero (1985). Celso Costantini tra rinnovamento cattolico in Italia e le nuove missioni in Cina. Pordenone: Concordia sette. Stora, Benjamin (2004). L’histoire de l’Algérie, sources, problèmes, écritures. Insaniyat, 25–26: 215–224. Teissier, Henri (1984). Église en islam. Méditation sur l’existence chrétienne en Algérie. Paris: Centurion. Teissier, Henri (1991). Histoire des chrétiens d’Afrique du Nord: Libye, Tunisie, Algérie, Maroc. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Teissier, Henri (1998). Lettres d’Algérie. Paris: Bayard/Centurion. Toupin-Guyot, Claire (2002). Les Intellectuels catholiques dans la société française. Le Centre catholique des intellectuels français (1941–1976). Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Vinatier, Jean (1985). Les prêtres-ouvriers, le cardinal Liénart et Rome. Paris: Éditions Ouvrières.

4

The handling of the Algerian crisis by the Holy See and the Faure government (1954–1955)

The Vatican and the Catholic world in the aftermath of the Toussaint rouge: cries and whispers Before accepting the office of Archbishop of Algiers in January 1954, Duval had declined the Pope’s invitation at length, convinced that he would be unable to bear a burden that promised to be extremely taxing. On 17 December, he wrote to Msgr. Barbetta, “The responsibilities of the Archbishop will be very onerous. False modesty apart, I do not feel I would be capable of shouldering them”.1 Duval’s foresight of the daunting responsibilities that awaited him was prophetic, despite the fact that, at the time of his appointment, everything indicated that the national movement of Algeria, unlike those of Morocco and Tunisia, had been quelled, if not defeated, by the colonial authorities. Repeated electoral fraud and constant violations of basic civil and political rights by the Residency-General in Algiers had divided and weakened the independence movements. The elections for the partial renewal of the Algerian assembly on 4 and 11 February 1951 had confirmed the electoral manipulations on the part of the French authorities.2 In the second constituency, that intended for the vote of the autochthons “of Muslim status”, out of 60 candidates elected, only 8 represented the opposition, while all the others enjoyed the approval and support of the administration. Similar instances of vote rigging occurred during the general elections of 17 June 1951 held to choose the MPs of the three Algerian departments in the National Assembly. In the second constituency, the Communist Party lost two seats, while not one single candidate of MTLD (Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratiques) led by Messali Hadj and of UDMA (Union démocratique du manifeste algérien) founded by Ferhat Abbas was elected (Peyroulou, 2009: 338). The three parties affected by electoral fraud, along with the Association of Muslim Ulemas, decided to join forces under the banner of the Algerian Front for the Defence and Respect of Freedoms (Remaoun, 2016: 354), set up on 5 August 1951 to demand that the parliamentary elections be invalidated, and that the Algerian people’s fundamental freedoms of conscience, press, DOI: 10.4324/9781003230175-5

The handling of the Algerian crisis 95 opinion, and assembly be respected by the French authorities. It also voiced its rejection of all forms of repression, whether collective or individual, and any form of administrative interference in religious affairs (Nouschi, 1962: 156). However, due to continuous internal disagreements and the emergence of numerous ideological incompatibilities, the Front was dissolved in 1953. Far from developing a shared strategy for the elections held on 31 January and 7 February 1954 for the renewal of the Algerian Assembly, the Ulema, the Communist Party, and the UDMA presented the voters of the second constituency with competitive lists which simply weakened each other, while the MTLD decided not to participate in the competition at all, thus losing all representation.3 The electoral failure of the independence movements brought to an end the era in which Algerian nationalism challenged the colonial system via the ballot box, defined by Malika Rahal as the “decade of political parties” (Rahal, 2013a, 2013b, 2018). At the same time, it opened a new season marked by a different relationship between militancy and political violence that on 23 March 1954, led to the creation of the Comité révolutionnaire pour l’unité et l’action (CRUA), whose aim was to imbue the PPA-MTLD (Boudiaf, 1992: 70; Meynier, 2004) with a revolutionary spirit that would ignite the armed struggle for Algerian liberation. The triggering events are notoriously those that occurred on the All Saints’ Day of 1954, known as the Toussaint rouge (Red All Saints’ Day), when a coordinated series of attacks, dynamite explosions, and acts of sabotage and arson carried out by independence activists throughout Algeria, revealed a long planned insurgency strategy. The decision to act on a Christian holiday that was strongly felt by the observant French in the colony was obviously no coincidence, since the observance of the religious calendar by the colonists guaranteed the preservation of a symbolic order of rites and traditions – such as the Marian celebrations, the Easter Triduum, and the commemoration of the Saints – which marked the space and passage of time of daily life in Africa, in psychological communion with metropolitan France, and therefore served to convey national self-awareness and a sense of belonging to Christian Europe. The Toussaint rouge, which is conventionally regarded as the beginning of the Franco-Algerian war, can be considered a historiographical watershed mainly because it revealed a new political morphology of Algerian nationalism, which broke with the ideological patterns known to the colonial administration. Until then, in fact, the radical nationalism of Messali Hadj, with its succession of different acronyms (ENA, PPA and MTLD), had been the only grassroots movement whose direct objective was independence, while the political galaxy composed of the UDMA and the Ulama was a bourgeois cross-section, characterised by the claims of greater political autonomy or, in the case of religious reformism, a cultural revival based on the identity of Islam, but without any real revolutionary offshoots. On 5 November 1954, therefore, the French authorities dissolved the MTLD,

96  The handling of the Algerian crisis convinced that they had decapitated the political leadership of the 1 November insurrection. In reality, the Toussaint Rouge had been accompanied by the dissemination of a proclamation issued by a fledgling and hitherto unknown FLN (Front de libération nationale), which openly declared the objective of “national independence”, defined as the “restoration of the sovereign, democratic and social Algerian State, within the framework of Islamic principles”, with “respect for all fundamental freedoms regardless of race or religion” (Shepard, 2015: 96–100). Although in the first months of the war, the FLN relied not only on family networks, but also on political links with the PPA-MTLD, in effect its ambition was to represent the entire Algerian population, and indeed its proclamation of 1 November invited all Algerians, regardless of political or class divisions, to converge under the exclusive leadership of the FLN for the achievement of independence both through the military action of its armed wing, namely the FLN’s National Liberation Army (Armée de libération nationale, ALN), and political negotiation, conducted by the FLN itself on condition, however, that France accepted the principle of self-determination (Vince, 2020: 64). The significance of the political change brought about by the advent of the National Liberation Front was not understood by the government in Paris which at the first signs, simply flexed its military muscles by deploying battalions of paratroopers in Arris and Bouhamama and dispatching troops to patrol the rural areas that were the theatres of the insurrection (Médard, 2010: 86). So it was that the Franco-Algerian conflict began without the word “war” ever being mentioned by the French authorities, since – as Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France and the Minister of the Interior, François Mitterrand strongly reiterated before the National Assembly – “Algeria is France” and “the departments of Algeria are departments of the French Republic”,4 therefore, for the government, an armed secession could be neither a realistic nor even conceivable scenario. The name “Algerian War” would not be officially acknowledged until 45 years later under Law regarding the replacement of the expression “operations conducted in North Africa” with “the Algerian War or fighting in Tunisia and Morocco” (No. 99-882 of 18 October 1999).5 However, for some exponents of Pax Christi, the international Catholic peace movement chaired by the Archbishop of Paris Cardinal Feltin, it was clear from the very start of the repressive operation in Algeria that a real war had broken out with very high human and social costs. On 14 November 1954, the Lyon section of Pax Christi tried to promote a public Catholic initiative condemning the French military intervention, an initiative which, as the unpublished documentation in the historical archives of the Church of France shows, failed because of opposition from the Archbishop of Algiers, Msgr. Duval. After a meeting between representatives of Catholic Action and the Bishop of Lyon Cardinal Pierre-Marie Gerlier held to discuss the events in North Africa, the diocesan assistant of the Secours catholique of Lyon,

The handling of the Algerian crisis 97 Abbé Joseph Gelin, wrote to Msgr. Bernard Lalande, personal secretary to Cardinal. Feltin and delegate of Pax Christi, representing the French section of the movement, urging the Church of France to formally denounce the military intervention, since the grassroots activists of Catholic associations had fallen into a state of despondency in the face of the inertia of the ecclesiastical hierarchies: At the point of passivity in which we find ourselves in the face of the massacres that are being prepared and perpetuated, I believe a reprimand of this kind is necessary. Some Christians have detected the phrase: ‘at this moment the only possible negotiation is war’. I believe it is Mitterrand’s. Unless it is Chevalier’s [Jacques Chevallier Mayor of Algiers, 1953–1958, from June 1954 to become Secretary of State for War and later Minister of Defence in Pierre Mendès France’s government]. It is said that the latter is a leader of Catholic Action in A.N. [North Africa]. Is this so? Do you intend to make a gesture or say a word in Paris? Once again, one senses that the trust of the best in the movement is waning.6 Initially, on 19 November, Lalande responded positively, saying that if Cardinal Gerlier supported the draft motion condemning the war, promoted by the Lyon section of Pax Christi, Feltin in Paris would have no problem in giving his assent.7 The draft motion drawn up by the Lyon chapter of Pax Christi, although in reality quite vague and generic, nevertheless referred to the “painful conflict” and the war fought overseas, as well as to the need to “understand the material, psychological, social, legal, religious and political situation that lies behind the conflict”.8 The correspondence of 23 and 24 November between Msgr. Lalande and Msgr. Duval clearly shows that the pacifist initiative of the Lyon chapter of Pax Christi failed because of strong opposition from the Archbishop of Algiers who, in line with the official version of the government, was determined to deny the existence of a state of war in his diocese. In his letter of 23 November, Msgr. Lalande informed Duval that the text drafted in Lyon, at the prompting of local activists no longer willing to accept the Church’s “silence”, had already received the approval of his own Archbishop Cardinal Gerlier, of the president of the French national chapter of Pax Christi, Msgr. Pierre-Marie Théas, as well as of the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Feltin. The merit of the motion was, in his view, its extreme moderation, aimed at inspiring gestures of reconciliation rather than opposition: As you asked me during our telephone conversation, I am entrusting the enclosed draft to you for your approval. This text comes from the Lyon chapter of Pax Christi; Abbé Gelin, chaplain of the Catholic Faculty

98  The handling of the Algerian crisis of Lyon, sent it to us after having consulted His Eminence Cardinal Gerlier, and after the latter had received your letter. I immediately informed His Eminence Cardinal Feltin and I read the contents over the telephone to His Excellency Monsignor Théas who agreed to sign it as the National President of Pax Christi for France. Nevertheless, Cardinal Feltin, Monsignor Théas, and myself, as head of the National Secretariat, do not want to do anything without having the prior assurance that this declaration has been appreciated by Your Excellency. The terms seem to us to be measured and, it seems, such as to reassure rather than excite. We know that other organisations would gladly think of similar manifestos; but it is likely that their wording would be much more aggressive than ours is. There again, many of our local chapters are asking us not to remain silent. That is why, Your Excellency, I am taking the liberty of asking for your opinion, and, if you agree in principle, your corrections and suggestions.9 Duval replied very frankly that he would not agree to the initiative and that he did not want to be involved. His justification was that the document had been written by a person who was not an eyewitness and might therefore refer to the existence of a war that had never actually broken out: It is very difficult for me to reply by telephone or telegram to such a serious question as that you have asked me. Please excuse me for replying to you in a letter. It seems to me that two changes should be made: 1) in paragraph 2, the expression ‘fighting each other’ suggests that there is a regular war going on, which there is not. Could it not say: … ‘Always having before our eyes that, above the barriers of space and race, all men remain brothers before God’. 2) For the same reason in the next paragraph, the words ‘about war’ should be deleted. This is my opinion. Nonetheless, this opinion – confidentially expressed – does not amount to an approval; I would not like my name to be associated with this affair. I find it astonishing that one should express an opinion without coming to see for oneself.10 Duval’s disavowal caused Cardinal Feltin to backtrack and on the following 30 November Lalande informed Abbé Gelin that the Lyon text could not be accepted in its original version for the following reasons: Feltin refused his assent “at least for the days to come”; Msgr. Villot, Secretary of the French Episcopate, and Father Emile Gabel, editor-in-chief of “La Croix”, harboured “uncertainty” because of some “reservations, regarding certain details” connected to the drafting of the motion and requested the use of the “conditional” tense to further soften the text; Msgr. Paul Maurice Perrin (Metropolitan Archbishop of Carthage since October 1953) preferred to speak of “situations” in the “plural”, to “emphasise that the North African

The handling of the Algerian crisis 99 problem embraces different spiritual communities (Christians, Muslims, Jews) and to react to an excessively simplistic perspective”; and lastly, Duval asked that the reference to the “war” be deleted.11 Duval’s closing remark deeply hurt Abbé Gelin, who wrote in an autographed note: I was sure the [ecclesiastical] authorities would have tripped up over the allusion to the war. Our allusion to the war was deliberate. Albeit while obeying the Archbishops, my opinion remains that there is war when soldiers strafe women in a defenceless village for two hours. The other opinion seems prudent to me, but I endure it with pain.12 At the beginning of December, a statement from the Algerian Episcopate concerning the “Aurès insurrection” containing an appeal for prayer, social justice, and brotherly love, appeared (Déclaration de l’épiscopat algérien au suiet de l’insurrection de l’Aurès, in Semaine religieuse d’Alger, December 2, 1954, cited in Mayeur, 1965: 371). This was the first of those humanitarian pronouncements that historiography considers proof of Msgr. Duval’s “Algerian commitment” in the face of the silence of the episcopate of metropolitan France (Gonzales, 2013). In reality, as emerges from the correspondence already mentioned and from other documents analysed in the following pages, one of the causes of the silence of the French Episcopate was precisely the opposition of the Archbishop of Algiers to any possible initiative of the metropolitan Church likely not only to politicise the conflict but also to overshadow his episcopal prerogatives in Algeria. Abbé Gelin and Msgr. Lalande found the Algerian bishops’ intervention, which reduced the war to an insurrectionary episode in the Aurès region, very disappointing, since such a declaration, according to Lalande’s suspicion, was intended to put “an end to our activity by cutting the ground from under our feet (without giving us the slightest warning)”.13 Gelin replied resignedly that any appeal was still “better than nothing. The publication of a text increases the chances that Christians will learn something about their Church. When the spirits are disoriented, those chances are slim!”.14 However, the abbot from Lyons hoped one day to write an exegetical commentary against the hypocrisy of the episcopal hierarchies, which would emphasise the contrast between Moses, the first “fellagha in the Bible” and the Christians of Damascus placed “within the juridical facade” of the “chosen nation”.15 After the dismal failure of the initiative of the Lyon chapter of Pax Christi, the pacifist organisation had to cope with another problem when a number of Algerian clergy protested against the activists in the western suburbs of Paris who had signed a petition addressed to Father Louis Augros, Superior of the Mission de France, as a sign of solidarity with the local équipe in Souk Ahras and against the violence and torture during France’s military repression of the population. As reconstructed by the historian Sybille Chapeu in

100  The handling of the Algerian crisis detail, despite Pius XII’s excommunication of the priest-worker movement, the Mission de France continued to represent an ideal missionary model not only in an increasingly secularised France undergoing a profound socio-cultural transformation, but also in Algeria where the organisation had been present since 1949 (Chapeu, 2004). The groups, based at Hussein-Dey in the port of Algiers and in the Souk-Ahras region, were composed of priests eager to join the poorest among the Muslim population whose aspirations to independence they had been quick to understand. They included Jobic Kerlan, a friend of Badji Mokhtar, an FLN militant killed in November 1954 during an operation against the French army, and Louis Augros and Pierre Mamet, who in 1955 had founded the Entr’aide fraternelle association for friendship between communities and a support committee for the families of nationalist prisoners (Chapeu, 2004: 30). The letters written by Algerian pieds-noirs priests against Pax Christi activists who were in solidarity with the Mission of France spoke of “the danger of misinterpreting” Islam that translated into underestimating the “inseparable” symbiosis in Islamic culture between religion, society, and politics16; of the lack of the “minimum experience of the Muslim mentality and psychology”17; and of the simplistic sympathy towards Muslims who know neither natural law nor the law of the human person but only subservience to “a tyrant God” to be worshipped with the “art of war”.18 At the same time as the mobilisation of Pax Christi, the military repression in Algeria provoked an equally lively mobilisation of intellectuals of the Christian left against the “war” and against the use of torture, which had long been the best known and most studied aspect of the relationship between Catholicism and North African decolonisation. For the purposes of this book, it is not necessary to go back over this subject, to which French historiography devoted its first contributions as early as the 1970s and 1980s, with the works of André Nozière (1979), François Bédarida and Étienne Fouilloux (1988) and the doctoral theses of Maillard de La Morandais and El Korso (Maillard de La Morandais, 1983; El Korso, 1984). This historiography has questioned the motivations behind the stance adopted by Christians, Catholics, and Protestants in the face of the Algerian conflict, sometimes leading to the option of open support for the FLN. Were these motivations religious or political? In the majority of cases, an ethical commitment emerges that is driven not only by a profound conviction of faith, but also in the name of political principles clearly influenced by republican ideals of freedom and justice. In the last decade (since 2012), the theme has been further explored by studies dedicated to progressive press publications, such as “Témoignage chrétien” (El Korso, 2012) and “Vin nouveau” (Mayeur-Jaouen, 2018), and the reconstruction of this political field in terms of “Christian Dreyfusism”, i.e. as a “nebula of liberal Catholics and leftwing Catholics” who saw in the opposition to the reactionary right-wing assertion of the colonial empire, the realisation of the same values as in the battle in defence of Dreyfus (Bocquet, 2012, 2014). Moreover, as Pierre

The handling of the Algerian crisis 101 Riché pointed out when referring to the anti-colonialist stances of HenriIrénée Marrou, intellectuals opposed to the Algerian war put the colonial police and the Gestapo on an equal footing, as the struggle for Algerian independence was seen as the logical continuation of the resistance of the maquis (French partisans); hence Hence Marrou’s vehement condemnation of torture on 5 April 1956, which appeared in the Libre Opinion column of the daily newspaper Le Monde, which has remained famous for its evocative title France, ma patrie … (Riché, 2003: 242). But what was the Holy See’s attitude towards this intense anti-colonial controversy featured in the French periodicals of the Christian left? How did this debate favour or hinder the Vatican’s diplomatic orientation towards the political problems of French decolonisation? Throughout the 1950s, the magazines of the French Christian left were subject to strict censorship by the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, whose historical archives contain numerous folders on this subject. In the autumn of 1953, after receiving an exposé from Cardinal JulesGéraud Saliège, Archbishop of Toulouse, the Nunciature of Paris, the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops (ACA) of France, and the Holy Office opened inquisitorial proceedings against the periodicals Témoignage chrétien, Quinzaine, and the Jeunesse de l’Église movement (founded by the Dominican Maurice Montuclard in 1936 to bring together priests and lay people in a form of community life inspired by the ideal of social justice).19 The accusations levelled against these periodicals were, after all, the same as those levelled against the nouvelle théologie (new theology) condemned by Pius XII in his 1950 Humani generis encyclical, namely the alleged doctrinal deviations, i.e. the rejection of a dogmatic orthodoxy that was hostile to modern thought, the criticism of the indifference displayed by the hierarchical Church towards the problems of the working class and proletariat, the dialogue with Marxism, and the objection to the Roman Curia as an authoritarian and pyramidal ecclesiastical apparatus (Flynn, Murray, 2011). In the documents contained in the files of the inquisitorial proceedings, the anti-colonial stance of the Christian periodicals, judged by the Vatican hierarchies to be exaggerated and biased, appears among the evidence of fault. The dossier against La Quinzaine drawn up by the Secretariat of the French Episcopate dated 4 December 1952 criticised the “overly accentuated passion” that characterised the polemics against French governments, the lack of “objectivity” and “an excessively systematic hostility”. As proof of this accusation, the report cited, by way of example, “a violent anti-colonialism, which loves to emphasise the faults of France in colonial matters, without ever remembering what was good in the activities of so many French colonists (and missionaries). The indigenous people are always represented as exploited; all wrongdoing is perpetrated by the French”.20 Similarly, in his letter to Domenico Tardini in January 1954, Nuncio Marella complains that the last editorial in La Quinzaine condemns the use

102  The handling of the Algerian crisis of violence only in reference to French colonial repression in North Africa without ever mentioning the violation of human rights in Eastern European countries, where the Catholic people were suffering high levels of persecution. Marella wrote: The editorial begins by expressing sympathy for those who are suffering, and condemns repression, terror, deportations and torture, but hastens to specify that it refers only to those taking place in Tunisia and Morocco, as if to prevent the reader’s mind from wandering to the communist-dominated countries, where the persecutions are more extensive and ferocious, and the highest number of victims are found among the clergy and the Catholics […]. What impresses and saddens the most is the total disinterest in the Catholic cause, the bluntly materialistic and classist slant of the article and the spirit of instigation that pervades the entire piece of writing.21 By way of confirming the Nunciature’s hostility towards the progressive Catholic press, in the same letter, the humiliating treatment meted out to the editor of La Quinzaine, André Denis, a former member of the MRP and an activist of the Association catholique de la jeunesse française and Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne, by the Nuncio himself is mentioned. At the suggestion of Cardinal Feltin, Denis had gone to the Nunciature to clarify things with Nuncio Marella, but after waiting a long time to be received was refused an audience.22 Once again in the autumn of 1957, therefore in the midst of the FrancoAlgerian war, in a report addressed to Msgr. Marella and the Secretary of the Congregation of the Holy Office Cardinal Giuseppe Pizzardo, the Secretary General of the French Episcopate, Jean-Marie Villot, when speaking of Témoignage chrétien wrote: “in the painful issue of Algeria, passion often prevails over a serene and objective vision of reality. Even if some collaborators in favour of ‘progressivism’ have resigned, the position of the weekly remains very markedly to the left”.23 In reality, the crux of the Vatican hierarchies’ condemnation of the progressive Christian press in France, which culminated on 13 March in the disciplinary action against La Quinzaine, was not so much the colonial question as the same old accusations of doctrinal deviation made against the worker-priests (Tranvouez, 1983). What emerges from the Vatican papers is that as according to the censors of the ACA and the Holy Office the anti-colonialism of Témoignage chrétien and La Quinzaine lacked a serene and objective assessment of the merits of French civilisation and the rights of the European minority in the colonies; this anti-colonialism was considered not so much a disvalue in itself as yet another demonstration of the drift of progressive Catholics towards leftwing radicalism. The colonial question was not taboo for the French Catholic Church in the immediate post-World War II period, indeed during the 1948 session of

The handling of the Algerian crisis 103 the Semaines Sociales de France, entitled Peuples d’Outre-Mer et civilisation occidentale (Overseas Peoples and Western Civilisation), it condemned certain abuses of colonisation. The religious press expressed all the different shades of missionary thought on colonialism, from the more conservative, represented by periodicals such as Les Annales de la Propagation de la Foi, La France catholique, or Le Pèlerin, to those tending to be open to the hypothesis of a progressive emancipation of the colonies, such as the publications Annales spiritaines and the Pères Blancs, up to positions advocating a rapid decolonisation, as in the case of Actualité Religieuse dans le Monde (Legrain, 2009). On 23 February 1954, at the invitation of Pax Christi, the Spiritan missionary Father Joseph Michel, ecclesiastical assistant to the Catholic students of Outre-mer (aumônier général des étudiants catholiques d’Outre-mer), delivered the well-known and controversial speech entitled Le devoir de décolonisation (The duty of decolonisation), which demonstrated the level of maturity the debate on the colonial issue had reached. Father Michel interpreted the thought of the Salamanca theologian Francisco de Vitoria as a criticism of colonisation when it degenerated into forms of political abuse and economic exploitation, such as slavery.24 Although he considered European civilisation in Africa to be historically legitimate as an instrument for the moral and cultural elevation of the subject peoples, Michel considered this experience to be anachronistic. There were only three possible solutions: either an unproductive insistence on the assimilationist policy, or “association” on a mutually consensual footing of equality, or total independence.25 His position tended towards the second solution and was therefore actually less radical and revolutionary than his opponents perceived. The Spiritan father’s speech provoked a virulent protest, which appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Française d’Outre-Mer, from François Charles-Roux, author of the polemical article “Does there exist a sin of colonialism and a Christian duty of decolonisation?” (“Existe-t-il un péché de colonialisme et un devoir chrétien de décolonisation?”).26 The ACA intervened in the controversy and entrusted Abbot Jean Blanc, former professor of ecclesiastical history and Secretary General of the Union Missionnaire du Clergé de France (Missionary Union of the Clergy of France), with the task of drawing up two information notes to be sent to the Episcopate to ensure an unbiased presentation of the opposing arguments of Michel and Charles-Roux, which in fact ended up with the majority of the bishops justifying the theses of the Spiritan priest.27 On the other hand, while the diatribe between Michel and Charles-Roux was underway, the Holy See sanctioned the principle of the erection of local hierarchies, definitively accepted by the Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda Fide Pietro Fumasoni Biondi in May 1954, which continued the process of the “Africanisation” of local hierarchies (Brasseur, 1986: 68). From 1951 to 1955, 10 African bishops were appointed, and 28 between 1956 and 1960, although it should be noted that the indigenous prelates did not occupy the highest ranks of the local Church but often held the position of auxiliary

104  The handling of the Algerian crisis bishops. Furthermore, as they were chosen from among the sons of the heads of powerful established families, they tended to maintain a certain mixture of spiritual and political authority, common in African society (Coulon, 1969: 228). The indigenisation of the episcopal hierarchies was a cause of tension between the Holy See and the French government, since the Vatican had decided to appoint local bishops without notifying France in advance, which was thus deprived of the possibility of opposing the appointment of nationalist or pro-independence prelates who were contrary to its colonial policy. The greater autonomy in the procedure for selecting bishops in the colonies did not however apply in the case of Algeria, where an Aide-memoire dating back to 1921 remained in force (Gori, 2002: 203). Despite the diplomatic friction caused by the Holy See’s missionary policy in French Africa, by the mid-1950s, relations between the Vatican and the French government were by no means in crisis, thanks to the fact that the Catholic MRP party acted a mediator between the ecclesiastical hierarchies and the French Republic.

The ecclesiastical hierarchies and the mirage of a “third way” The new government led by the radical Edgar Faure, which had received a vote of confidence on 23 February 1955, increased the political weight of the MRP, which was assigned five ministries, including Justice headed by Robert Schuman, Finance by Pierre Pflimlin, and Overseas Territories by party president, Pierre-Henri Teitgen. The increased Catholic presence in the government did not escape the notice of Nuncio Paolo Marella, and in his report sent to the Secretariat of State the following day, he said he was confident that Edgar Faure, whom he described as being “on good terms with the ecclesiastical authorities”, would not “dare to take measures that would harm the Church” so as “not to immediately lose the collaboration of the MRP and the majority of the ‘moderates’”.28 About a week later, on the double anniversary of Pius XII’s 79th birthday and the 16th anniversary of his pontificate, the Nuncio met the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the independent Antoine Pinay at the Quai d’Orsay. During “an hour spent in pleasant conversation”, Pinay wished to reassure the Holy See that the new government, in agreement with the Christian Democrat delegation, had “not given up at all on building a Christian Europe, because we firmly believe that this is the only way to eliminate the threat of a communist Europe”.29 Prime Minister Faure obtained parliamentary investiture on 23 February, and on the same day, during the solemn opening of the first ordinary session of the Algerian Assembly, Governor General of Algeria, Jacques Soustelle, set forth the broad lines of a reform programme based on the principle of “integration” rather than the “assimilation” envisaged in the

The handling of the Algerian crisis 105 1936 Blum-Viollette Bill concerning the granting of political rights to certain categories of Algerian subjects (Martin, 2006).30 In Soustelle’s declared intentions, “integration” would not represent a process of “uniformity” on the “Procrustean bed of a purely legal conception” of Franco-Algerian relations but would respect the “original” character of the region in historical, religious, and cultural terms.31 In his discourse, the governor outlined a strategy to combat Algeria’s “underdevelopment”, based on a policy of full employment, agricultural modernisation, widespread schooling and “greater access for autochthonous Algerians to public employment”, at times specifying humanitarian motivations of “social solidarity” and the promotion of “human dignity”.32 In the following weeks, Soustelle worked on a plan of cultural and political “integration” measures, completed at the end of May 1955.33 They included fully implementing the Statute of 1947, regarding Islam with the independence of worship from the civil power,34 extending the right to vote to Muslim women, creating a “bilingual community” with the compulsory teaching of Arabic in all primary schools, and above all strengthening the political rights of the Arab electorate by putting the weight of the two constituencies for the election of local councils on a par with each other.35 By raising the issues of economic redemption and political equality of the Algerian population, the “integration” project found support among the parties of the so-called troisième force – the radicals, the socialists of the SFIO and especially the Catholics of the MRP – who considered the overseas implementation of profound political, economic, and social reforms a valid alternative to the immediate granting of independence to the Maghreb territories and a credible remedy to the scenario of the disintegration of the French Union (Thomas, 2003; Marangé, 2016). According to the leaders of the MRP, the success of the reformist project depended on the ability of the French political class to overcome the opposition of the extremist colonists backed by the most reactionary elements in the army and the police force. Having completed his post as Foreign Minister following the crisis of the Mendès-France government in the previous December, Robert Schuman had firmly condemned on the pages of “La Nef” (the magazine directed by Lucie Faure, Edgar’s wife), the immobilism of the French colonial residents in North Africa and the complicit behaviour of the local police forces, which escaped both the judgement of the public and the political control of the motherland’s governments in defiance of “the notions of responsibility and hierarchical subordination”.36 Jacques Fonlupt-Espéragber, a long-standing leader of the MRP and fatherin-law of President Pierre-Henri Teitgen, was convinced that the time had come to “ensure our compatriots or our North African Muslim protégés the real enjoyment of human rights”.37 Together with his fellow party member, Roland de Moustiers and the socialist Robert Verdier, he took part in the parliamentary enquiry in Morocco in January 1954, which brought to light police violence, torture, and a malfunctioning justice system (Prévot, 1999: 516).

106  The handling of the Algerian crisis At the party’s national congresses in Lille in 1954 and Marseilles in 1955, the MRP outlined a proposal for a “third way” that fell somewhere between the solution of “abandonment”, i.e. the dismantling of French rule in North Africa, and the continuation of “colonialism”.38 At political level, the “third way” consisted in the institutional form of the “association” to France of the former Moroccan and Tunisian Protectorates and, at economic level, in an investment programme capable of breaking down colonial “feudalities”.39 As regards Algeria, the proposal of the “third way” more generically envisaged the re-dimensioning in the Algerian Assembly of the “big interests” of the colonial lobbies in favour of the “legitimate aspirations of the native masses”, as well as the creation of a national Conseil économique on the model of the one in the motherland, i.e. representative of the social and union actors.40 The North African policy of the Catholic centrists was clearly influenced by the political debate on the “Soustelle plan”, vehemently rejected by the intransigent colonialists and lukewarmly welcomed by the Gaullist Rassemblement du peuple français (RPF), to which the Governor General of Algeria himself belonged. The ultimate political objective of the “integration” project was to strengthen Algeria’s institutional link with the metropolitan territory of France as an alternative to the road to independence, so that while it laid the foundations for the creation of a modern and inclusive “Franco-Algerian nation” (Shepard, 2011), it also lent itself to the Gaullist ideological narrative, which had long insisted on the need to align the nation’s subjects overseas (Blunt, 1999) with French values. Following the outbreak of the Moroccan and Tunisian crises, Christian Fouchet (RPF) had repeated before the National Assembly that a greater French commitment in the Maghreb was necessary in order to remove Muslims from the propaganda of Arab nationalism, which used Islam to create an anti-French movement.41 Similarly, the Gaullist Michel Debré saw in the formation of a solidarity bloc of former colonies at the conference of non-aligned countries in Bandung (18–24 April 1955) the danger of a new Islamic assault on France, which would mark the end of any inclusive Franco-Muslim project; he therefore appealed to his compatriots to resist this threat, even referring to the victory of the Franks over the Moors at Poitiers in the 8th century (Michel Debré, La Leçon de Bandoeng. Courrier d’Information Politique, 9 May 1955, cited in Tyre, 2006: 291). From the Gaullist viewpoint, the precondition of the reform programme was the “pacification” of Algeria, a euphemism for a strict military normalisation of the region to eradicate any form of revolt for independence. Faced with a prolonged armed insurrection, on 3 April the government decided to declare a “state of emergency” in Algeria, which in the absence of a formal “declaration of war”, meant that France did not have to recognise the insurgents as combatants of an enemy army. At the same time, it made it possible to introduce exceptional military-type measures restricting

The handling of the Algerian crisis 107 individual and collective freedoms, such as controlling and prohibiting meetings and shows, imposing a night curfew, house-to-house searches and home confinement, and even detaining anyone “suspected” of putting public order and security at risk (Thénault, 2007). The problem of the violation of fundamental freedoms in Algeria immediately resonated during the Bandung Conference, which, with 29 Afro-Asian delegations present, constituted a global forum for discussing the demands of emerging nations. Allal El Fassi for Morocco, Salah Ben Youssef for Tunisia, and Hocine Aït Ahmed, a member of the FLN leadership representing Algeria, participated as observers and presented a joint memorandum testifying to the united front of the Maghreb on the colonial issue (Seridj, 2020: 25). The resolution in defence of the right to self-determination of peoples as enshrined in the United Nations Charter, adopted at the end of the conference, gave weight to the question of Algeria’s independence, raised before the UN Security Council by Saudi Arabia, which had voiced the concerns of the Arab world “in the face of the attempts of France to destroy Algeria’s moral, religious and cultural values” (The permanent representative of Saudi Arabia at the UN Security Council had raised the Algerian question on 5 January 1955; see Seridj, 2020: 25, 27). In this scenario, the representatives of the Algerian national movements PPA-MNA, UDMA, and Ulama tried to gain the support of the Vatican through the intermediary of the Apostolic Internunciature Nunciature in Cairo, at the time headed by Msgr. Georges-Marie de Jonghe d’Ardoye.42 The Messalist Ahmed Mezerna, former president of the Mouvement pour le triomphe des libertés démocratiques (now called Mouvement national algérien), Ahmed Bayyoud, permanent delegate of the Union démocratique du manifeste algérien in Cairo, and Cheikh Bachir El Ibrahimi, distinguished Islamic thinker and co-founder of the Association des oulémas musulmans algériens, met Monsignor Jonghe d’Ardoye on 25 June. They pled him to deliver a memorandum dated 14 May to Pius XII, in which they urged him to intervene in support of Algeria’s claims before the Security Council and to call for a special meeting of the United Nations Assembly. The memorandum, which the Vatican Secretariat of State judged to be “a very serious accusation against France for practising a political system based solely on force in Algeria”,43 was a lengthy and detailed examination of French colonial rule which, in the words of the three signatories, implemented a “policy of segregation and obscurantism” through economic exploitation, and the “mass slaughter of Algerian people” by means of increasingly sophisticated torture techniques, such as suffocation in the bathtub (la baignoire), the water hose (le tuyau d’eau), flagellation, electric shocks applied to genitals, hanging by the legs, and the spiked board (la planche à clous). In addition, there was the systematic denial of the most elementary civil and political rights, concealed behind the “illusory and arbitrary conception of the myth of Algeria [consisting] of three French departments”, with a completely false

108  The handling of the Algerian crisis electoral representation, i.e. 60 European delegates for 900,000 inhabitants in the Algerian Assembly and 60 Muslims for 9 million autochthons.44 Unlike similar memoranda prepared for the Holy Father by the Neo Destour and the Istiqlal party, which recognised the figure of the Pope as an undisputed moral authority on a global scale, the Algerian memorandum contained no specific reference to the role of the Catholic Church. It limited itself to denying the presence of “xenophobic sentiments” among the pro-independence movements and addressed the religious problem only in the paragraph dedicated to cultural colonisation where it denounced the phenomena of “de-Islamisation” and the “material strangulation of the Muslim religion” perpetrated by the colonial authorities through the policy of “intellectual and moral impoverishment” consequent to “the relegation of the national language to second place in the life of the country”.45 The Algerian initiative at the Internunciature in Cairo came from three high profile representatives of the historic nationalist movements, at that time engaged in the difficult attempt to recover a central role in the independence process, now dominated by the dynamic protagonism of the FLN. In fact, after the official announcement of the birth of the National Liberation Front, in February 1955, the “Committee of Ten” was founded. It was a steering group open to the representation of the Messalists and the religious and bourgeois elements (the Ulama and the Union démocratique du manifeste algérien), but subsequently, when the FLN leaders Mohamed Khider and Ahmed Ben Bella refused any hypothesis of extending the management of the insurrection, the MNA, UDMA, and the Ulama formed another autonomous committee (Guérin, 1973: 52–53). Can this approach to Vatican diplomacy therefore be interpreted as an attempt to relaunch the process of independence at a negotiating level parallel to the armed struggle, firmly in the hands of the ALN? Msgr Jonghe d’Ardoye certainly did not grasp this intention. The Nuncio warned his interlocutors to “be very careful not to promote communist propaganda” and added that “if [the Algerians] wanted to gain independence and have Catholics on their side, it was absolutely necessary that the Church be more than certain of enjoying full freedom in a future independent State”.46 As Mézerna, Bayyoud, and El Ibrahimi did not proffer any reply in this regard, the Nuncio wrote to Tardini that he had had “the impression that this [independence] movement has a very Muslim character”.47 A similar assessment regarding the penetration of the communist and Islamic factor in the Algerian revolutionary process also re-emerged in the long report sent by the Archbishop of Algiers Léon-Étienne Duval to the Nunciature of Paris on 8 August 1955, concerning the events that took place in Algeria following the Toussaint rouge. For an in-depth understanding of Msgr. Duval’s analysis of the situation in French Africa, it is necessary to read the entire document. In his report, he traces the origin of the political unrest in the region to the negative influence of “secularism”, intended as a cultural relativism that undermined the

The handling of the Algerian crisis 109 moral foundations of the social order, to the point of pushing the “evolved”, that is the cultured natives who had been inspired by Western thought without managing to master it, towards a “very dangerous” rebellion: In reality, secularism has contributed towards weakening religious values, towards creating “evolved” people capable of dangerously grasping Western revolutionary principles and loosening traditional customs, without having succeeded in establishing the hoped-for climate of fraternity. Political “liberation” without reference to moral laws has become a fearsome passion. At present, it is a matter of fact that among the leaders of the rebellion there are a certain number of “evolved” people who, having been educated in secular schools, no longer really believe in religious values.48 The Archbishop of Algiers then went on to analyse the social and political causes of the uprising of 1 November, attributing the former to the serious conditions of poverty of the Algerian population, not only to the “deplorable” negligence of the French governments but also to the objective “conditions of the soil and climate”,49 while the latter were, in his opinion, due to the threatening and destabilising action of Arab nationalism and communism, the latter supported by the progressive Catholic press such as La Quinzaine, which “seemed to approve of the acts of violence”: Cairo’s action is unquestionable and undisputed. However, many informers of public opinion are unaware of some of the religious motives behind Cairo’s enthusiasm. […] Propaganda is a form of Jihād and Jihād prepares and makes propaganda possible. […] It is therefore a new form of Jihād on the part of the Cairo agitators, as other documents show, the aim of which is the strengthening of Islam and its propagation’. […] At first, the Communist Party was content to help the rebellion financially. Later, as numerous documents show, it decided to actively join terrorist organisations. […] We can appreciate, in the light of current events, how little foundation there was for the opinion of those who consider Islam a solid barrier against communism.50 With regard to the religious situation and Islamic-Christian coexistence, Duval nevertheless stressed the successes of the pastoral activity in the Algerian dioceses, which were proof of the indispensable role of Catholic charitable and educational institutions for the moral and material growth of the Muslim population, due to the “inadequacy” of Koranic teachings: Social Justice: How many testimonies do we have of the esteem in which [Muslims] hold the doctrine of papal encyclicals! Many of them recognise that the Koran cannot provide them with a social doctrine suited to the conditions of modern society. Education: Faced with the inadequacy

110  The handling of the Algerian crisis of Koranic schools and the fears that secular schools arouse in them, a good number of Muslim parents do not hesitate to make great sacrifices to bring up their children in schools run by [Catholic] religious men and women, because they want a solid moral education for their children, based on faith in God. It is extremely regrettable that Christian schools represent only a small part of the school population in Algeria […] (our schools receive only derisory subsidies from the State budget through the back door of charitable work). Defence of faith in God: The progress of atheism, the threats of Marxism frighten many Muslims; they realise that to prevent the development of atheism they need the help of the Church.51 The considerations contained in the next two long paragraphs stemmed from the acknowledgment of the merits of the Algerian episcopate, Tendances dangereuses de certains chrétiens and À propos des Notes doctrinales publiées par la Semaine Religieuse de Lyon. They were dedicated to the polemical deconstruction of the assumptions of the motherland’s Catholic “progressivism”, guilty in his opinion of “demagogic flattery” ( flatterie démagogique) towards the anticolonial thought of the secular left, which ignored the real conditions of North Africa. Firstly, Duval did not agree with the theory on the decline of the historical association between colonial rule and the primacy of the Christian West proposed by Catholic intellectuals by means of “unjust” arguments against the Roman Church and likely to result in the “syncretism” of an erroneous inter-religious dialogue. He wrote, about an intervention of François Mauriac in Cahiers maghrébins, a publication that appeared in Paris in 1954: We do not want to deny the existence of certain injustices, brutalities, even violence, but to generalise them to the point of making ‘the Christian West’ responsible for them – in practice, for the Muslim, the Christian West is the Catholic Church – is an injustice that is no less than those that the eminent academic points out. Nor is the danger of syncretism chimerical. Under the pretext of understanding Muslims, under the pretext of respecting their civilisation, their literature, under the pretext of promoting their personal development, some Christians, at times even priests, especially in France, assume an attitude that amounts to approving Islamic ‘revelation’. Qualified observers have wondered whether some priests in France will not one day run the risk of adopting a stance towards Islam similar to that of some worker priests towards Marxism.52 From the ascertainment of the merits of the Algerian Episcopate derived the considerations of the following two long paragraphs, Tendances dangereuses de certains chrétiens and À propos des Notes doctrinales publiées par la Semaine Religieuse de Lyon, dedicated to the polemical deconstruction of the assumptions of the Catholic “progressivism” of the motherland.

The handling of the Algerian crisis 111 Duval harshly attacked the Notes doctrinales published by the Theological Committee of the Diocese of Lyon, under the direction of Archbishop Cardinal Pierre-Marie Gerlier, in the “Semaine Religieuse” of 3 June 1955, which had caused a stir in France because of its open support for the cause of Algeria’s political independence (Mayeur-Jaouen, 2018: 402).53 Duval expressed his “deep sorrow” that the Lyons theologians had not consulted the Algerian episcopate and had consequently circulated doctrinal notes that “distorted reality” and “testified to an ignorance of the extreme delicacy and difficulty of Algerian problems”.54 Independence was, in his view, a premature objective compared to that “internal autonomy” along the lines of the Tunisian Protectorate which would not have put the Christian population at risk by jeopardising the “missionary role of the Church in Algeria”: How is it that the authors of Lyon speak of the right to independence for Algeria without even alluding to the stages through which it could normally be achieved? Tunisia, which was a Protectorate, is in relative peace because it has adhered to internal autonomy and for Algeria, legally composed of French departments, they speak of independence, without indicating a possible transition! What is even more serious is that, in these Notes, there is no mention of the Algerian Catholic population, nor of their rights, or the considerable difficulties they would encounter if, all of a sudden, according to the only hypothesis put forward by the authors, Algeria were to become ‘independent’.55 Lastly, Duval said he was convinced that the dissemination of the Lyon document would only discourage the Christian community overseas.56 The final objective of the memorandum of the Algerian Episcopate of 8 August 1955 was indeed to ensure the Holy See intervened, as regards the metropolitan bishops in general but in particular Cardinal Gerlier, in order to prevent French Catholicism from taking further steps in favour of the independence movement, as shown by the account of 18 August by the Nuncio Paolo Marella concerning the “long conversation” he had had with Duval in Paris at the Nunciature. The Archbishop of Algiers had in fact gone in person to the Nuncio to deliver his memorandum and to express “also verbally the profound regret felt by him and their Excellencies the Suffragan bishops” on reading the “Notes Doctrinales”, which “in the present circumstances can cause considerable damage to the normal development of the work of the Church in North African countries”.57 Duval then asked Marella to make representations to the Secretariat of the Episcopate and the ACA of France, taking care, however, “to use his exposé in the strictest confidence, not to speak about it to any of the Eminences or Excellencies who are members of the Hierarchy but above all not to His Most Reverend Eminence Cardinal Gerlier”.58

112  The handling of the Algerian crisis While not wishing to appear as the direct inspirer of censorship on the part of the Vatican, Duval insisted with the Nuncio that the French episcopate should “avoid taking an open position on one side or another” and limit itself to an apostolate of peace restricted to purely religious matters. He then underlined the inopportune nature of the “interventions of the French Catholics in the motherland in favour of the claims made by the autochthons of Algeria [which], on one hand are completely gratuitous with respect to the nationalist movement – that does not expect the Church to support its cause at all – and on the other antagonise the Europeans residing in North Africa, who form by far the most important nucleus of the Christian community”.59 The caution recommended by Duval and shared by the Paris Nunciature can be contextualised in a specific moment in history, the summer of 1955 (until 20 August), in which the future of Franco-Algerian relations still seemed open all be they hanging on the thread of the chances of success of the “Soustelle Plan”, presented to the government on 7 June. Vatican diplomacy took the solution to the North African problem that the MRP defined “third way” seriously. In fact, in the report of the debate on Algeria in the National Assembly, written on 16 August for the Secretariat of State, Msgr. Marella dwelt on Jacques Fonlupt-Espéragber’s speech that demonstrated, “with copious facts”, the hardships and inequality suffered by the Algerian population.60 The Nuncio underlined how the MRP and the socialists, having condemned the “politique du baton” (policy of the stick), that is to say violent repression to the bitter end that would only hasten the loss of the former colony as had occurred in Indochina, proposed “radical social reforms” as an alternative. These would have included “increased financial investment” and a new statute responding “to the political aspirations of the nationalists” in order to achieve an intermediate solution somewhere “between the abandonment demanded by the communists and the policy of force suggested by the conservatives”. The new statute suggested was one of “internal autonomy” for Algeria, which would have “closely tied” the nation to France by means of a system of “association” or “federation”.61 The Nuncio acknowledged that colonialism was still considered in Catholic circles as “one of the main reasons for division” and that “animated discussions continue to take place between so-called ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ Catholics”, who sided respectively with former ambassador Charles Roux and Father Joseph Michel, but he nevertheless hoped for a constructive confrontation that would help ease Franco-Maghreb relations: The former reprove the excesses and abuses of the colonists, but uphold the system of colonisation as the most suitable and perfectly legitimate means of ensuring the progress and prosperity of the African or Asiatic peoples, who are, in their view, incapable of governing themselves; the latter recognise the merits of colonisation, but refuse to admit its necessity and hence its legitimacy in the present age. Countless writings have

The handling of the Algerian crisis 113 appeared on the subject, good and less good things have been said by both sides; but many hope that this contrast of ideas may pave the way for a new and better phase in the relations between the French people and those they have colonised.62 The expectation that the political and social conflict would be mitigated through the free exchange of ideas at parliamentary and cultural level was, however, destined to clash with events after 20 August 1955, which soon demonstrated the impracticability of any intermediate solution based on compromise. In fact, on 20 August, on the second anniversary of the deposition of the Sultan of Morocco, the FLN coordinated a series of demonstrations and armed assaults in the north-east of the Constantine area, particularly around Philippeville (present-day Skikda), at the same time as the revolts organised by Moroccan nationalists in the four towns of Khenifra, OuedZem, Moulay-Bouazza, and Oued-Grou. The FLN’s action was directed both against the European population – soldiers, gendarmes, civilians (adults and children) – and against Algerian notables accused of collaborating with the French administration, including Allaoua Abbas, grandson of UDMA leader, Ferhat Abbas (Stora, 2010: 83). The French response was immediate, violent, and disproportionate: 1273 “rebels shot dead” according to French sources; 12,000 according to FLN estimates (Rioux, 1983: 82). Although on one hand, the Philippeville attacks convinced Governor General Jacques Soustelle that evermore drastic repression was necessary before any possible implementation of a social reforms programme (Tyre, 2006: 286), on the other, they consolidated the hegemony over the FLN liberation movement, until then under political pressure due to the competition of the UDMA, the Ulama, and the supporters of Messali Hadj. The harsh and indiscriminate counter-offensive launched by the colonial authorities ended up pushing those Algerians still reluctant to approve the option of armed struggle into the arms of the FLN (Ageron, 1997: 44–45). From this point of view, as Charles-Robert Ageron wrote, on 20 August “for France and Algerian nationalist militants alike, the Revolution announced on 1 November became the Algerian war” (Ageron, 1997: 27). The Holy See was disappointed at how the situation in North African was precipitating, and at the end of August, the Vatican diplomat, Msgr. Emanuele Clarizio, met Robert Schuman for an in-depth discussion on the latest events that were jeopardising “the compromise solution” pursued by Edgar Faure and Schuman himself as an alternative to the policy of force promoted by the “most intransigent” – the Minister of Foreign Affairs Antoine Pinay and the Minister of Defence Pierre Kœnig – both “opposed to any reduction in [French] sovereignty in Morocco and Algeria”.63 During a conversation with Monsignor Clarizio, Schuman reiterated his disapproval of the hard-line approach of the “French colonialists who

114  The handling of the Algerian crisis would like to continue in the same way as a hundred years ago”. In fact, he “deplored” the “hostile demonstration” they had staged against resident General Gilbert Grandval and the Archbishop of Rabat Amédée Lefèvre, both in favour of an evolution in Franco-Moroccan relations,64 on the day of the funeral of the Commander-in-Chief of the French troops in Morocco General Raymond Duval, killed in the clashes in Oued Zem and Khénifra on 22 August. According to the Minister of Justice, however, the reconciliation of the Moroccan situation was close thanks to the repatriation of the deposed Sultan Ben Youssef, whom he defined as “intelligent, but immoral and false”.65 The Algerian case was more complex because of the absence of an indigenous representation that could “adequately and conveniently support” the interests of the Muslim majority and because the “fictio iuris” of Algeria as a French territory divided into departments, not only “solved nothing”, but also enabled the free transit migration on national territory of the now 300,000 Algerian workers. As proof of how much of a problem this was, Schuman gave as an example the “violent clashes” in Goutte d’or (a historically multi-ethnic Parisian neighbourhood in the 18th arrondissement, with a high concentration of North African and sub-Saharan residents) which had led to the adoption of “very strict police measures”.66 On his part, Clarizio noted with concern how the Algerian “fellaghas” attacks of 20 August took place at the same time as the Moroccan riots, with a “synchronism that confirmed a vast plan of action”.67 From this point of view, Schuman confirmed that, “as is widely known, foreign communism had a hand in all the tragic events in North Africa […] and that one of the Moroccan troublemakers who organised the systematic destruction of some vital machinery” had done “special studies in Moscow”. As for the rebels’ collaboration with Egypt and Syria, “the five-minutes silence” observed in Damascus in memory of the victims of the French repression “showed how the struggles of the Moroccans and Algerians are shared by the other populations of the Arab League”.68 For this reason, the Minister of Justice continued, the state of emergency had been extended in Algeria and the Defence Ministry had called up a contingent of 180,000 men. In any case, the Catholic Church had nothing to fear, since the Secretary of State at the Presidency of the Council, Léopold Sédar Senghor, a Senegalese politician who had “just returned from the areas in turmoil”, had assured him that “the natives consider the Catholics to be their best friends, indeed the only ones in whom they have hope and confidence”.69 Summarising his long conversation with Schuman, Clarizio finally wrote to Tardini, “ten days after the tragic events that stained Morocco and Algeria with blood, the French government has managed to take measures that give some glimmer of hope for the future”.70 The Vatican diplomat’s optimism about the effectiveness of the Faure government’s measures to deal with the North African crisis was to say the least very hasty with regard to the situation in Algeria.

The handling of the Algerian crisis 115 On 26 September 1955 in Algiers, on the opening day of the Algerian Assembly session which was to discuss the Soustelle plan, 61 Muslim representatives, until then “moderate”, signed a declaration in which they denounced the failure of the “integration” policy and affirmed that the majority of Algerians now supported the “national idea” (Evans, 2012: 142). Shortly afterwards, Mostepha Benbahmed, a socialist MP from Constantine, explained to French parliamentarians that the violence of Soustelle’s repression had made it impossible for the Muslim population to identify itself as “French” (Ageron, 1997: 46). The Algerian crisis had negative repercussions on the stability of Edgar Faure’s government, which in fact announced legislative elections on 20 October ahead of the scheduled date of June 1956 (Rioux, 1983: 83), and was also reflected in greater tension in relations between the Nunciature in Paris and the French episcopate. The blatantly anti-colonial intervention of the Bishop of Angers Henri Chappoulie on 2 October 1955 in Lille, during a Pax Christi meeting devoted to Africa,71 profoundly irritated Nuncio Marella. On 5 October, in a letter to Tardini, Marella complained that Chappoulie was not only ignoring the exhortation to silence received from the bishops of Algiers and Tunis via the Nunciature in Paris but also was “provoking strong reactions in conservative circles and great satisfaction in left-wing circles”, particularly in communist circles, to the point that in his opening speech at the last session of the National Assembly, the PCF MP Marcel Cachin, presented his words as “an approval of the communist theses on African policy”.72 Msgr. Chappoulie denounced the unequal, racist treatment of Arab defendants and the abuses associated with “forms of mass repression”, such as “the collective slaughter of the entire population of a village” or “pêlemêle” (random) searches without distinguishing between the innocent and the guilty (cited in Houart, 1960: 24). His discourse was certainly much harsher and more explicit than the Pastoral Letter of the Algerian bishops of the previous 15 September and the declaration of the ACA of France of the following 14 October. After a lengthy examination of the socio-economic problems of underdevelopment in the region, the letter from the Algerian bishops called for immediate solidarity-based actions and recognition of the “free expression of the legitimate aspirations” of the Algerian people in a spirit of “friendly cooperation”.73 The declaration of the metropolitan bishops referred to the letter of the Algerian Episcopate without however mentioning the political and economic aspects. On one hand, it legitimised “the right to resist” the unjust order of the constituted authority aimed at making people “commit a crime” and on the other urged Christians to “safeguard both the rights of the homeland and love for all men” through an interpretation of the facts that was careful to “condemn hateful deeds without giving way to unfair generalisations”.74

116  The handling of the Algerian crisis As revealed in a letter sent by Marella to Tardini the day after the 59th ACA (12–14 October), the ACA statement was the result of mediation by the Nuncio in Paris between Msgr. Duval, “once again opposed to any intervention by the French Episcopate in the delicate issue in question”, and the French bishops “who, while fully admitting the need for the utmost caution, have judged it to be their strict duty to remind the faithful of the principles which must illuminate their conduct given the present confusion of ideas”. Although Duval had “then yielded to the insistence of His Most Eminent Cardinal Gerlier”, the document did not cover but a “very broad and generic content”.75 The French Episcopate’s caution was not only dictated by the fear of displeasing Msgr. Duval, but also by “the extreme sensitivity of the civil power to any act of the ecclesiastical authority that might have some relation to this matter [colonialism]”.76 The Nuncio had addressed this problem on 9 October in a conversation with the president of the National Assembly, MRP MP Pierre Schneiter. Schneiter told the Nuncio that, having learned of the imminent celebration in Notre-Dame Cathedral of a mass in suffrage of the dead from Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco, the Minister of the Interior, Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury had asked the Archbishop of Paris, Card. Feltin for a homily based on a clear “distinction between the French and North African dead”, reminding him “that even a purely religious function, at a difficult time like the present, could have unpleasant repercussions on the internal order of the nation”.77 The President of the National Assembly added, however, that despite the undoubted tension between the government and the French Episcopate, the Algerian bishops were “highly esteemed” “both in government circles and among Muslims” and that “several people who are friends of his and close to the government would have thought of His Excellency Most Rev. Duval” and his Suffragans as suitable “interlocutors” for serious “Franco-Algerian negotiations”. In Schneiter’s opinion, however, “accepting such a proposal would be a very serious mistake, the consequences of which could be very unfortunate for the Church”.78 The advice of Schneiter, described by Marella as an “excellent Catholic”,79 to avoid any direct involvement of the Church in political negotiations was very sensible in light of the events of that convulsive autumn of 1955, which were placing the Church hierarchies in a difficult position both in the metropolitan area, where the “mobilisation decrees” introduced to draft reservists for Algeria had provoked an explosion of not only political but also religious dissent, and in North Africa, where the path to independence in Tunisia and Morocco still appeared to be an unknown quantity. In France, in fact, the Catholic Church was hit by a wave of anti-colonial dissent linked to the mutiny in Paris and Rouen of some army units recalled to Algeria, which caused an uproar in the media (Grenier, 2007). On 29 September, numerous recruits attending a mass celebrated in the Church of Saint-Séverin (in the 5th arrondissement of Paris) “for peace”

The handling of the Algerian crisis 117 and in memory of the victims of “both sides”, circulated a text in which, expressing their resolute opposition to the war in North Africa, they expressed, on behalf of their comrades in arms “believers and non-­ believers, Christians and communists, Jews and Protestants”, their anguish and shame at the obligation imposed on them of “having to serve a cause with violence […] contrary to all Christian principles, all the principles of the French Constitution, and the right of all peoples to self-­ determination” (L’appel de Saint-Séverin. France-Observateur, 6 October 1955, cited in Quemeneur, 2004). The Nuncio reacted furiously because the protest put the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Maurice Feltin, who was also the Vicar Castrense, i.e. the head of the Military Ordinariate, in great difficulty. On 21 October, Marella wrote to Tardini that the clergy of the SaintSéverin parish were in no way responsible for the incident, as the demonstrators had acted unbeknown to the parish priest, and that, nevertheless, this protest was very serious because it confirmed the influence of the communist “troublemakers” on young Catholics, many of whom were members of the Conseil Français des Mouvements de Jeunesse, to which the “Association Catholique de la Jeunesse Française ACJP” and the Association of Catholic Explorers80 also belonged. In response, the “secularist” right wing called for the removal of Cardinal Feltin from his post as Vicar Castrense because he was also president of Pax Christi, held mainly responsible for spreading a pacifist and “defeatist” message. Marella, according to Cardinal Feltin himself, added that the government was under pressure to adopt “severe measures” against military chaplains who were “demoralising” the troops and that the Minister of Defence, at the time Pierre Billotte, had refused to appoint new ones. Furthermore, various ministers deplored “that in publicly condemning colonialism, representatives of the Episcopate have considered this question in the abstract without taking into account the concrete circumstances of North Africa and have put order and disorder on the same level”.81 The Nuncio Marella, who until then had been fairly neutral in reporting the positions of French Catholics whether for or against colonialism, in this report manifested strong opposition to the protests of the autumn of 1955 which revealed, in his view, a more general and profound crisis of values which, under the banner of freedom of conscience and civil disobedience, now affected the Catholic world in its cardinal principles of order and hierarchy: In reality, the reactions mentioned above are the expression of a mentality that has its origins a long time ago, namely in the period of the ‘résistance’. Deserting, rebelling against authority, were at that time prized titles of merit. Those who set out down the path of rebellion became national heroes and are still held in high regard in the life of the Republic.

118  The handling of the Algerian crisis Since then, there has been constant talk of how an individual is entirely responsible for his actions, even when they are carried out when following orders from on high. Each person, therefore, before carrying out orders received, has a strict duty to examine their ‘morality’ and ‘legitimacy’ and if he does not find them consonant with his conscience, he should refrain from carrying them out. This duty of individual criticism of the operations of public authority thus frequently becomes a duty of disobedience. The practical consequences of such theories in the religious sphere are well known: today they are becoming more evident in the political and military spheres as well. There is no doubt – and I would like to stress this point – that the ‘scandalous’ reactions of the youth to the government’s colonial policy and the mutinies in Paris and Rouen have the same remote cause as the painful episodes of the ‘working priests’ of ‘Jeunesse de l’Église’ and of ‘La Quinzaine’: the crisis of authority that France has been suffering from for fifteen years or so. In searching for the immediate cause for disobeying the Government, we are instantly reminded of the campaign that has been waged for years against colonialism, and on which I have reported in several of my previous reports. The writings of influential priests, such as the Rev. Father Michel, C.S.Sp., of Catholic newspapers and weeklies, or those that claim to be Catholic, such as ‘Témoignage Chrétien’, ‘Ésprit’, ‘La Quinzaine’, etc., and the declarations of Their Excellencies the Bishops [Gerlier, Chappoulie] have gradually created an atmosphere in which the reprobation of colonialism in all its forms appears to many as an imperative moral duty of the moment.82 Tardini was impressed by Marella’s report, which he considered “of particular interest” to the Secretariat of State, and replied that he had “hastened to submit to the consideration of the Holy Father” “the just observations” of the Nuncio “on the remote causes and immediate reasons that have led to disobedience to the civil authorities”.83 The report of 21 October was accompanied by a letter to the Nuncio from Admiral Jules Artur containing a long disquisition against “working priests” and an equally long denigration of the work of Card. Feltin, of Mauriac’s “social-Marxist demagogy” (démagogie socialo-marxistante), of “Témoignage Chrétien” and especially of the Abbé Pierre, who was accused of having published in his magazine “Faim et soif” an appeal in defence of conscientious objection, demonstrating the inability of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to enforce discipline and to “prevent a consolidation of the painful misunderstandings that disturb so many of the faithful”.84 In North Africa, on the other hand, the situation of the Catholic Church was made uncertain by the institutional transition from Protectorates to self-government taking place in Tunisia and Morocco.

The handling of the Algerian crisis 119 In Tunis, Catholic residents had some concerns about the application of the Franco-Tunisian convention signed on 3 June. Msgr Paul Maurice Perrin, Metropolitan Archbishop of Carthage and Primate of Africa since 29 October 1953, reassured Nuncio Marella that the convention seemed to “respond” to the ‘desiderata’ of the Catholic Church concerning freedom of conscience and worship, the personal status of Catholics in Tunisia, the status of the Archdiocese of Carthage, and the freedom of teaching”.85 The end of the Protectorate, however, put State subsidies to Catholic schools at risk and for this reason, according to the Archbishop, it was not possible to forgo aid from the motherland, taking care, however, to “find a way to avoid making it appear that the subsidies are directly remitted by the French government to the clergy and religious institutes”. Moreover, Perrin continued, “some anxiety” was caused by the prediction that the law on public schools would “repeat the provisions adopted in Egypt on the compulsory reading of the Koran, to be done only by Muslim teachers”. The question of Koranic teaching was closely connected to a more general assessment of the political context, where “calm is not yet complete”, not only because of the Destour’s old guard who advocated “the establishment of an Islamic theocratic State”, but also due to the “profound disagreement now manifested within the party that dominates the current Tunisian government [the Neo Destour]”, whose Secretary General Salah Ben Youssef, defined by Perrin as “the ‘Arab League’s’ right-hand man in close contact with the Egyptian government”, had stated he was opposed to the agreements with Paris in overt disaccord with President Habib Bourguiba.86 The Catholics in Rabat also feared Egyptian influence, despite the fact that the exiled Sultan, Mohamed Ben Youssef, a symbolic figure of Arab nationalism, had signed the La Celle-Saint-Cloud Declaration, which established the development of future Franco-Moroccan relations on the basis of “a freely agreed and defined interdependence”, on 6 November, just days before he returned to his homeland on 16 November. A note from the Vatican Secretariat of State dated 7 November, concerning information received from Allal El Fassi, feared imminent discriminatory measures against French residents, now “treated like members of other minorities” by the nationalist movement which was arranging for them to “leave as soon as possible”. This was due to the pressure being exerted by Cairo, confirmed by a sum of money credited to Allal El Fassi’s account from Egypt, “500 million in two payments, one of 200 million and the other of 300 million”.87 The Secretariat of State’s note, however, placed trust in the conservative influence of the Saudi King Ibn Saoud [Saoud ben Abdelaziz Al Saoud], who “was afraid of new ideas” and was “reticent” towards the nationalist movement, fearing that its development in North Africa would have “dangerous repercussions for the internal tranquillity of Arabia”.88 Meanwhile, in Paris, political circles and the press continued to discuss the Franco-Algerian “integration” issue.

120  The handling of the Algerian crisis In reality, the government had little faith in the Soustelle plan. The Minister of the Interior, Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury, admitted that he had spoken of integration because it was diametrically opposite to the “disintegration” of French rule in North Africa (Pervillé, 2007: 49). The Prime Minister Edgar Faure himself also had serious doubts as to its viability, since the report of the commission on financial relations between Algeria and France, chaired by Roland Maspetiol, a member of the Economic and Social Council, cast doubt on the possibility of rapidly putting the standard of living of the two countries on a par without damaging the metropolis (Pervillé, 2007: 49). On the left, the Communist Party was still the only major party to recognise Algeria’s right to independence. However, the widespread protest movement among the drafted men, their families, and intellectuals had in the meantime led the SFIO (French Section of the Workers’ International) to withdraw its support of the government and to propose a three-point programme – a ceasefire, free elections in Algeria and negotiations with the newly elected – formulated by Gilles Martinet in “FranceObservateur” on 29 September.89 On 29 November, Edgar Faure’s government lost the confidence of the National Assembly and the President of the Republic, René Coty, dissolved the National Assembly with the decree of 1 December 1955. This decision, denounced by the left as a coup d’état, opened a very lively election campaign, during which the Algerian case became a crucial issue for the first time.

Notes 1 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 7, fasc. 2–30, letter from Msgr. Léon-Etienne Duval to Msgr. Giulio Barbetta, 17 December 1953, ff. 26–26v. 2 Ferhat Abbas, Guerre et révolution d’Algérie: La nuit coloniale. Paris: Julliard, 1962, 182. 3 France-Maghreb, bulletin no. 2 April 1954 cited in Daniel Guérin, Ci-gît le colonialisme. Algérie, Inde, Indochine, Madagascar, Maroc, Palestine, Polynésie, Tunisie. Témoignage militant. Paris: Mouton, 1973, 319–320. 4 J. O., Débats parlementaires, Friday, 12 November 1954, 4961, 4967, 4968. 5 J. O., 20 October 1999, Loi relative à la substitution, à l’expression “aux opérations effectuées en Afrique du Nord” de l’expression “ à la guerre d’Algérie ou aux combats en Tunisie et au Maroc”. 15 647. 6 Centre national des Archives de l’Église de France (henceforth CNAEF), Archives du Mouvement catholique international pour la paix Pax Christi, Pax Christi-France (henceforth PXF), fasc. Algérie: correspondance, letter from Msgr. Joseph Gelin to Msgr. Bernard Lalande, 14 November 1954. 7 CNAEF, PXF, fasc. Algérie: correspondance, letter from Msgr. Bernard Lalande to Msgr. Joseph Gelin, 19 November 1954. 8 CNAEF, PXF, fasc. Algérie: correspondance, document attached to the correspondence Projet de déclaration orale aux rencontres Pax Christi qui doivent avoir lieu à Lyon à partir du mercredi soir 17 novembre. 9 CNAEF, PXF, fasc. Algérie: correspondance, letter from Msgr. Bernard Lalande to Msgr. Léon-Étienne Duval, 23 November 1954.

The handling of the Algerian crisis 121 10 CNAEF, PXF, fasc. Algérie: correspondance, letter from Msgr. Léon-Étienne Duval to Msgr. Bernard Lalande, 24 November, 1954. 11 CNAEF, PXF, fasc. Algérie: correspondance, letter from Msgr. Lalande to Abbé Gelin, with Lalande’s undated attached note for Gelin, 30 November 1954, and letter of the Archbishop of Tunis dated 30 November 1954. 12 CNAEF, PXF, fasc. Algérie: correspondance, Abbé Gelin’s undated autographed note. 13 CNAEF, PXF, fasc. Algérie: correspondance, letter from Msgr. Lalande to Abbé Gelin, 5 December 1954. 14 CNAEF, PXF, fasc. Algérie: correspondance, letter from Abbé Gelin to Msgr. Lalande, 6 December 1954. 15 Ibid. 16 CNAEF, PXF, fasc. Algérie: correspondance, letter to the president of Pax Christi Msgr. Théas signed by Jean Dentu, parish priest of Jean-Baptiste de Neuilly, co-founder in 1945 and vice-president of the Franco-Muslim friendship association “Algérienne”, 20 September 1955. 17 CNAEF, PXF, fasc. Algérie: correspondance, Jean Dentu to Msgr. Jean Mounier (Société des Missions Africaines), 16 September 1955. 18 CNAEF, PXF, fasc. Algérie: correspondance, Vincent Serralda di Dalmatie (today Ouled Yaïch) Algerian priest, 12 October 1955 to the national equipe of Pax Christi. 19 Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (Vatican Apostolic Archive, henceforth AAV), Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 742, fasc. 253, letter from Cardinal Jules-Géraud Saliège to Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella, 31 October 1953, f. 68. 20 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 741, fasc. 252, Secretariat of the French Episcopate, 4 December 1952, ff. 47–49, here f. 49. 21 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 741, fasc. 252, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 15 January, 1954, ff. 105–119, here ff. 105, 106. 22 Ibid., f. 108. 23 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 742, fasc. 253, letter from Msgr. Jean Villot to Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella, 25 September 1957, ff. 156–157, here f. 154. 24 Joseph Michel, Le devoir de décolonisation (1954). Republished in Mémoire Spiritaine, 4, 1996, 131–154, here 137–138. 25 Ibid., 149. 26 François Charles-Roux, Existe-t-il un péché de colonialisme et un devoir chrétien de décolonisation? Nouvelle Revue Française d’Outre-Mer, 46, 1954, 239–242. 27 Souvenirs inédits du Père J. Michel sur “Le devoir de décolonisation”. Mémoire Spiritaine, 4, 1996, 132–134, here 134. 28 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 29, Report sent by Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 24 February 1955, ff. 45–48, here f. 48. 29 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 29, Report sent by Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 2 March 1955, ff. 40–44, here f. 42. 30 A bill presented by Popular Front leader Léon Blum, at the suggestion of Maurice Viollette, former governor-general of Algeria, with the aim of granting French citizenship and the right to vote to some 20,000/25,000 Muslims who retained their personal status linked to religion. The project was deliberated in the Council of Ministers on 15 October 1936 but was subsequently suspended on 4 March 1938.

122  The handling of the Algerian crisis 31 Jacques Soustelle, Annexe I – Discours prononcé à la séance solennelle de l’Assemblée algérienne le 23 février 1955, in Aimée et souffrante Algérie. Paris: Plon, 1956, 303–316, here 312–313. 32 Ibid., 304, 308, 315. 33 Ibid., 129. 34 The State would have limited itself to providing compensation for Islamic clerics and acting as an arbitrator in disputes between the various communities concerning the use of mosques and Ḥabūs (land and buildings used for religious purposes), ibid., 102. 35 The first predominantly European constituency elected 3/5 of the representatives, while the second constituency, representing the Muslim majority, elected only the remaining 2/5, ibid., 104–105. 36 Robert Schuman, Nécessité d’une politique, in Maroc et Tunisie, le problème du protectorat. Paris: La Nef, 1953, 7. 37 Letter from Jacques Fonlupt-Espéragber to Robert Barrat dated 3 June 1953, cited in Daniel Rivet, Le Comité France-Maghreb réseaux intellectuels et d’influence face à la crise marocaine (1952–1955). Paris: Éditions de Cahiers de l’Institut d’histoire du temps présent, 1997, 28. 38 The subject of the French presence in the Maghreb was addressed both during the 10 national congress of the MRP (Lille, 27–30 May 1954) and during the 11th congress in (Marseilles, 19–22 May). During the latter, MP Joseph Dumas presented the report on the situation of the Union française and, recalling what the party had decided at the congress the previous year, stated: “Faced with an unchanged situation, except that everything has gradually worsened, we cannot but take up the resolutions of our Lille congress. […] In lieu of unacceptable abandonment, and to methods of force that are an illusion and only lead to even more tragic abandonment, we propose a policy of association”; in Joseph Dumas, L’attente de l’Afrique noire par Joseph Dumas, député de la Seine. Forces nouvelles (MRP Weekly), special issue, June 1955, 3–7, here 4. 39 Ibid., 4–5. 40 Ibid., 6–7. 41 Christian Fouchet, Discours à l’Assemblée nationale. Journal Officiel de l’Assemblée nationale (J.O.A.N.), 2 Legislature, No. 50, Session No. 76, 5 June 1952, 2642. 42 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 10, fasc. 457–481, Report from Msgr. Georges-Marie de Jonghe d’Ardoye to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 25 June 1955. 43 Ibid., ff. 459–460, here f. 459. 44 Ibid., ff. 462–480, here ff. 463, 464, 470, 472. 45 Ibid., ff. 468, 477. 46 Ibid., f. 461. 47 Ibid. 48 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 10, ff. 49–191, Rapport très confidentiel sur les incidences religieuses des événements d’Algérie du I Novembre 1954 au 31 Juillet (Very confidential report on the religious implications of the events in Algeria from 1 November 1954 to July 31), 8 August 1955, by Msgr. Léon-ÉtienneDuval, also signed by Paul Pinier, Bishop of Constantine and by Bertrand Lacaste, Bishop of Oran, ff. 73–89, here f. 74. 49 Ibid., f. 75. 50 Ibid., ff. 76, 77–78. 51 Ibid., ff. 82–83. 52 Ibid., f. 89.

The handling of the Algerian crisis 123 53 Notes doctrinales à l’usage des prêtres du Ministère, à propos du problème des Nord-Africains en France et de l’Afrique du Nord, in Semaine Religieuse of 3 June 1955, that also appeared in Documentation catholique, n. 1208, 18 September 1955, Col. 1191–1210. 54 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 10, ff. 49–191, Rapport très confidentiel sur les incidences religieuses des événements d’Algérie du I Novembre 1954 au 31 Juillet (Very confidential report on the religious implications of the events in Algeria from 1 November 1954 to July 31) by Msgr. Léon-Étienne Duval, 8 August 1955, here ff. 86, 87, 88. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 711, fasc. 36, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to the Vatican Secretariat of State to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 18 August 1955, ff. 283r–286r, here 285r. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., ff. 284r., 285r. 60 Ibid., f. 292r. 61 Ibid., ff. 292r.–293r. 62 Ibid., ff. 293r.–294r. 63 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 10, fasc. 38–48, Report from the Nunciature of Paris (by Msgr. Emanuele Clarizio) to the Vatican Secretariat of State, 1 September 1955, ff. 39–47, here f. 42. 64 Ibid., f. 45. 65 Ibid., f. 43. 66 Ibid., ff. 43, 46–47. 67 Ibid., f. 41. 68 Ibid., ff. 45. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., f. 39. 71 Henri Chappoulie, Fraternité chrétienne et peuples d’Outre-Mer. Semaine religieuse d’Angers, 16 October 1955. 72 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 5 October 1955, ff. 198r.–199r. 73 Lettre collective de l’épiscopat algérien. Les chrétiens et la paix en Algérie, Documentation catholique, 2 October 1955, C. 1263–1271. 74 Déclaration de l’A.C.A. Problème de l’Afrique du Nord devant la conscience chrétienne, Documentation catholique, 30 October 1955, 1/2, C. 1371–1374. 75 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 15 October 1955, ff. 58r–60r, here ff. 58–59. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., here ff. 59–60. 78 Ibid., f. 60. 79 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 30, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 22 January 1955, ff. 65r–70r., here f. 70. 80 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 21 October 1955, ff. 202r–211r, here f. 203. 81 Ibid., ff. 209r–210r. 82 Ibid., ff. 207r–208r.

124  The handling of the Algerian crisis 83 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, letter from Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, to Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella, 4 November 1955, f. 212r. 84 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, letter from Jules Artur, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy, 6 November 1955, ff. 230r–231v. 85 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 10, fasc. ff. 8–16, Report on meeting between Msgr. Marella and Msgr. Perrin Archbishop of Carthage (minutes), 21 October 1955, ff. 10–11, here f. 10. 86 Ibid., f. 12. 87 AA. EE. SS., Period V, Part. II, French Africa, Pos. 10, fasc. ff. 26–29, Note from Vatican Secretariat of State on Allal El Fassi’s predictions on Morocco’s future, 7 November 1955, ff. 17–25. 88 Ibid. 89 Gilles Martinet, Une certaine idée de la gauche (1936–1997), Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997, 144.

References Ageron, Charles-Robert (1997). L’insurrection du 20 août 1955 dans le NordConstantinois: de la résistance armée à la guerre du peuple. In: Charles-Robert Ageron (ed.), La Guerre d’Algérie et les Algériens, 1954–1962. Paris: Armand Colin-Masson, 27–50. Bédarida, François, Fouilloux, Étienne (eds.) (1988). La Guerre d’Algérie et les Chrétiens. Cahiers de l’Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, 9, October. Blunt, Craig Simon (1999). (Re) Interpreting Integration: A Study of Colonial Reform During the Algerian War (1954– 62). Coventry: University of Warwick. Bocquet, Jérôme (2012). Un dreyfusisme chrétien face à la guerre d’Algérie. In: Denis Pelletier, Jean-Louis Schlegel (eds.), À la gauche du Christ. Les chrétiens de gauche en France de 1945 à nos jours. Paris: Seuil, 227–255. Bocquet, Jérôme (2014). Les chrétiens et la guerre. La guerre juste ou la « génération du djébel » (1954–2010), soutenance Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches. Paris: Haute École Pratique des Hautes Études. Boudiaf, Mohamed (1992). Où va l’Algérie? Alger: Rahma. Brasseur, Paule (1986). L’Église catholique et la décolonisation en Afrique noire. In: Charles-Robert Ageron (ed). Les chemins de la décolonisation de l’empire colonial français, 1936–1956. Paris: CNRS, 55–68. Chapeu, Sybille (2004). Des chrétiens dans la guerre d’Algérie, L’action de la Mission de France. Paris: Les Éditions de l’Atelier-Éditions ouvrières. Coulon Christian (1969). L’africanisation de l’Église catholique, mémoire présenté pour le diplôme supérieur d’études et de recherches politiques. Paris: Fondation nationale des sciences politique. El Korso, Malika (2012). La guerre de libération nationale et l’indépendance algérienne au regard de Témoignage chrétien. In: Amar Mohand-Amer, Belkacem Benzenine (eds.), Le Maghreb et l’indépendance de l’Algérie. Oran, Tunis, Paris: CRASC, IRMC et Karthala, 235–252. El Korso, Malika (1984). La guerre d’Algérie à travers cinq journaux catholiques métropolitains, 1954–1958, thèse de doctorat de 3ème cycle sous la direction de Charles-Robert Ageron. Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Evans, Martin (2012). Algeria: France’s Undeclared War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The handling of the Algerian crisis 125 Flynn, Gabriel, Murray Paul D. (eds.) (2011). Ressourcement. A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology. New York: OUP Oxford. Fouilloux, Étienne (1988). Intellectuels catholiques et guerre d’Algérie (1954–1962). In: Jean-Pierre Rioux, Jean-François Sirinelli (eds.), La Guerre d’Algérie et les intellectuels français. Paris: Cahiers de l’Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, vol. 10, 53–78. Gonzales, Denis (2013). L’engagement algérien et humaniste du cardinal LéonÉtienne Duval (1903–1996). Confluences Méditerranée 4(87): 83–191. Gori, Luca (2002). Santa Sede e Francia: La decolonizzazione dell’Africa nera francese (1953–1960). Studi Storici 43(1): 193–213. Grenier, Clément (2007). La protestation des rappelés en 1955, un mouvement d’indiscipline dans la guerre d’Algérie. Le Mouvement Social 218(1): 45–61. Guérin Daniel, (1973). Ci-gît le colonialisme. Algérie, Inde, Indochine, Madagascar, Maroc, Palestine, Polynésie, Tunisie. Témoignage militant. Paris: Mouton. Houart, Pierre (1960). L’attitude de l’Église dans la guerre d’Algérie, 1954–1960. Brussels: Le Livre Africain. Legrain, Michel (2009). La querelle du Devoir de décolonisation autour du père Joseph Michel et de l’aumônerie des étudiants d’outre-mer (1954). Histoire et missions chrétiennes 10(2), 95–117. Maillard de La Morandais, Alain (1983). De la colonisation à la torture: depuis leurs origines jusqu’à leurs engagements, débats des consciences chrétiennes françaises pendant la guerre d’Algérie (1954–1962), thèse de doctorat de 3ème cycle. Paris: Université Paris 3. Marangé, Céline (2016). De l’influence politique des acteurs coloniaux. Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 131: 3–16. Martin, Jean (2006). Blum-Viollette (projet). In: Jean-François Sirinelli (ed.), Dictionnaire de l’histoire de France. Paris: Larousse, vol. 1, 1176, 91–92. Mayeur, Jean-Marie (1965). Les documents collectifs de l’épiscopat français relatifs aux questions temporelles de 1944 à 1962. In: René Rémond (ed.), Forces religieuses et attitudes politiques dans la France contemporaine. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 351–376. Mayeur-Jaouen, Catherine (2018). « Urgence pour l’Algérie »: Vin nouveau, une revue d’étudiants catholiques contre la guerre d’Algérie (1955–1956). In: Morgan Corriou, M’hamed Oualdi (eds.), Une histoire sociale et culturelle du politique en Algérie: Études offertes à Omar Carlier. Paris: Éditions de la Sorbonne, 387–411. Médard, Frédéric (2010). Les débuts de la guerre d’Algérie: errements et contradictions d’un engagement. Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains 240(4): 81–100. Meynier, Gilbert (2004). Le PPA-MTLD et le FLN-ALN, étude comparée. In: Mohammed Harbi, Benjamin Stora (eds.), La Guerre d’Algérie, 1954–2004, la fin de l’amnésie. Paris: R. Laffont, 417–451. Nouschi, André (1962). La naissance du nationalisme algérien, 1914–1954. Paris: Éditions de Minuit. Nozière, André (1979). Les Chrétiens dans la guerre d’Algérie. Paris: Cana. Pervillé, Guy (2007). La guerre d’Algérie (1954–1962). Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Peyroulou, Jean-Pierre (2009). L’impossible réforme: de l’impunité à la fraude électorale. In: Id., Guelma, 1945. Une subversion française dans l’Algérie coloniale. Paris: La Découverte, 329–338.

126  The handling of the Algerian crisis Prévot, Maryvonne (1999). Convergences maghrébines autour d’Alain Savary, secrétaire d’État aux affaires marocaines et tunisiennes en 1956. Revue Historique 611(3): 507–536. Quemeneur, Tramor (2004). « La messe en l’église Saint-Séverin et le “dossier Jean Müller”. Des chrétiens et la désobéissance au début de la guerre d’Algérie (1955–1957). Bulletin de l’Institut d’histoire du temps présent 83: 94–106. Rahal, Malika (2013a). A Local Approach to the UDMA: Local-Level Politics During the Decade of Political Parties, 1946–56. Journal of North African Studies 18(5): 703–724 Rahal, Malika (2013b). Algeria: Nonviolent Resistance Against French Colonialism, 1830s–1950s. In: Maciej J. Bartkowski (eds.), Recovering Nonviolent History: Civil Resistance in Liberation Struggles. Boulder, CO: Rienner, 107–123. Rahal, Malika (2018). L’UDMA et les UDMISTES: Contribution à l’histoire du nationalisme algérien. Alger: Barzakh. Remaoun, Hassan (2016). Enjeux démocratiques, sociaux et nationaux dans les tentatives de regroupement frontiste au sein du mouvement national (1936–1962). In: Afifa Bererhi, Naget Khadda, Christian Phéline, Agnès Spiquel (eds.), Défis démocratiques et affirmation nationale. Alger: Chihab Éditions, 354–365. Riché, Pierre (2003). Henri-Irénée Marrou, historien engagé. Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf. Rioux, Jean-Pierre (1983). France de la Quatrième République. L’Expansion et l’Impuissance (1952–1958). Paris: Le Seuil. Seridj, Mélinda (2020). Hocine Aït -Ahmed: itinéraire transnational d’un nationaliste algérien. Les Cahiers Sirice 25(29): 21–30 Shepard, Todd (2011). Thinking Between Metropole and Colony: The French Republic, ‘Exceptional Promotion’ and the ‘Integration’ of Algerians, 1955–1962. In: Martin Thomas (ed.), The French Colonial Minf. Volume 1: Mental Maps of Empire and Colonial Encounters. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 298–323. Shepard, Todd (2015). Voices of Decolonization: A Brief History with Documents. Boston, MA; New York: Bedford/St Martin’s Stora, Benjamin (2010). Le massacre du 20 août 1955. Récit historique, bilan historiographique. Historical Reflections 36(2): 81–91. Thénault, Sylvie (2007). L’état d’urgence (1955–2005). De l’Algérie coloniale à la France contemporaine: destin d’une loi. Le Mouvement Social 218(1): 63–78. Thomas, Martin (2003). The Colonial Policies of the Mouvement Républicain Populaire, 1944–1954: From Reform to Reaction. The English Historical Review 118(476): 380–411. Tranvouez. Yvon (1983). Résistance au pouvoir dans le catholicisme. La Quinzaine face à l’A.C.A. (1952–1954). Archives de sciences sociales des religions 56(1): 5–35. Tyre, Stephen (2006). From Algérie française to France musulmane: Jacques Soustelle and the Myths and Realities of ‘Integration’, 1955–1962. French History 20(3): 276–296. Vince, Natalya (2020). The Algerian War, The Algerian Revolution. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

5

The Holy See and the Mollet government Distrust and adaptation strategy. The Fidei donum encyclical (1956–1957)

The degeneration of the Algerian conflict and the discovery of oil. The strategic importance of the diocese of Laghouat At the end of 1955, the Holy See believed that the Holy Father’s radio message of 24 December would help towards finding a solution to the colonial dispute. Compared to his previous Christmas message, which had dismissed the independence processes as “nationalistic explosions, greedy for power”,1 Pius XII now recognised that “a just and progressive political freedom” for non-European peoples should neither be “denied nor hindered”.2 In French historiography from the 1960s to the 1980s, apart from rare contributions that placed Pius XII’s radio-messages on the colonial theme within the context of a magisterium still dominated by the fear of communism (Alix, 1967: 17–51), the prevailing interpretation considered the Pope’s interventions as an encouragement to the Catholic Church on the African continent to support the drive for independence (Nozière, 1979: 60, 154–156; Touili, 1985: 18). Nonetheless, as we will see later, it was an interpretation that the Vatican documentation in part contradicts. With a more attentive analysis of the radio message, however, one cannot fail to note the recognition of the merits of the Western presence in the non-European territories and the exhortation to Europe to remain there as an irreplaceable model of civilisation to guide the path of post-colonial evolution. The Pope affirmed that the non-European countries had to ascribe to Europe “the merit of their advancement; and that without the influence of Europe that extended into all fields, they could be dragged by blind nationalism into chaos or slavery”.3 With the manifest intention to mediate between the opposing theories of the anti-colonialist missionary clergy, personified by Joseph Michel, and the more conservative Catholicism represented by Charles Roux, the Pope made it clear that “the peoples of the West, especially of Europe, should not remain passive as regards these matters by pointlessly regretting the past or mutually reproaching colonialism. Instead, they should work constructively to apply, where they have not yet done so, those genuine values of Europe and the West which have borne so much fruit DOI: 10.4324/9781003230175-6

128  The Holy See and the Mollet government on other continents”.4 As Elizabeth A. Foster has observed, “In his 1955 Christmas message, Pius explicitly addressed anticolonial agitation head on, trying to strike a balance between support for self-­determination for colonized peoples and respect for a paternalist conception of a European civilizing mission” (Foster, 2019: 14). Oissila Saaïdia pointed out the ambiguity of the expression “progressive freedom” with regard to the specific Algerian case: “ever since Pope Pius XII’s Christmas message in 1955, Rome has been advocating gradual decolonisation. […] But this approval given to peaceful nationalism cannot be applied in the same way in the African colonies and in Algeria where the Catholics are also the Europeans who steer and control political, economic, and social life” (Saaïdia, 2018: 214). At the time of the Pope’s radio message, on the other hand, the situation in Algeria was becoming increasingly complex as the calling of new elections in December coincided with the end of the “state of emergency”, soon followed by an increase in attacks perpetrated by the independence front, 800 in November 1955 and 1200 in January 1956 (Thénault, 2012: 67). These attacks had the effect of radicalising the nationalist sentiment in metropolitan France and among the pied-noir population to the advantage of the populist propaganda of Pierre Poujade, founder of a reactionary movement that was seeking consensus among the middle classes through a message centred on anti-parliamentarism, the fiscal revolt, and the intransigent defence of French Algeria (Sirinelli, 1988: 91; Kalman, 2013: 181). Faced with this anti-republican threat, the Republican Front – a centre-left alliance that included the socialists (the SFIO led by Guy Mollet), the centrist radicals led by Pierre Mendès-France, the coalition’s true inspiration, and some left-wing Gaullists such as Jacques Chaban-Delmas – was formed on 8 December 1955. The Front’s election agenda included plans for the economic modernisation of France and the introduction of political and social reforms in Algeria aimed at “pacification”. On 8 December, in the run up to the elections, François Mauriac shocked the Catholic electorate by urging them, in an article published in the French weekly “L’Express” to abandon the MRP he criticised for its timid North African policy not yet absolutely on the side of decolonisation, and to vote for the Republican Front and in particular Pierre Mendès-France.5 Mauriac’s intervention, which also touched on the sensitive question of the MRP’s policy of safeguarding the prerogatives of the Church, as in the case of the “Barangé law” which granted subsidies to Catholic schools, deeply upset the ecclesiastical hierarchies, which until then, had imposed a strict pre-election silence on the clergy.6 The Holy See, in a harsh article published in the “Osservatore Romano”, intervened in defence of the MRP and against the election appeals in favour of MendèsFrance.7 Above all, however, it acted secretly and severely against the clergy suspected of sympathising with Mauriac, in particular the Bishop of Chartres, Roger Michon, who was referred to the Congregation of the

The Holy See and the Mollet government 129 Holy Office for adjudication and in the Semaine religieuse of his diocese “Voix de Notre-Dame de Chartres” of 23 December, was forced to deny his closeness to the Nobel Prize winner for Literature.8 A document dated 22 December 1955, entitled Note sur l’évolution des réactions de plus en plus nombreuses de la Hiérarchie et des catholiques français devant les initiatives du progressisme (Notes on the evolution of the ever more numerous reactions of the Hierarchy and French Catholics to the initiatives of progressivism), found among the papers of the Paris Nunciature and probably traceable to the Dominican Father Paul-Pierre Philippe, Commissary of the Holy Office in charge of the Michon case, demonstrates the Vatican’s impatience with the “aberrations of F. Mauriac and his Progressivist companions” committed to “continuing their effort of ‘intellectual’ perversion and disintegration of Catholic forces”.9 This document also seems to confirm certain details reported in the Italian Communist press that the article in the “Osservatore Romano” had been suggested directly by Nuncio Marella, who had thus taken “the most disastrous step of his career, second only to the suppression of the working-priest movement”.10 Notwithstanding the Holy See’s intervention, the centre-right coalition of which the MRP was a part, despite having gained 33.10% of the votes, did not have enough seats to form a new government. The results of the elections, held on 2 January 1956, were uncertain, and only after many weeks of negotiations was an executive formed at the end of the month by the centre-left, i.e. the Republican Front, headed by SFIO leader Guy Mollet. The new government was greeted with extreme mistrust by the French in Algeria who were hostile towards Mollet as during the election campaign he had described the colonial repression as “idiotic dead end” war (“imbécile et sans issue”11). This discontent culminated in a heated protest staged on 6 February 1956 against Mollet during his visit to Algiers, which was dispersed by riot police (Evans, 2012: 149). The anger of the colonists induced the new Prime Minister to partially back down. Firstly, he divested General Georges Catroux, recently appointed to replace Governor General Jacques Soustelle and entrusted with the task of pacifying the region, and secondly, appointed Robert Lacoste as Resident General within the framework of a policy aimed at reaffirming the objective of destroying the Algerian nationalist movement and maintaining the indissoluble link between Algeria and France (Evans, 2009). The episode profoundly affected the Nunciature in Paris, and it gradually became convinced that the long-term survival of the French colonial order was impossible, an opinion increasingly shared by the Holy See. This judgement was conditioned not so much by idealistic adherence to anti-­colonial values, but rather by a lack of esteem towards the socialist Mollet and the centre-left political class, whose continuous concessions to the North African national movements had had the sole effect of further fomenting their demands for independence.

130  The Holy See and the Mollet government On 14 February, Marella informed the Vatican Secretariat of State that “developments in North Africa clearly show that the slow decline of France as a major power cannot be halted by a simple change of parliament or government”.12 According to the Nuncio, there was no longer “any doubt” that as well as being “a natural expression of their considerable evolution”, the North African peoples’ desire for independence was also the result of the crisis of the French Republic, which had not “conserved the prestige and authority of the past”, so that the Muslim population were now aware that they were “dealing with hesitant masters without a valid guide who were plagued by profound internal discord”.13 The most serious consequences of French ineptitude – the report continued – has been seen in Algeria where Mollet’s trip ended “disastrously”. On the one hand, “encouraged by the successes of the Tunisian and Moroccan nationalists, the Algerians are becoming more and more rigid in their refusal of ‘integration’ with France” in view of “total independence”, while, on the other, the protest of the colonists marked “the triumph of violence over authority” and ended up “reinforcing in the indigenous population the persuasion that the strong way is the best way against weak governments”.14 On the other hand, the colonists were concerned about how rapidly the process of national emancipation in Morocco and Tunisia was developing, now that independence was soon to be proclaimed. In fact, with the agreements of 2 and 20 March respectively, these two countries gained their independence and while wishing to maintain good political and trade relations with France for economic reasons, they immediately depicted themselves for the benefit of public opinion in the Arab world as “the wings of the Maghreb” that were preparing the liberation of Algeria (the reference is to the words of the Moroccan Prime Minister Mbarek Bekkaï: “Morocco and Tunisia are the wings of the Maghreb […] When the wings are free, the body will liberate itself”; see Essemlali, 2011, 79). Nevertheless, the Republican Front government continued to adopt the “third way” policy, i.e. a compromise between the withdrawal of France from North Africa and maintaining the colonial regime to the bitter end, by pursuing a perspective of “pacification in Algeria”, which already under the Mendès-France and Faure governments had included the use of both military repression to suppress the rebellion, and reforms to abate the interest of the colonial lobbies. On 12 March 1956, in fact, the government obtained from the National Assembly the authorisation to launch a programme of reforms and economic, social, and administrative investments, but at the same time were granted “special powers” (“pouvoirs spéciaux”) that would allow the adoption of “all the exceptional measures necessary to restore order, and protect people, property and territory” (Thénault, 2012: 68). As was customary, most of the speeches during the parliamentary debate, which began on 8 March, stressed the terms “investment” and “modernisation” to emphasise the mutual economic benefits for Algeria if it were to

The Holy See and the Mollet government 131 remain part of the French Republic. However, the most significant consequence of this law, voted surprisingly also by the Communist Party, was the conferral on the civilian authorities of powers typical of wartime legislation, but particularly the delegation to military commands, by decree and without parliamentary intervention, of the power to arrest, detain, and interrogate suspects. In this way, the army became the most powerful French force in Algeria (Thénault, 2012: 69). On the eve of the parliamentary debate on special powers, Msgr. Duval and Msgr. Pinier had a long discussion with the Nuncio Msgr. Marella on the religious and political situation in their respective dioceses of Algiers and Constantine. Compared to their previous conversations with the Nuncio, the two bishops were now more concerned about the hostility shown towards the Algerian Episcopate by groups of the colonial right who still considered priests as “propagators of the culture and civilisation of this country [France] rather than as missionaries of the Gospel […] and repeatedly reproached the clergy for their lack of patriotism”. Moreover, the awareness of the clemency of the Arab independentists towards the Catholic Church, which was spared the attacks of the insurgents, induced the clergy and Catholic associations to “carefully avoid promoting or supporting all those initiatives that could in some way give the Muslims an excuse to accuse the Church of collusion with the colonialists”.15 That the Algerian bishops distanced themselves from the colonial enclaves of their dioceses, however, still did not correspond to a clear adhesion to the ideal of independence. Duval deplored the fact that the Mollet government was too weak and, referring to the prime minister’s appeal to the insurgents to lay down arms, an appeal accompanied by the threat of all-out war if the revolt continued, expressed his pessimism about the usefulness of these warnings, as emerges from the summary of his conversation with the Nuncio: According to His Excellency Archbishop [Duval], France will not be able to solve the problem on its own if it does not first succeed in uniting the country around a precise programme of action. […] The indigenous population knows very well that the course of action chosen by the Prime Minister is not even approved by all the members of his Cabinet! They also know that, in any eventuality, they can count on the scruples of the partisans of non-violence and even more on the systematic defeatism of the communists, whose trade unions have already promised a series of strikes if further ‘repressions’ are authorised in Algeria. In such a state of affairs, the French living in North Africa cannot be asked to continue to have confidence. In fact, while political parties in Paris are wasting time in endless theoretical discussions on formulas for interaction, federation, etc., and intellectuals are delighting in weighing the legitimacy of certain

132  The Holy See and the Mollet government military actions, many industrialists are hurrying to transfer their capital from Algeria and hundreds of families are emigrating to other countries.16 Concern over the depopulation of the French community in Algeria also appears in the report of 26 March 1956 that Duval wrote to inform the Paris Nunciature of the events that took place between August 1955 and the March of the following year, i.e. from the Battle of Philippeville (a major turning point in the Algerian War) to the upsurge in French military intervention following the approval of “special powers”. The Archbishop spoke of the “profound sadness”, sometimes in the form of “real despondency”, of the Christian communities in Algeria, in his view “deeply affected” by the “exaggerated or unjustified criticism of the Catholic press in France”, which forced families, especially those living in the countryside, to leave for France, Canada, or South America. If this exodus of French people from Algeria had continued, there would have been “unpleasant consequences for the future”, namely “the decline of the Church’s presence with the ensuing disastrous repercussions”.17 Duval attributed the return migrations of pieds-noirs to France or other destinations not so much to the ongoing conflict as to tensions within the French community itself, some triggered by the political right, by “propaganda conducted by the big financial interest groups” that accused the Church of abandoning Catholics and “taking the side of the Muslims”, others provoked by the left, especially by the progressive Catholic press, especially the missionary press, in the Metropolis. After denouncing the “unjust attacks in Catholic newspapers, even in the official or unofficial publications of some Catholic Action or Missionary Work groups”, the Archbishop dwelt on the articles that appeared between October and December 1955 in the bulletin of the Lille-based missionary laity movement “Ad Lucem. Association catholique de Coopération internationale” presided over by Cardinal Achille Liénart, former prelate of the Mission de France, and in the magazine “Missi” of the Œuvres pontificales missionnaires in Lyon, Cardinal Gerlier’s diocese, which reproached the ecclesiastical hierarchies of the Church in Africa, including those in Algeria, for being at the exclusive service of Europeans.18 The harsh comments in Duval’s correspondence of that period with Msgr. Jean Maury, executive editor of “Missi”, and later with Georges Hourdin, executive editor of “Informations Catholiques Internationales”, responsible in his opinion for having published offensive and biased articles against the Algerian clergy accused of a lack of missionary spirit, show how misunderstood the Archbishop of Algiers felt by that part of the Catholic world which was in favour of decolonisation.19 This alleged misunderstanding was linked to Duval’s choice not to take clear and definitive positions in political terms on the Algerian national question.

The Holy See and the Mollet government 133 The proverbial cautiousness of his public statements has often been interpreted by historiography as a need dictated by respect for his pastoral role and the need to protect the Algerian clergy from possible retaliation by the colonial authority. According to a 1971 study by Albert Fitte, although on one hand “the Algerian hierarchy had never publicly sided with either political solution to the Algerian conflict”, exhorting the Catholics – as in the case of the episcopal letter of 15 September 1955 or in the circulars to the clergy of the same year – not to “interfere in political techniques”, on the other, Duval had expressed confidentially in a letter to the clergy on 7 October of the following year, his conviction that sooner or later he would have to “take into account the need to progressively satisfy the will of the people of Algeria for self-determination” (Fitte, 1971: 78–79).20 Similarly, when referring to the episcopal letter of 15 September 1955, Darcie Fontaine’s more recent study, Decolonizing Christianity Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria, argues that “it is possible to look at this declaration and see an overt openness to the possibilities of Algerian independence based on the phrase ‘assuring the free expression of legitimate aspirations’” (Fontaine, 2016: 65). She also interprets the anti-communism of the first reports sent by Duval to the Holy See as “a calculated attempt to garner Vatican support both for clergy like Jean-Claude Barthez and Jean Scotto, who were attempting to reshape Christianity in Algeria with tactics that conservative Christians viewed as radical, and for his own projects in North Africa” (Fontaine, 2016: 97). In actual fact, there is no trace in Vatican documents of Duval’s interventions in defence or in favour of the Catholics siding with the independence movement in his diocese. In the silence of the local episcopate on political matters, the Catholic Action movements in Algiers were able to organise meetings at the archbishop’s palace to discuss issues of colonial reform, such as the abolition of the controversial double constituency that underestimated the representation of the Muslim majority.21 This would seem to demonstrate a certain tolerance on Duval’s part towards the ecclesiastical activities that took place in his diocese, but were they really an expression of Duval’s political thinking? Once again, it is only an in-depth and accurate interpretation of the reports sent by Msgr. Duval to the Nunciature and thus to the Holy See that ensures a reliable reconstruction of his positions. In his report of 8 August 1955, in dissent with the Theological Committee of the Diocese of Lyon, Duval had expressed his scepticism about the advisability of Algeria’s immediate independence without guarantees for the French minority. Likewise, in his report of 26 March 1956, and particularly in the long paragraph on La situation présente envisagée au point de vue ou des perspectives d’avenir de l’Église (The present situation considered from the point of view or future prospects of the Church), the Archbishop of Algiers insisted on the need for a solution somewhere

134  The Holy See and the Mollet government between the withdrawal of France and the maintenance of the colonial status quo. On the subject of the “fundamental steps” of Algerian decolonisation, Duval in fact wrote: Algeria, an underdeveloped country, at least for the time being needs the assistance of a Western country from an economic and cultural point of view. It therefore seems that a solution of abandonment, besides being harmful to France for other reasons, would be dangerous for Algeria itself. Moreover, a solution of stagnation (maintaining the ‘status quo’) is also to be ruled out as contrary to the legitimate aspirations of the indigenous people, and for the same reason a threat to peace.22 From the point of view of practical, political, and legal solutions, Duval’s personal vision did not seem to go beyond the concept of “integration” contemplated by the Faure and Mollet governments and was even less advanced in terms of promoting political rights, as the Archbishop was against conceding the real electoral weight of the Muslim majority through the abolition of the double constituency. In this regard, he stated: How can promoting the political right of every Muslim to vote be guaranteed while maintaining a fair balance between the Muslim and the European community? The crushing of the European community by the Muslim community in the game of an electoral system based solely on the law of numbers would be a disaster for Algeria, which would be plunged into disorder and anarchy.23 This fear of unforeseen and uncontrollable developments in the Algerian situation, favoured by incautious reforms, explains the extreme prudence of his episcopal magisterium. Careful not to take sides, he tried to remain in the strictly pastoral sphere, as confirmed by the White Fathers in a report at the beginning of 1957. They disclosed that after having entrusted them with the task of “ensuring the missionary orientation of all the works of the diocese”, placing “insistent emphasis on this particular characteristic that he wished to find in Catholic Action”, Duval had always appeared “careful to gauge the consequences that the attitudes he had to adopt, his words, and the declarations he had to make, could have from this point of view”.24 Duval’s idea of “recognising the legitimate aspirations” of the Algerians was therefore based on the same strict gradualness the Pope had recommended in his 1955 radio message on the “progressive freedom” of non-­ European peoples. In this sense, the opinions privately expressed by the Archbishop of Algiers in his report to the Paris Nunciature on 26 March appear entirely in tune with the position expressed by Cardinal Maurice Feltin on 20 April in a speech on the Algerian question given to representatives of the capital’s parishes.

The Holy See and the Mollet government 135 The Archbishop of Paris, consistent with the Church’s reaffirmed political neutrality over the parties, dwelt on “the moral aspect of the problem”, namely the duty to combine love of peace and rejection of violence and racism in the name of universal brotherhood with loyalty to the homeland, the “true mother”.25 According to the Archbishop, France was about to end its colonising experience but not its civilising mission because, having an indubitable technological and economic advantage over the emerging countries, it retained its duty to assist and help colonised peoples and therefore to “prepare and realise a progressive emancipation of the colony” through “all useful reforms to allow Africans to take progressively more responsibility in the social realm”.26 Cardinal Feltin thus expressed a point of view that the ecclesiastical hierarchies had already crystallised. The most important Catholic daily newspaper in France, “La Croix”, seemed to want to confer a sort of authority and official status on this orientation through the three editorials that the editorin-chief Father Emile Gabel dedicated to the “Algerian drama” between May and June. While all three excluded the simplifications and extremist solutions proffered by the opposite sides of the conflict,27 they did consider the dissatisfaction of the Arab majority due to the denial of their political and social rights and the justification of the colonists’ fears of a future dominated by the Muslims,28 in order to justify France’s intervention in Algeria to protect its citizens and to continue to guarantee the development and material well-being threatened by the rebels possibly gaining the upper hand,29 to be legitimate. Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre also felt obliged to underline the Church’s immovable midway position in the passionate intellectual and theological controversy on the issue of decolonisation. This controversy had been rekindled in April 1956 by the appeal of the Union des étudiants catholiques africains (Union of African Catholic Students) to the French Catholics and missionary clergy in favour of African autonomy, in line with the thinking of Father Joseph Michel (Legrain, 2009: 111).30 The theses of Father Michel and the Aumônerie des étudiants d’outre-mer (Chaplaincy of overseas students) were answered shortly afterwards by the Dominican Father Joseph-Vincent Ducatillon who, taking up the defence of the “rights” of France and the French, strongly reaffirmed the legitimacy and relevance of Catholic “patriotism” in the colonial context.31 Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre, who had a hierarchical super-ordination over Father Michel both in the Apostolic Delegation of sub-Saharan Africa and in the missionary congregation of the Holy Spirit to which they both belonged, in a letter to his confrère criticised the exaggerations that had emerged from this debate. He wrote that while Ducatillon’s thesis was correct in recognising “the colonising powers had acquired some legitimate rights”, it appeared “excessive” and “based on quite indefensible grounds”, while Father Michel’s own argument was too peremptory in its alleged demonstration that “decolonisation is imperative”, as it did not take into account the danger of anarchy linked to communism and Islamic fanaticism.32

136  The Holy See and the Mollet government The balance between the opposing views consisted in accepting a new role for France in its former African colonies as a guarantor of a peaceful evolution that would prevent a “return to savagery”.33 In the Catholic world, however, there were still different interpretations of the concrete prospects for a renewal of France’s presence in Africa in the context of a gradual reform of the French Union. When Morocco and Tunisia were declared independent, the doubts of the Paris Nunciature about Guy Mollet’s ability to keep the precipitous course of events in North Africa under control increased. In May 1956, Nuncio Marella informed the Holy See of the secret negotiations started by the Mollet government with the leaders of the Algerian revolt through the mediation offered by the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, one of the leaders of the “Non-Aligned Movement”. This mediation took place at the same time as the recognition of the sovereignty of Tunisia and Morocco by some Western governments, including the United States, Great Britain, and Italy, which hastened to establish diplomatic relations with the new independent States.34 It was in this context that Msgr. Marella refused to accede to the Italian government’s request for “an initiative of the Holy See” alongside Western countries in the North African question for the rapid pacification of Algeria with a view to its independence,35 received via the Italian Ambassador to Paris, Pietro Quaroni. This refusal seems surprising as firstly, diplomatic relations between Italy and the Holy See had always been excellent, and secondly, the Vatican was not generally opposed to the Italian government’s so-called neo-Atlanticism, i.e. its policy of dialogue with Arab countries with the aim of gaining for Italy a strategic position on the Mediterranean chessboard, independent of the United States, its main Atlantic partner.36 However, the Paris Nunciature’s disinterest with regard to Ambassador Pietro Quaroni’s proposal can be explained in the light of the same considerations expounded by Msgr. Marella in his March and May reports. For the Nuncio, Mollet’s policy “not only had not appeased the nationalists of the two former protectorates, but had made them more demanding, more audacious, and more daring; at the same time, instead of severing their solidarity with the Algerian rebels, it had helped to reinforce it”. Proof of this was the military aid offered to the “fellaghas”, a vaguely derogatory-sounding term that literally means bandits, by the guerrillas of Abdel Krim Khatib, head of the “Armée de Libération Marocaine”, defined as a “subversive organisation”.37 Although he disliked Premier Mollet and distrusted his handling of the Algerian crisis, Marella nevertheless welcomed one of the most important governmental initiatives of 1956, namely the National Assembly’s approval of the Defferre Framework Law (Loi cadre Defferre) in the June of that year. In the French Empire (although still not in Algeria, as it was a province of metropolitan France), it marked the first step towards political autonomy for the territories south of the Sahara. In fact, the Defferre

The Holy See and the Mollet government 137 Framework Law decentralised a number of powers by granting a degree of self-government, although not full independence, to the colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, renamed Overseas Territories (Territoires d’Outre-­ Mer, TOM) (Shipway, 2013). For the Paris Nunciature, this legislative intervention, as well as the implementing decrees of January to February 1957, was a turning point “of paramount importance for the future of French Africa” as it marked the definitive end of the “assimilation” policy aimed at homologating the indigenous populations to French citizens “in the strictest sense of the word”. The advantages of the assimilationist strategy, in particular the raising of living standards and the progressive civic and political education, had the unintended consequence of “awakening in the Africans a sense of their own personality” and pushing them towards “emancipation”. For this reason, Marella observed: Some of the shrewdest and most far-sighted French leaders realised that, in order to keep the colonies under the control of the mother country, it was necessary to change direction quickly: instead of continuing to try to make people who increasingly felt and wanted to remain African feel French, it was necessary to try to help them achieve their autonomy within the framework of a vast Franco-African Union. It was clear to the aforementioned leaders that if Paris persisted in keeping under tutelage peoples who, rightly or wrongly were now aware of their adulthood, they would try to gain their full freedom on their own, perhaps by resorting to violence.38 The Nuncio noted with satisfaction that the government’s plans had been amended several times in Parliament “in the direction of an ever greater autonomy of the African peoples” thanks to the “energetic stance” taken by the MPs of the MRP who, until then “hesitant”, had “spoken out unreservedly in favour of the emancipation of the colonies”.39 However, the Dakar Apostolic Delegation’s assessment of the Defferre Framework Law was very different. The 1956 report for Propaganda Fide contained a polemical assessment of the new direction on the African matter taken by the Mollet executive, described as “a government that is ruining its political solidity with a total abandonment of authority”.40 The criticism of the Paris government’s policy in the African territories was formulated on the basis of value judgments that were certainly anti-French but not anti-colonial. In fact, Msgr. Lefebvre, the author of the report, considered that granting greater powers of self-government to local administrations in the colonies was “the best way to incite disorder and revolution” since this reform appeared to be inspired by “false notions of French democracy [which] have had deplorable results”. The Apostolic Delegate also wrote: “France is standing down morally and legally. It no longer believes in the legitimacy of its presence

138  The Holy See and the Mollet government and even less in the moral obligation of a presence aimed at avoiding the worst. It no longer has the moral strength to stay because it has reduced the reasons for its presence to economic and selfish ends”.41 As a result of the Defferre Law, the report went on, “assets are being transferred, and senior officials are asking to be reintegrated into metropolitan France”, leaving Africa without anyone to defend civilisation. Islam must be considered an “anti-Western” phenomenon, especially “the young Islam [which] proclaims itself the religion of the blacks, Catholicism being the religion of the whites”, ignited by “evermore present and powerful influences from Cairo [which] are striving to lead a crusade against the Western world”.42 Msgr. Lefebvre also outlined a dichotomous opposition between “official France”, i.e. that of politicians and intellectuals, educated in the “principles of liberal and atheistic democracy”, and Catholic and missionary France composed of “sensitive administrators, devout doctors [who] called upon their Christian convictions in their service and acted realistically”. Lefebvre counted progressive Catholics among the ranks of “bad” France, as they were “imbued with the principles of liberalism and modernism”, and therefore held them responsible for exerting a “harmful influence”. In the report, he said that the Secretary General of the Presidency of the Republic, Charles Merveilleux du Vignaux, had privately “spoken to him of the great dismay that these articles [by progressive Catholics] have caused in the conscience of many French Catholics”. The apostolic delegate went on to say that: It is becoming increasingly evident that an active fraction of lay or regular clerics (and I may say some dignitaries of the Church of France) are proclaiming to the four winds liberal theories that are destroying the legitimacy of the French presence in Africa, that are invoking principles that are ambiguous to say the least, such as the freedom of peoples to dispose of themselves, the equality of races, the freedom of religions, and a sense of history that above all translates into support for the workers and the liberation of colonised peoples. Magazines such as ‘Ésprit’ and ‘Informations catholiques internationales’; magazines such as ‘Témoignage chrétien’, ‘Syndicalisme d’Outre-Mer’ (CFTC), and ‘Tam-Tam’ of the Aumônerie Catholique des Étudiants d’Outre-Mer in Paris, have supported socialist theories that tend towards Marxism.43 In a later report, Lefebvre points out that the framework law had brought about a “truce” on the part of African leaders towards the Europeans, previously identified as the target of all “recrimination” and judged as the “cause of all evil”. However, Lefebvre was sceptical about the local populations’ capacity for self-government, since “the democracy imposed by France is far from being what corresponds to the spirit of our Africans”, mainly because of the opportunism of their leaders, eager to possess the financial resources to assume the role of “master if not undisputed tyrant of [their] country”.44 Therefore, according to the apostolic delegate, even in

The Holy See and the Mollet government 139 the scenario of an increasingly post-colonial Africa, the role of the Church remained irreplaceable, as demonstrated by the effective participation of the Missions in election campaigns for the formation of the Assemblées des territoires d’outre-mer (the bodies of the legislative party), in support of candidates willing to guarantee financial aid to Catholic activities,45 in those countries where the pressure of the communist parties was strongest, for example Madagascar and Cameroon. The successful results of direct political engagement on the part of the Catholics thus made it possible “to hope that relations between these [African] governments and Europe would be based on Christian principles, which would avoid the misunderstanding that we are seeing in North Africa”.46 Marcel Lefebvre’s positions always appear to be marked by an intransigence consistent with his anti-modernist theological vision with evident ultra-reactionary ideological connotations. The most extreme judgments against the progressive Catholicism of metropolitan France and against any hypothesis of real political development of the local populations, judged according to ethnicity parameters, are the expression of his thought and, at least in their most radical formulation, do not find correspondence in the reports sent by other bodies of the ecclesiastical hierarchy such as the Paris Nunciature or the Algerian Episcopate. It is true, however, that Lefebvre’s radicalism did not prevent the Vatican from judging his work positively. Msgr. Angelo Dell’Acqua wrote to the Prefect of Propaganda Fide Pietro Fumasoni Biondi to inform him that “given the skills and abilities of His Excellency Monsignor Marcello Lefebvre” he would remain as the Pope’s representative in French Africa so he would have “the possibility to better follow the development of the Delegation’s numerous and serious problems, and to opportunely keep the Holy See informed”.47 Despite their divergent interpretation of the Defferre law, Marella and Lefebvre shared the same concerns about the impact of the international factor in the Algerian crisis linked not only to the geopolitical but also the economic competition between Western countries. In fact, at the beginning of the same year (1956), another event, as unexpected as it was crucial, contributed to radicalising the conflict, mobilising international diplomacy and, at the same time, strengthening the French Algerian front: the discovery in January of oil at Edjeleh in the south-east of the Algerian Sahara (Djermoun, 2014). Following this discovery, control of Algerian soil became an even more imperative objective for France as the direct exploitation of a huge “national” energy source would allow it to become a self-sufficient oil power able to compete with the superpowers (Saul, 2006). Since the Sahara was naturally an important stake also for the FLN in the war of independence, France redesigned the Algerian borders to its own advantage, separating the Saharan departments of southern Algeria from those of the North, so as to create a Saharan administrative entity, independent from its other African possessions, annexed to the metropolitan territory (Adjel-Debbich, 2018).

140  The Holy See and the Mollet government Marella firmly believed that the international powers were fomenting the insurrection as they were gambling on the outcome of an independent Algeria for opportunistic reasons related to the competition for control of energy resources: “That sometime in the near future France will have to abandon its ancient colony also appears to be the conviction of various foreign powers that are all trying to supply the ‘rebels’ with weapons and money while they prepare themselves to seize the legacy left by France. In addition to Egypt, which is practically leading the revolt, Russia, America and Great Britain are tacitly competing for the ‘protection’ of Algeria and the Sahara, territories which are said to be rich in undreamt of treasures (oil, uranium, etc.)”.48 Also Lefebvre, having been informed about the extension of the FLN revolt and the consequent “invasion of the fellaghas” in the diocese of Laghouat, located in the Sahara and therefore under the jurisdiction of the Apostolic Delegation of Dakar, feared that the rest of French Africa would be contaminated by the Algerian “rebellion”, in his view indirectly helped by the United States and England both attracted by the Saharan oil and intent on making the task of pacification more difficult for France.49 In the light of these reasons, and almost anticipating the advent of a charismatic leader like De Gaulle capable of restoring order, Lefebvre felt he had to conclude: The only solution to this tragedy is to find a man of great value, of great energy, who knows the problems well, and to whom the French government would give full power for a period of five years. Both the French and the Muslim Algerians could get on very well with each other: they know each other, they would find solutions if there were a brave man to implement them. But the intervention of the metropolis, with its false principles of egalitarianism and liberalism, can only end in abandonment, anarchy and communism. The situation of the Church is not critical for the moment, indeed the confidence of the local populations has not diminished, and schools are open and functioning everywhere, but this may not last long if France abandons the country completely.50 This scenario increased the anxiety already felt by Vatican hierarchies who, from this moment on, began to pay particular attention to the situation in the oil extraction area that fell under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the diocese of Laghouat and which corresponded to Algerian territory south of the Saharan Atlas. The White Fathers, who had been present in the Sahara since Bishop Lavigerie was first installed in Algeria in 1868, stated in their 1956 annual report on the state of the missions in that diocese that the real geopolitical conflict now taking place in the region was no longer the war of independence but rather the “titanic and obscure battle that the world oil trusts are waging silently and relentlessly” to gain control over the energy resources.51 The economic consequence, however, was a material

The Holy See and the Mollet government 141 development that brought “wages and bread” to the “mass of the desert poor [who] ask only to live in peace, freed from the pangs of hunger and unemployment” and this was all the more beneficial as the violence of the fellaghas reduced the nomads of the northern highlands in the centre of the rebellion zone to poverty.52 The superiors of the Society of White Fathers also described in their diaries the major social change resulting from the economic transformation of the region following the exploitation of oil and the rising standard of living of the Western community, condemning with harsh moral judgment the decay of religious values that accompanied the increased prosperity of the European settlers. In their view, the “frenzy of development” had led to “a generalised and contagious decline, not only in religious practice, but also in present morality”, such as “drinking alcohol, the materialistic spirit of work and leisure, the love of money, which leads to many violations of honesty, lies and other sins of speech that lacerate and profoundly divide groups and individuals”.53 Nevertheless, in spite of the terrible consequences of the war such as “ill-treatment on the part of the insurgents” and “police violence”, the behaviour of Europeans and Muslims towards each other had “remained generally cordial or at least unbiased, humane” thanks to the “fine missionary work” of parishioners from more modest backgrounds who lived in the midst of Arab homes, handed out clothes and cartons of Secours Catholique milk, and taught local girls to knit and sew.54 In order to safeguard its own interests and missionary priorities, how then could the Catholic Church operationally address the challenges posed by the major events of 1956, such as the independence of former protectorates, the unexpected turn of events in the Sahara, and the tendency to demobilise the colonial apparatus as provided for under the Defferre law in a continent traversed by an alleged threat from communism and Islam? In a report sent to Pietro Sigismondi, the Bishop of Laghouat – the White Father Msgr. Georges-Louis Mercier – described how the missionary situation was facing “a very concerning turning point” in a region affected politically by nationalist rebellion and, at the same time, “troubled economically by the invasion of prospectors of all nationalities who have already discovered the oil”. In his view, it was “foreseeable that international influences, especially at economic and strategic level, will use this already initiated industrial development as a pretext to distance most of these immense sparsely populated lands from the pressure of political emancipation from which the surrounding regions are benefiting [he was referring to the neighbouring riparian countries, Tunisia and Morocco]”.55 A predominant Western presence in the Saharan area, however, could be positive for the Catholic missions that would have been able to maintain “greater freedom of action with respect to the territory under Muslim sovereignty”, provided, however, that with the economic help from Propaganda Fide they continue to carry out their social works among the poorest Arab populations, thus responding “to the urgent demand

142  The Holy See and the Mollet government of prominent Muslims” who trust in the collaboration of the Church.56 The effectiveness of the social apostolate was therefore considered crucial to maintaining contact between the Christian minority and the Muslim majority and from this point of view, the report added: In the state of uncertainty and serious difficulty in which the Missions in Algeria find themselves, under the revolutionary nationalist drive orchestrated by communism, it is no longer time for verbal declarations and protests of sympathy and friendship, but for concrete actions and gestures that are the most effective demonstration in this regard. The Mission in the Sahara has always been at the forefront of this desire for true and disinterested service, in the name of Christ, to the underprivileged peoples of the desert. This is the best way, in the minds of Muslims, to achieve the necessary dissociation between religion and national governments.57 Mercier’s words touched on the crux of the Catholic Church’s condition in the process of post-colonial transition, namely the issue of the reinforcement of Catholic apostolic services in the event of a sudden collapse of the French colonial order that would leave the European and Christian minority in disarray. This reinforcement was to take place through the recruitment of new missionary resources, starting with sending European priests to Africa on detachment from their own dioceses for a set period of time. Both the Episcopate of North Africa and the Delegation of sub-Saharan Africa agreed on this, and were both working with the Holy See in initiatives to revise the existing missionary models.

Relations between the Holy See, the Algerian Episcopate and the Apostolic Delegation in Dakar: the origins of the Fidei donum The following correspondence is of great documentary value for the understanding of the missionary aspects of Pius XII’s pontificate because it allows us to place the origin of the Fidei donum encyclical, a fundamental theological turning point, in its proper historical and religious context. In July 1956, the Archbishop of Algiers and Msgr. Mercier went to the Vatican to deliver on behalf of the North African Episcopate a report, defined as “strictly confidential”, addressed to the Secretariat of State, the Congregation of Propaganda Fide, and the Consistorial Congregation, i.e. the congregation of the Roman Curia responsible for the selection and appointment of new bishops and apostolic administrators and the supervision of the government of dioceses. This report highlighted the serious difficulties of the Church in North Africa which, despite the intensity of its missionary commitment, risked collapsing because of the scarcity of human resources available – seminarians, priests, and regular and missionary

The Holy See and the Mollet government 143 clergy – compared to immense territories inhabited by an overwhelming Muslim majority. The Algerian Episcopate therefore appealed to the Holy See to intervene and authorise the French bishops to send their priests incardinated in the dioceses of metropolitan France “on loan” to the Maghreb. In informing Marella, Duval wrote that he placed great trust in the “great devotion” of the Paris Nunciature towards the Algerian Episcopate and counted on its help “to defend our cause, when the occasion arises, with the bishops of France” and added that Pius XII himself had welcomed the initiative: “the Holy Father has taken note of it and has assured us that he will help as much as possible”.58 The Holy See, in fact, kept its promise to support Duval both with public declarations and by exerting pressure on the French Episcopate in the direction desired by the North African bishops, i.e. that of closer missionary cooperation between the Church of France and that of North Africa. On 11 July, Msgr. Dell’Acqua sent a letter to Duval on behalf of Pius XII which would be published and have a far-reaching collective resonance. In it, the Holy Father reiterated to the Archbishop of Algiers, “and through him to all those who are suffering on Algerian soil, his constant concern” and expressed his “profound sadness at the prolonged suffering of the entire Algerian population”, finally offering his “most heartfelt auspices” for the re-establishment of peace and a climate of fraternal cooperation.59 From a letter from the Archbishop of Algiers to the Paris Nunciature dated 29 July, it is clear that it was Nuncio Marella himself who interceded with the Secretariat of State so that the Holy Father would send this public declaration of support to the Algerian Episcopate via D’Acqua and that it was the fruit of a collective drafting in which Duval himself participated with “detailed modifications” “taking into account possible reactions and above all the use that the press might make of the letter”. Duval also wanted the Nuncio to know how much, during the papal audience granted to him, he had been “touched by the paternal goodness of the Supreme Pontiff and by the affectionate understanding that we have found in the Roman Congregations, especially in the Secretariat of State”.60 Around the same time, in fact, in confirmation of the benevolence of the Vatican hierarchies towards the North African Episcopate, Msgr. Dell’Acqua, acting as interpreter of Pius XII’s wishes, wrote to Cardinal Achille Liénart, President of the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops of France, to inform him of “the great difficulties encountered by these [North African] dioceses in facing the particular apostolic tasks that are imposed on them today”. Dell’Acqua then advocated the request of the bishops in the Maghreb, in particular the Algerian ones, for missionary help from the French dioceses: As painful as the situation in these regions may be in many ways, His Eminence is not unaware that it nevertheless offers the Church real possibilities for action with regard to non-Christian populations, especially

144  The Holy See and the Mollet government in the field of education and social activities, and charitable works. The Bishops of North Africa are legitimately concerned about responding to this expectation with a proportionate effort, which due to the circumstances, is of an unequivocal urgent and serious nature. It is in these conditions that they painfully feel the shortage, from which their dioceses suffer, of personnel suited to these tasks: priests, religious men and women, and Catholic Action activists. May God grant that, in the absence of a sufficient number of apostles at the right time, the progress of the Church in North Africa shall not be compromised for long! The Holy Father, on the basis of the missionary traditions of your country, also nurtures the hope that, despite the heavy responsibilities and burdens weighing on the Bishops of France, those of them who are able, will agree to provide their colleagues with the fraternal help they need.61 This request is surprising because it came after months of misunderstanding and friction between the Church of Algeria and the Church of France, due – as we have seen – to mutual recriminations: in Duval’s opinion, French Catholics lacked objectivity and knowledge of the local reality, because of their criticism of the Algerian clergy, who were judged in the motherland to not possess the true missionary spirit needed to keep up with the challenges of an increasingly rapid decolonisation. Now the Algerian bishops were knocking on the doors of the Metropolitan Episcopate seeking help and asking for men and resources from France, a strategic pathway that was in some ways paradoxical, that is, sending other European priests overseas, in countertendency both with the promotion of the native clergy implicit in the principle of the installation of local hierarchies established by Propaganda Fide in 1954, and with the turning point indicated in the rest of French Africa by the Deferre law, which would soon lead to the repatriation of numerous officials (no longer needed in the colonies given the reduction in the powers of the central State) and with it the reduction in the number of faithful of European origin. At the insistence of the Holy See, Cardinal Liénart nevertheless agreed to include the difficult situation of the North African dioceses on the agenda of the 73rd Assembly of the Cardinals and Archbishops of France (17–19 October 1956).62 The reaction of the French Episcopate, however, was very different from that expected by the Algerian bishops. After the meetings, Duval went to the Nunciature to “express his concerns personally” to Marella. The Nuncio told him that the Archbishop of Carthage had received a negative impression from the Assembly which, he claimed, had greeted the appeal of the North African Episcopate “sympathetically but coldly”. The reason for this “coldness”, according to Marella, was to be found in the chronic crisis of priestly vocations in a secularised society such as that of France, and therefore in the objective lack of priests to “mobilise” in the overseas territories. In the previous days, the Vatican diplomat had discussed the matter with the bishop of Bourges (Joseph-Charles Lefèbvre, Marcel’s cousin)

The Holy See and the Mollet government 145 and with those of Bordeaux (Paul-Marie-André Richaud) and Agen (Roger Johan), who were grappling with the same problems that the Algerian dioceses had complained of, that is, depopulated seminaries and parishes that “are having to survive with inadequate means” (in the original Italian version, “the equivalent of the verb ‘scrape by’ was used”).63 On 8 November, the North African Episcopate brought a new memorandum to the attention of the French bishops, transmitted by Duval to the Nunciature in Paris on 10 November,64 aimed at renewing the request for “‘ad tempus’ [fixed-term] loans for some young priests”.65 The request was indeed desperate, as the Algerian bishops were willing to take in not only idealistic young priests, “profoundly touched by the religious situation in the country”, but also sick people seeking the warmth of the North African climate, “rheumatics, former tuberculosis patients, asthmatics….etc…”.66 The document contains two semantic peculiarities that are worth noting: the definition of North Africa as an “under-evangelised country”, therefore as a unitary political and geographical entity, despite the various processes of independence either concluded or in progress, and the indication of the dioceses of metropolitan France and their titular heads as “our dioceses”, “our bishops”, as if to underline the North African Episcopate’s sense of national belonging to the French motherland. The report, perhaps wishing to silence the recent polemics of the “progressive” Catholic and missionary press, insisted on the merits of the missionary commitment of North African parishes on the theme of interreligious and intercultural dialogue and therefore underlined the fact that many seminarians were learning Arabic and spoke of the “apostolic contacts with Muslims”, many of whom “strongly feel the need to lean on the Church to defend their faith in God from the threats of atheistic materialism”, “appreciate Christian social teaching”, and “want their children to benefit from the religiously based moral education provided by our Christian schools”.67 At the same time, however, the document pointed to the need to continue the work of evangelisation undertaken in colonial times, although now with the aim of accompanying the Christian minority towards new scenarios: “the burden of evangelising North Africa remains, at least in part, that of the Church of France. The role played in the past by the Church of France in the foundation and the first steps of the Christian communities in North Africa entails a moral consequence for the Church of France i.e. the duty not to abandon these Christians at this dangerous turning point in their history, to help them progress towards their full maturity and, in particular, to help them increase the rate of the recruitment of priests”.68 Having received no response from the Church of France, the Algerian bishops returned to the Secretariat of State in January 1957 with a memorandum, forwarded by Msgr. Pinier,69 which posed the problem of preserving the “prestige of the Papacy and of His Holiness Pius XII, and of papal teachings” in the face of the “growing threat of communist influence throughout Africa, starting from North Africa, favoured by the secularism of French schools and Arab nationalism”.70 The core of the argument, this

146  The Holy See and the Mollet government time more explicitly political, was the strategic importance of a structured Christian presence in the Maghreb, especially in the event of the birth of a new Muslim State within the Algerian borders, at the gates of Europe and especially of Rome: Even and above all if one day a new Muslim State is born close to Rome, it is important that essential moral values and religious freedoms are safeguarded there. They will be so thanks to the quality of a Christian presence that will know how to ensure it is recognised as valid, at moral and social level, in the service of the common good of Algeria. Nonetheless, it must assert itself very clearly, very strongly in irrefutable gestures and deeds. The choices of the new Algeria will have considerable repercussions on the entire Muslim world and the rest of Africa. The way of dealing with the Church and the Christian religion will resonate in all Islamic countries.71 These latter arguments must have seemed particularly persuasive to the Secretariat of State since Msgr. Angelo Dell’Acqua immediately wrote to Msgr. Marella urging him to draw the attention of the French bishops once again to “the urgent need for clergy in North Africa”.72 The appeal therefore did not go unheard in the Vatican, not least because it confirmed, albeit in less alarmist tones, the same dark scenario of the propagation, starting from North Africa, of communism and Islam in the rest of the African continent, outlined again by Lefebvre in a report of February 1957 that the Holy See took very seriously. In it, the Archbishop of Dakar obsessively reiterated the theme of religious Islam reorganised in a “missionary” way, the proselytism of which made the competition with Christianity “a truly tragic speed race to ‘occupy the territory’” and was favoured in an anti-Catholic function by the “official secularism of the French government” through the imposition of Arabic “as the official language of the indigenous population who did not know it”, “the choice of Muslims as heads of villages that were still pagan”, and the construction of mosques. The anguished helpless missionaries spoke to the apostolic delegate “about these aberrations”, while Marxist elements of the African political class went freely to Russia and Eastern Europe, without any control on the part of the French authorities.73 On receiving this report, Dell’Acqua immediately wrote to Fumasoni Biondi to inform him that the situation in Africa, which had to be considered extremely serious in light of the information received by the Holy See, required pontifical intervention and added, with clear reference to the Fidei donum that would be promulgated two months later (21 April 1957), that the Pope was preparing an encyclical to remind the European Bishops of their duty to send priests to provide missionary aid to the Church in the countries undergoing decolonisation:

The Holy See and the Mollet government 147 The enclosed Memorial [by Archbishop Lefebvre] shows how the forces of destruction are today running at a faster pace than the forces of good and are threatening to undo efforts made in the past. The Holy Father, who nurtures such deep pastoral concern for the presence of the Church in the regions, especially in Afro-Asia, which are shaking off their millennial torpor through often dangerous ways, has deemed me worthy of the task of informing Your Eminence of His intention to embrace some of the ‘desiderata’ of the ‘Memorandum’, both by addressing an Encyclical Letter so that all Catholics may be made aware of this very grave problem and hasten its solution, above all by the great means of prayer, and by calling the attention of the Episcopate of France to the grave responsibilities incumbent upon it in this regard.74

Notes 1 Nuntius a Summo Pontifice Pio PP. XII Universo Orbi Datus (Christmas message broadcast, 24 December 1955), Acta Apostolicae Sedis, a. XXXXVII, Vol. XXII. Roma: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1955, 15–28, here 24. 2 Nuntius Radiophonicus (Christmas message broadcast, 24 December 1955), Acta Apostolicae Sedis, a. XXXXVIII, Vol. XXIII. Roma: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1956, 26–41, here 40. 3 Nuntius Radiophonicus (24 December 1955), cit., 40. 4 Ibid. 5 François Mauriac, Les catholiques devant les élections. L’Express, 8 December 1955. 6 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 712, fasc. 38, 098r–101r, 14 December 1955: Nuncio, Marella informed the Vatican Secretariat of State that “at the moment (French) public opinion was polarised around the attacks and repression in Algeria and Morocco, the fate of French North Africa, the future of the Sarre, and other international events that closely affect the vital interests of the nation” but that “the priests and the faithful had managed to control themselves, and by obeying the instructions from the Episcopate had succeeded in maintaining silence”, with the exception of a few articles published in La Croix and La France Catholique, signed by Father Lucien Guissard and Édouard Lizop, aimed at “refuting the insidious assertions of Mr. François Mauriac, who from the columns of ‘L’Express’ had repeatedly urged the Catholics to vote for Mr Mendès-France, whom he described as the only man capable of ensuring the full freedom of the Church while respecting an open and tolerant secularity”. 7 François Mauriac, Bloc-Notes, 1952–1957. Paris, Seuil, 1993, tome I, 1955, 315. 8 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, 710, fasc. 32, letter from the Secretary of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office Msgr. Giuseppe Pizzardo to Msgr. Roger Michon, 12 December 1950, f. 141r, and to Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella regarding the Michon case, 14 December 1955, 140r; letter from the Commissary of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office Father Paul-Pierre Philippe to Marella, 17 December 1955, ff. 138r–138v; letter from Marella to Pizzardo on Father Phillipe’s censure of Msgr. Michon, 2 January 1956, f. 143r. 9 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 712, fasc. 38, Note sur l’évolution des réactions de plus en plus nombreuses de la Hiérarchie et des catholiques

148  The Holy See and the Mollet government français devant les initiatives du progressisme 22 décembre 1955 (Note on the evolution of the increasingly numerous reactions of the Hierarchy and French Catholics to the initiatives of progressivism 22 December 1955), ff. 134–137, here 136. 10 Michele Rago, Un manifesto firmato da Mauriac contro l’intervento del Vaticano, 23 December 1955. 11 Guy Mollet, Que faire?. L’Express, 19 December 1955. 12 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, letter from the Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to the Vatican Secretariat of State, 14 February ff. 69r–73r, here f. 69. 13 Ibid., ff. 69–70. 14 Ibid., ff. 71, 72–73. 15 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 711, fasc. 36, letter from the Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to the Vatican Secretariat of State Marella’s summary of the conversation between Msgr. Duval and Msgr. Pinier sent to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 3 March 1956, ff. 304r–308r, here ff. 304–305. 16 Ibid., f. 307. 17 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 711, fasc. 36, from Duval to the Secretariat of State, 26 March 1956, with attached document Rapport très confidentiel sur les incidences religieuses des événements d’Algérie du 1er août 1955 au 25 mars 1956 (Very confidential report on the religious implications of the events in Algeria from 1 August 1955 to 25 March 1956), ff. 38r–46r, here f. 40r. 18 Ibid., ff. 41–44. 19 Letters cited in Marco Impagliazzo, Duval d’Algeria. Una Chiesa tra Europa e mondo arabo (1946–1988). Roma: Studium, 1994, 96–99. 20 Similarly, Marco Impagliazzo believes that Duval’s conception of the missionary Church was independent of the “political projects– autonomy, association, federation, independence, assimilation and so on – under discussion, and that although he might have considered them to some extent valid and realistic, dialogue, reconciliation, and the will to cohabit in friendship rather than political opinions came first”, in Marco Impagliazzo, Duval d’Algeria. Una Chiesa tra Europa e mondo arabo (1946–1988). Roma: Edizioni Studium, 1994: 99. 21 Réunion des mouvements d’Action catholiques à l’Archevêché d’Alger le 30 octobre 1955. Rapport ronéoté, cited in Albert Fitte, Quelques aspects du monde catholique algérien à la fin de la IVe République. Cahiers de la Méditerranée, 3(1), 1971: 74–86, here 79. 22 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 711, fasc. 36, Rapport très confidentiel sur les incidences religieuses des événements d’Algérie du 1er août 1955 au 25 mars 1956, cit., ff. 45–46. 23 Ibid., f. 45. 24 AGMAfr, Docs 86934/87748, 1957.27,2.1, Sur le plan de l’Église. 25 Orientations d’Église: S. Em. Le Cardinal Feltin rappelle et précise les principes. La Croix, 26 April 1956, cited in Elisabeth Foster, “Theologies of Colonization”: The Catholic Church and the Future of the French Empire in the 1950s. The Journal of Modern History, 87, 2015: 281–315, here 310. 26 Ibid. 27 Emile Gabel, Le drame algérien. I. Perspectives politiques. La Croix, 17 May 1956, 1. 28 Emile Gabel, Le drame algérien. II. Construire par l’amitié. La Croix, 18 May 1956, 1, 6. 29 Emile Gabel, Le drame algérien. III. Le devoir des Français. La Croix, 20–21 May 1956, 1, 6.

The Holy See and the Mollet government 149 30 Une importante déclaration des étudiants catholiques africains en France. Le Monde, 13 April 1956; Le devoir de décolonisation en Algérie. Témoignage chrétien, 13 April 1956; Déclaration des étudiants catholiques d’Afrique noire en France. Afrique Nouvelle, 24 April 1956; Déclaration des étudiants catholiques d’Afrique noire en France. Tam-Tam, 6, April–May 1956, 4–6. 31 Joseph Vincent Ducattillon, Actualité du patriotisme. La Croix, 29 May 1956, 5. 32 Msgr. Lefebvre to Michel, Dakar, 5 June 1956 (cited in Elizabeth Foster, “Theologies of Colonization”: The Catholic Church and the Future of the French Empire in the 1950s. The Journal of Modern History, 2015, 87, 281–315, here 309). 33 Ibid. 34 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 712, fasc. 38, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to the Vatican Secretariat of State to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 26 May 1956, ff. 005r–012r, here ff. 10–11. 35 Ibid., f. 10. 36 On neo-Atlanticism in general, see Massimo De Leonardis, La politica estera italiana, la NATO e l’ONU negli anni del neoatlantismo (1955–1960). In: Luciano Tosi (ed), L’Italia e le organizzazioni internazionali. Diplomazia multilaterale nel Novecento. Padova: Cedam, 1999; on Italy’s mediation in the Algerian pacification process, relations with France and Nehru’s initiative, see Flavia De Lucia Lumeno, Non li lasceremo soli. Italia, Francia e Algeria (1945–1958). Milano: Guerini Associati, 2020. 37 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 712, fasc. 38, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 26 May 1956, cit., f. 7. 38 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to the Vatican Secretariat of State to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 5 March 1957, ff. 281r–290r, here ff. 281, 282r–283r. 39 Ibid., f. 289r. 40 ACPF, NS, vol. 2064, ff. 161–179, Biennial Report from the Dakar Apostolic Delegation, by Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre, 1 November 1956, here. f. 167. 41 Ibid., f. 166. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., Paragraph L’influenza nefasta dei cattolici francesi (The nefarious influence of French Catholics), f. 168. 44 ACPF, NS, vol. 2064, ff. 240–245, Letter from Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre to Propaganda Fide, Aperçu sur la situation actuelle de l’Afrique française, au point de vue politique, économique; la place de l’Église dans les évènements actuels; l’aspect international de ces territoires (Overview of the current situation in French Africa, from a political and economic point of view; the place of the Church in current events; the international aspect of these territories), 5 May 1957, here f. 240. 45 Ibid., ff. 242–243. 46 Ibid. 47 ACPF, NS, vol. 2064, from Msgr. Angelo Dell’Acqua, Substitute for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State, to Prefect of Propaganda Fide Cardinal Pietro Fumasoni Biondi, 16 May 1958, f. 441. Dell’Acqua also suggested to the congregation of Propaganda Fide that Lefebvre be relieved of his duties as Metropolitan Archbishop of Senegal so that he could carry out the task of Apostolic Delegate full-time. 48 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 711, fasc. 36, 3 March 1956, ff. 304r–308r, here ff. 307–308.

150  The Holy See and the Mollet government 49 ACPF, NS, vol. 2064 Notes sur la situation actuelle en Afrique française [Notes on the current situation in French Africa], 15 November 1957, Report from Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre to Propaganda Fide, ff. 415–416. 50 Ibid. 51 Archives générales des missionnaires d’Afrique (henceforth AGMAfr), Docs 86458/87748, Une circonscription autonome du Sahara Français, 1956.30,1.2. 52 Ibid. 53 AGMAfr, Docs 86950/87748,1957.28,2, Diocèse de Laghouat, Les Européens. 54 Ibid. 55 ACPF, NS, vol. 2064, ff. 838–839, letter from Msgr. Georges-Louis Mercier to Msgr. Pietro Sigismondi, 17 May 1956. 56 Ibid. 57 ACPF, NS, vol. 2064, Programme d’activités sociales des Pères Blancs, Diocèse de Laghouat, ff. 840–845, here f. 844. 58 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 711, fasc. 36, letter from Msgr. Léon-­ Étienne Duval to Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella, 29 July 1956, f. 163r. 59 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, letter from Msgr. Angelo Dell’Acqua, Substitute for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State, to Msgr. Léon-Étienne Duval, 11 July, 1956, ff. 195r–196v. Duval published it in «Semaine Religieuse d’Alger», 9 August 1956, and later in Léon-Étienne Duval, Messages de Paix 1955–1962. Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1962, 11–12. 60 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, from Msgr. Léon-Étienne Duval to Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella, 29 July 1956, f. 196r. 61 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, from Msgr. Angelo Dell’Acqua, Substitute for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State, to Cardinal Achille Liénart, Archbishop of Lille, President of the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops of France, 22 July 1956, f. 121r. 62 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, Msgr. Angelo Dell’Acqua, Substitute for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State, to Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to the Vatican Secretariat of State, 23 November 1956, f. 120r. 63 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Angelo Dell’Acqua, Substitute for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State, 27 November 1956, ff. 116r–119r. 64 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, from Msgr. Léon-Étienne Duval to Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella, 10 November 1956, f. 108r. 65 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, Strictement confidentiel et réservé à NN.SS les Évêques [Strictly confidential and reserved for the NN.SS. Bishops], Algiers, 8 November 1956, signed by Maurice Perrin, Archbishop of Carthage, Léon-Étienne Duval, Archbishop of Algiers, Amédée Lefevre, Archbishop of Rabat, Bertrand Lacaste, Bishop of Oran, Paul Pinier, Bishop of Constantine, Georges Mercier, Bishop of Laghouat, ff. 098r–102r, here f. 101r. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., ff. 99r.–100r. 68 Ibid., ff. 100r–101r. 69 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, Msgr. Angelo Dell’Acqua, Substitute for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State, to Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella, 3 January 1957, f. 110r. 70 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, Notes sur quelques problèmes missionnaires en Afrique du Nord (Notes on certain missionary problems in North Africa), undated, ff. 111r–112r. 71 Ibid. 72 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Angelo Dell’Acqua, Substitute for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State, 7 January 1957, f. 122r.

The Holy See and the Mollet government 151 73 ACPF, NS, vol. 2064, Undated document written by Marcel Lefebvre, attached to the letter from Msgr. Angelo Dell’Acqua, Substitute for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State to Cardinal Pietro Fumasoni Biondi, f. 215–216. 74 ACPF NS, vol. 2064, letter from Msgr. Angelo Dell’Acqua, Substitute for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State to Cardinal Pietro Fumasoni Biondi, 4 February 1957, ff. 214r–214v.

References Adjel-Debbich, Sarah (2018). La crise de l’oléoduc Edjeleh-Gabès : Au cœur des enjeux de souveraineté du Maghreb (1954–1962). L’Année du Maghreb, 18: 129–148. Alix, Christine (1967). Le Vatican et la décolonisation. In: Marcel Merle (ed), Les Églises chrétiennes et la décolonisation. Paris: Colin, 17–51. Djermoun, Soraya (2014). Le secteur algérien de l’Énergie: de l’hagiographie aux turbulences. Les Cahiers de l’Orient, 3(115): 39–52. Essemlali, Mounya (2011). Le Maroc entre la France et l’Algérie (1956–1962). Relations Internationales, 146: 77–93. Evans, Martin (2009). Guy Mollet’s Third Way: National Renewal and the French Civilising Mission in Algeria. French History & Civilisation, 2: 169–180. Evans, Martin (2012). Algeria: France’s Undeclared War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fitte, Albert (1971). Quelques aspects du monde catholique algérien à la fin de la IVe République. Cahiers de la Méditerranée, 3(1), 74–86. Fontaine, Darcie (2016) Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foster, Elizabeth A. (2019). African Catholic: Decolonization and the Transformation of the Church, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. Kalman, Samuel (2013). French Colonial Fascism, The Extreme Right in Algeria, 1919–1939. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Legrain, Michel (2009). La querelle du Devoir de décolonisation autour du père Joseph Michel et de l’aumônerie des étudiants d’outre-mer (1954). Histoire et missions chrétiennes, 10(2), 95–117. Nozière, André (1979). Algérie: Les chrétiens dans la guerre. Paris: Éditions Cana. Saaïdia, Oissila (2018). L’Algérie catholique. XIXe-XXIe siècles. Paris: CNRS Édition. Saul, Samir (2006). Politique nationale du pétrole, sociétés nationales et « pétrole franc ». Revue historique, 638(2): 355–388. Shipway, Martin (2013). Gaston Defferre’s Loi-Cadre and its application, 1956/57: last chance for a French African ‘empire-state’ or blueprint for decolonisation? In: Tony Chafer, Alexander Keese (eds), Francophone Africa at Fifty. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 15–29. Sirinelli, Jean-François (1988). Guerre d’Algérie, guerre des pétitions? Quelques jalons. Revue Historique, 279(1): 73–100. Thénault, Sylvie (2012). Histoire de la guerre d’indépendance algérienne. Paris: Flammarion. Touili, Mohamed (1985). Le retentissement de la révolution algérienne. Colloque international d’Alger (24–28 novembre 1984). Alger: Entreprise National du Livre.

6

The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic

French Church in crisis over the torture issue and tensions between the Algerian Episcopate and the army If for the Catholic Church 1957 marked the year the missionary option was sanctioned by the encyclical Fidei donum, all be it with many ambiguities, for the destiny of the Algerian conflict, the same year was the moment in which, during the “bewildering spring” (“l’étonnant Printemps”; Rioux 1983: 126), French society, as never before in its history, was called upon to openly face up to the issue of the violation of human rights and the immorality of the repressive systems of the so-called counter-terrorist war. In the days preceding the general strike called by the FLN for 28 January 1957 in all the principal Algerian cities to protest against the French occupation, the resident minister Robert Lacoste, backed by Prime Minister Mollet, handed over full security powers to maintain order in Algiers to General Jacques Massu, commander of the 10th Parachute Division. The Algerian workers’ strike, which received massive support, was brutally suppressed by the French army that with some 8000 French soldiers landed in the capital and cordoned off the Casbah with roadblocks and barbed wire. FLN activists were arrested, tortured, tried in military courts, and imprisoned, while supporters or mere suspects were interned without trial in camps d’hébergement (euphemistically accommodation camps), where, in the spring of 1959, some 10,000 people were confined (Thénault, 2005). In the rural regions, where insurrectionary activity was rifer, particularly in the Aures, in order to eliminate the guerrilla’s logistical support networks, the French army forcibly moved the local populations into camps de regroupement (“regrouping camps”), surrounded by barbed wire and under army surveillance, thus depriving them of their means of subsistence and condemning them to starvation and sometimes death from malnutrition. In 1957, regrouping camps were set up throughout Algeria and remained in operation until mid-1961, by which time approximately one-third of Algeria’s rural population, or 2,350,000 people, had been interned in them (Feichtinger, 2017). DOI: 10.4324/9781003230175-7

The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 153 In light of this escalation of military violence, under the banner of inhuman practices, the year 1957 marked a turning point for the Catholic world. The so-called Battle of Algiers (30 September 1956 to 24 September 1957) reignited the public debate on torture and urban terrorism and polarised the positions of French Catholics between those who condemned torture in solidarity with the insurgents and those who supported French Algeria in the name of national Christian values. On one hand, the “Jean Müller Dossier”, published by Témoignage chrétien on 15 February, through the posthumous correspondence of a 25-yearold Catholic scout leader, called back to duty in Algeria and killed in an ambush, recalled the horror of his military experience in Algeri1; on the other, Réflexions d’un prêtre sur le terrorisme urbain (Reflections of a priest on urban terrorism), written by the chaplain of the 10th Paratrooper Division – Father Louis Delarue, Oblate of Mary Immaculate (Boniface, 2003: 50) – and circulated at the end of the following March by General Massu, legitimised repressive violence and urged officers to find “effective though unusual means” to strike opponents he defined as “bandits”, “terrorists”, and “primitives” “without weakness”.2 The emotion aroused by the revelations in the “Müller dossier” and the indignation at Father Delarue’s apologia for torture led progressive Catholics to take a more determined stand against the extremists in French Algeria and the complicit neutrality of the ecclesial authorities. On 4 May, the Comité lyonnais d’action pour le respect des droits de la personne (Lyon Action Committee for the respect of human rights) collected 121 signatures against torture (Fouilloux, 1991: 96), while the Jeunesse Étudiante Chrétiennne (JEC) openly condemned the army’s actions that violated human dignity, going so far as to break the obligation of official silence imposed by the ecclesiastical hierarchies, by then a matter of conscience for the leaderships of the JEC and the JECF (Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne féminine), who collectively resigned on 12 May (Giroux, 2011: 51). The dictum of silence was implicit in the so-called doctrine of the mandate theorised since the 1930s by Msgr. Émile Guerry, author of a treatise on the function of the Catholic laity as an extension in the society of the action of the clergy and therefore a pastoral instrument of the visible and institutional Church limited to the educational and evangelising mission and strictly subordinate to the directives of the Episcopate.3 At the end of May 1957, Msgr. Guerry, by then Archbishop of Cambrai and Secretary of the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops, strongly condemned the position of the JEC, which, in his opinion, betrayed the “mandate” given by the ecclesiastical authority due to their encroachment from the educational field to the political one (Cholvy, Comte, Feroldi, 1991: 98–99). Meanwhile, the stance taken by Delarue, who was confirmed as military chaplain without any disciplinary warning from his ecclesiastical superiors, also seemed to meet with the approval of the Vicar at Arms and Archbishop of Paris Cardinal Feltin, who was mainly engaged in rebutting the press campaigns against the army’s atrocities by evoking the official vulgate of the

154  The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic “pacification work” carried out by the French army in Algeria to restore the order compromised by the armed bands of terrorists. Speaking on 10 May before the Assembly of Parish Unions, and again on 13 June during a mass in Saint-Cyr, while admitting that “mistakes had been made”, he reiterated his “admiration” for and “confidence” in the army which was “one of the strengths and one of the glories of France” (le Moigne 2005: 232–233). The operation to rehabilitate the honour of the army desired by Feltin was also reflected in an article entitled Des chrétiens interrogent l’Église signed by the Jesuit René d’Ouince that appeared in La Croix on 31 July. Meaningfully republished the following October in the official bulletin of the military chaplaincy directorate Vicariat aux Armées informations, it concluded that “the use of physical restraint” as a “choice of the lesser evil” although reprehensible in general could hardly be reproached in certain circumstances (Boniface, 2001: 509). The attitude of the Archdiocese of Paris deeply shocked the Christian philosopher Joseph Vialatoux, professor at the Catholic University of Lyon, activist of the Catholic-social movement Chronique Sociale and one of the most authoritative organisers of the Semaines Sociales, author of La répression et la torture: essai de philosophie morale et politique published in 1957. The correspondence between Vialatoux and the influential Secretary of the French Episcopate, Msgr. Jean Villot, illustrates perfectly the climate of tension prevailing in the French Church that year. In a letter of 26 June to Villot, Vialatoux reported Feltin’s irritated and aggressive reaction to the criticism he had dared to advance about the “double morality” of the ecclesiastical hierarchies, on one hand harsh against the young pacifists of Jeunesse chrétienne (as in the case of Msgr. Guerry), on the other tolerant towards the bellicose remarks of Father Delarue and the “enormous monstrosities” uttered by the former second lieutenant in Algeria and now extreme right-wing MP Jean-Marie Le Pen.4 In response, the Archbishop of Paris accused Vialatoux of superficiality and of a “recklessness” (“étourderie”), which was inexcusable given the age of the philosopher from Lyon who, in his opinion, had not even had the “patience” to read and fully understand the arguments of the archdiocese. Feltin concluded by saying that “the distressing events” in Algeria were “exceptional” and therefore one should not “generalise”.5 In another letter written in the same month, the philosopher also aired the suspicion that Feltin’s interventions had been dictated by the Presidency of the Council, which “had no qualms about involving a prince of the Church in its political propaganda services”, and that within the French Episcopate there had opened an irremediable rift between the Archbishop of Paris and the few dissident voices, such as that of the Archbishop of Lyon Gerlier, who were openly opposed to torture.6 Villot assured Vialatoux that there had been no pressure from the civil authorities but only an appeal from the military ecclesiastical assistant Jean Badré not to “leave the soldiers in disturbing uncertainty” by offering them

The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 155 “words of encouragement along purely spiritual lines”. As for the alleged clashes between Feltin and Gerlier, Villot underlined that it was only a “matter of temperament”, of personal differences, rather than of ideas.7 Villot’s apparently compliant reply only made Vialatoux more indignant and in his subsequent letters he said he was fed up with the no longer tenable “pretext of prudence” with which the ecclesiastical hierarchies justified their acquiescence to the army’s behaviour,8 adding that he had learned directly from Father d’Ouince that his “deplorable” “possumus non loqui” (“we cannot speak”), which appeared in La Croix, i.e. the invitation to cease the polemics against Father Delarue, had been imposed on him. In essence, Father d’Ouince thought that the argumentation used by Delarue, described as an “apostle of torture”, was “intolerable”, but that he “could not say so”. Vialatoux concluded that Cardinal Feltin’s justifications for “a pseudo-Christian priest” covering “the practice of torture” with his “cassock” so as not to annoy the French government was “an appalling scandal, in the strongest, deepest, most certain sense of the word ‘scandal’”.9 The positions of progressive Catholics in metropolitan France found a concrete application in the action of the Mission de France, described in detail in the aforementioned book by Sybille Chapeu, Des chrétiens dans la guerre d’Algérie. As some priests from the local équipe of Mission de France had compiled dossiers documenting the violence of the French police and army, passed on to journalist friends, these priests were expelled by the French authorities from Souk-Ahras in April 1956, an event that had considerable media coverage and which soon drew even more attention during the so-called trial of progressive Christians in 1957. The main defendant in this trial was Jean-Claude Barthez, vicar of the Mission de France on the outskirts of Algiers, guilty of having sheltered a young Algerian nationalist who had fled from a camp de regroupement and was arrested in March 1957 for having hidden a mimeograph for printing Algerian resistance leaflets (Chapeu, 2004: 103, 105). It is in this context that, according to the American historian Darcie Fontaine, an alleged “Vatican conspiracy” to remove Duval, considered by the Catholic right too close to Mission de France and the Algerian activists of the FLN, from office is to be placed. The conspiracy theory is based on a letter written by the White Father Jacques Lanfry already published in 1994 (Impagliazzo, 1994: 77), presented by the author as unpublished and explained through a long series of historical inaccuracies: Msgr. Georges Roche, presented as the strategist of the alleged conspiracy, is referred to as the “leader of the Catholic organisation” Cénacle, which was in truth none other than Opus Cenaculi, a secular institute of consecrated life; René Brouillet, at the time First Counsellor of the French Embassy to the Holy See, is defined as a “Vatican official” (but as everyone knows, the staff of embassies accredited to the Holy See do not belong to Vatican diplomacy but depend on the governments to which they belong, in this case the French

156  The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic government); Msgr. Angelo Dell’Acqua, Substitute for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State, is defined as “French ambassador to the Vatican” (sic!); and Msgr. Antonio Samorè, at the time Secretary of the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, is indicated as “Secretary of State” (position vacant from August 1944 to December 1958 and subsequently filled by Msgr. Domenico Tardini) (Fontaine, 2016: 98, 99). The long paragraph in Eugène Tisserant’s biography written by Étienne Fouilloux, dedicated to Opus Cenaculi, clarifies the alleged mystery of the activity of Msgr. Georges Roche. He was a priest who was not exemplary in his chastity and poverty and who, after leaving his home diocese of Poitiers because of bad relations with the local ecclesiastical hierarchy due to his moral conduct, had found protection in Rome with Cardinal Dean Tisserant, who allowed him to incardinate Opus Cenaculi in the diocese of Porto and Santa Rufina (of which Tisserant was titular) and to make it the centre of a series of non-transparent real estate speculations all be they not of a political nature (Fouilloux, 2011: 396–406). Roche’s attempt to discredit Duval was dictated by his patron Tisserant, a staunch supporter of French Algeria who, after losing his beloved great-grandson Pierre Vuillemin, an officer killed in an FLN ambush in July 1957, had further exacerbated his nationalist and Islamophobic stance and engaged in an unvoiced controversy against Duval, but which in fact had had no practical consequence (Fouilloux, 2011: 361–364). As emerges from the documentation, Duval enjoyed the absolute trust of the hierarchies of the Holy See, among other things because he had no contact with exponents of the Algerian national liberation movement, as he himself made clear in a letter of 24 January 1957 to Nuncio Marella. Duval referred to a controversy raised by Michel Gorlin, spokesperson for the resident general Robert Lacoste, regarding the wish expressed by Ferhat Abbas in a Swiss newspaper to see the Archbishop of Algiers elevated to cardinal. As this wish might have suggested that he was close to the independence movement, Duval hastened to distance himself from Abbas by specifying that he had never had any connection with him or any other member of the FLN: This is indeed a sign of the extreme confusion in which we live. I have had the opportunity only once – in ten years – to speak with Mr Ferhat Abbas. It was at Algiers station, about two years ago; I had gone to accompany Msgr. Pinier who was taking the train to Constantine. Since Mr. Abbas was in a nearby compartment, Bishop Pinier and I talked with him for two or three minutes before the train left. I have never exchanged letters with him. I have never had conversations with the FLN. That a Muslim has spoken of a cardinal’s biretta is not surprising to anyone familiar with the hyperbolic expressions of Oriental kindness and skill. That a Swiss newspaper published this alleged wish is

The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 157 surprising. That a high-ranking official of the general government of Algeria saw fit to respond to it and, therefore, give it publicity, this goes beyond the limits….10 Evidence of the operation to discredit Duval concocted by Tisserant’s inner circle can also be found in the correspondence of the Nunciature in France, where a letter from Canon Henry Houche dated 25 March is filed. The latter, after having tried unsuccessfully to meet Marella in July 1956 in Paris (the Nuncio had avoided the meeting by telling him he was leaving for Rome), now tried to convey to him the feelings of “concern, anguish, discouragement, mistrust, indignation and anger [that] are increasingly overwhelming the hearts of the faithful” “unpleasantly surprised” by Duval’s behaviour and by his “unwillingness to stigmatise terrorism and sympathise with the terrible difficulties of the Christian population”.11 While acknowledging the need to “dissociate” Catholicism from colonialism, especially in view of Algeria’s future and inevitable independence, Houche was also convinced that the time was still not ripe and that the process of emancipation, with the complicity of the Algerian Episcopate as clearly seen in the case of the Mission de France priests in Souk Ahras, was taking place too rapidly for the sole benefit of the “communist infiltrators” embedded among the Islamic nationalists of North Africa, who were “a grave danger to peace and a terrible threat to the Church and Europe”.12 This complaint received no response from the Secretariat of State and indeed a few days later Msgr. Marella praised Duval in a detailed account of the talks held by the Paris Nunciature on the Algerian situation with various political and religious figures, namely the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Pierre de Félice, Senator Edmond Michelet, Vice-President of the Council of the Republic (the upper house of the French Parliament under the Fourth Republic), Canon Houche, and Msgr. Duval along with his auxiliary bishop Msgr. Gaston-Marie Jacquier. Marella wrote in his report that, “with the exception of His Excellency the Bishop of Algiers, no one appeared to me capable of giving a dispassionate overall judgement” and, in reference to the Souk Ahras issue, he praised Duval’s ability to gloss over an episode that revealed the dangerous complicity of the progressive clergy with the fellaghas and at the same time offered the conservatives a pretext to propose a colonialist logic as violent as it was outdated and ineffective: The attacks follow one another at an alarming rate; the French reprisals, instead of having the effect of circumscribing the hotbeds of resistance, seem to contribute to making the Algerian population’s cooperation with the rebels closer and more effective. Even clerics, albeit in very limited numbers, have started to protect the ‘fellaghas’, so as not to give the French soldiers – as they said – the opportunity to commit unnecessary crimes. At the end of March, three priests and a nun were

158  The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic accused of high treason for having given asylum to Muslims wanted by the police. Incidentally, I note that His Excellency Msgr. Duval is doing his utmost to ensure that this regrettable episode is hushed up. The conservatives are not unaware of the above facts and do not hide the fact that Mr Lacoste, despite the undeniable military successes achieved by his 400,000 men, is far from having regained control of the situation. Faithful to the old rules of colonial policy, according to which an uprising can only be crushed by force, they hope for greater firmness on the part of the government and never tire of calling for the use of more rapid and effective systems of repression.13 Not only did the Nuncio not believe that the end of the conflict was in sight, as it was beginning to look more and more like “the Indo-Chinese affair”, i.e. a morass with no way out, he also acknowledged that the disconcerting revelations in the press about the use of torture retrospectively proved that François Mauriac, Jean-Marie Domenach, and Pierre Henri Simon, as well as the articles in Esprit and Témoignage chrétien had been right. Marella did wonder, however, whether the establishment of the Commission permanente de sauvegarde des droits et libertés individuelles would not simply have the effect of demoralising French troops and encouraging Arab nationalists, thus prolonging the duration of the conflict: The Government has thus implicitly recognised the legitimacy of the anxieties harboured by a large section of the public, and accepted its condemnation of the systems of ‘total reprisal’, the discredited use of which was not only considered permissible by the old colonialists but, in certain circumstances, even expressly recommended. In the opinion of some neutral observers, the government’s measure on one hand will have the consequence of calming the anxieties of many, while on the other hand, it will contribute to lowering the morale of the army, giving courage to the rebels, and therefore making the repression of the revolt much slower and more difficult. A foreign diplomat told me cynically yesterday that, ‘With the scruples that these Frenchmen have, military action will become more and more covered up and in the long run weariness will gain the upper hand over national sentiments and political calculations’.14 While French society was grappling with the ethical dilemmas raised by the debate on the use of military and counter-terrorism practices contrary to the dignity of the human person, the conflict was spiralling out of control. The French army regularly came under attack from across the AlgerianTunisian border, which became a rear-guard base for the FLN as it provided logistical support for the transit of arms to the Algerian independence fighters, and support to the National Liberation Army (ALN) troops stationed on its territory. At the beginning of 1958, after suffering a heavy attack by the ALN from the Tunisian post of Sakiet Sidi Youssef, the French army

The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 159 command in Algeria decided to react and on 8 February authorised the use of heavy bombers in Tunisia (by then an independent and sovereign State), without the incumbent President of the Council, the radical Félix Gaillard (6 November 1957 to 14 May 1958) being informed (Wall, 2001: 113). Gaillard, who a posteriori nevertheless defended the decision to bomb, justified in his view following “provocation” by Algerian “rebels” on the other side of the Tunisian border, was overwhelmed by the controversy. This opened a scenario of serious political instability fomented by the mobilisation of the radical right, which on 13 March gave voice to the anger of the police force against the parliamentary regime. Thousands of police officers, harangued by Jean Dides, former police commissioner of the Paris prefecture and a Poujadist deputy, against the “weakening of the State”, went so far as to call for “protection measures” such as curfews, internment centres, and the militarisation of the police (Blanchard, 2011: 58). The fall of the Gaillard government on 15 April paved the way for General de Gaulle’s return to power, although the President of the Republic, René Coty, before resorting to the General, wanted to try a more moderate solution by nominating the Catholic Pierre Pflimlin as head of government. An exponent of the MRP, Pflimlin hoped for the hypothesis of a “third way” of negotiating, an alternative to the “becoming harsher or surrendering” dilemma to find a solution to the Algerian problem (Pflimlin, 1989: 365). The appointment of a representative of the MRP as Prime Minister could not but meet with the approval of the Nunciature in Paris, which was greatly alarmed by the crisis that followed the bombing of Sakhiet, both in terms of the serious consequences for the stability of politics at home and in Africa where, as Msgr. Marella wrote to the Secretariat of State, “the audacity of the North African terrorists is becoming more worrying every day” due to the supply of “more modern and deadlier weapons [which] is giving a new impetus to the rebellion”.15 In addition, the Nuncio did not fail to convey his scepticism to the Holy See about the cathartic advent of de Gaulle as a national peacemaker since with his claims to centralising power he could represent an unknown factor for the political system: [de Gaulle] is above all a kind of myth to whom people like to turn their minds in the most turbulent times to regain hope. His return would perhaps be welcomed by all if we were sure that he would be content to remain a myth, a symbol, a cohesive force. However, it seems that the general will only agree to come out of his present hermitage if all powers are delegated to him. What use will he make of them? These unknowns are cooling the enthusiasm of many.16 In mid-March, the Nuncio analysed the political situation with one of the leaders of the MRP, MP André Colin. The conversation took place just a few days after the demonstration on 13 March, which had made a very

160  The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic negative impression on Marella, who was worried by the numerous police officers who had surrounded the Palais Bourbon, the seat of the National Assembly, shouting “death to the fellaghas”, a typical French Algerian slogan, to demand the rise to power of Dides, whom the Nuncio defined as “one of the most notorious and discussed ‘Gaullist’ parliamentarians for his resolutely conservative or totalitarian ideas”.17 Colin tried to reassure Marella by stating that “all you have to do is mention the name of General de Gaulle for any threat to vanish”18 but the Nuncio was not convinced. According to his sources, as Marella wrote to the Secretariat of State, “The Soviet Ambassador in Paris [Sergei Vinogradov] is whispering in the ears of ministers and other influential French people that the Kremlin would welcome a ‘temporary magistracy’ of General [de Gaulle], to whom it would be willing to grant every support”.19 According to the Nuncio’s hypothesis, Moscow’s secret expectation was to see de Gaulle’s return to power in the form of an authoritarian shift that would inevitably fail because of left-wing opposition and would open “the door to the communists”. Meanwhile, French Algerian supporters, civilians, and soldiers reacted strongly to the prospect of the new Pflimlin government being in favour of negotiations with the separatist rebels, and a large patriotic rally was organised by Pierre Lagaillarde, a lawyer and president of the General Association of Algerian Students (AGEA), and Robert Martel, a winegrower from the Mitidja plain and founder of the North African French Union (UFNA) in Algiers on 13 May, the feast of the Virgin Mary’s first apparition at Fatima, The demonstration, which saw the participation of more than 100,000 people, led to the creation of a Committee of Public Safety (Comité de salut public, CSP) chaired by General Massu. Robert Martel, who addressed the crowd from the balcony of the headquarters of the Governorate General on 13 May (Mouton, 1972: 288), hoped that this uprising in Algiers would mark the start of a Catholic counter-revolution throughout France, under the insignia of the Sacred Heart. After 15 May, when it became clear that General Salan, the commander-in-chief in Algeria, supported the CSP, other Committees of Public Safety were formed in metropolitan France, and this fuelled fears among left-wing parties and much of the press that the Algiers putsch was the precursor to a military coup in Paris. In his assessment of the political situation following the Algerian coup d’état, Msgr. Marella reiterated his concern about the “possibility of civil war”, which would in turn lead to another danger, “the creation of a Popular Front”, i.e. of a compact left-wing bloc in the form of a “union ouvrière [workers’ union] the communists hoped for” led by the “extreme left ready to react to the establishment of a right-wing dictatorship”.20 In order to prevent events from spiralling out of control, Pflimlin would only deal with the Algerian question once he was sure that he was “firmly in control of the motherland”, thus avoiding “distancing himself publicly from popular military leaders such as Generals Salan and Massu so as not to deepen the rift between the executive and the army”.21

The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 161 The scenario described by the Nuncio worried Pius XII who, through Msgr. Tardini, let Marella know that he had personally seen his report and that he was “still particularly concerned about the great Catholic nation in this grave hour and was [lifting up] special fervent prayers to the Lord for her”.22 The Nunciature was confident in the success of the government’s moderate strategy, aimed at “regaining authority in Algiers ‘en souplesse’, in a progressive and almost callous manner, while at the same time facilitating the submission of the rebel generals”.23 Premier Pflimlin let Msgr. Marella know, through “a friend of his from Catholic Action”, that he was “determined to persevere” and “that he would only step down if he was forced to accept the communist votes in order to keep his office”.24 Marella also hoped that the government would enjoy the support of a “friend of the Nunciature”, the independent conservative leader Antoine Pinay, who was in the meantime engaged in exploratory talks with de Gaulle in order to find out the general’s real plans. However, none of this produced the desired results. As Marella reported to Tardini, Pinay had “tried, but in vain, to discover what his interlocutor [de Gaulle] would propose as a solution to the Algerian problem. In short, this contact between one of parliament’s most influential figures and the die-hard opponent of the parliamentary ‘system’ would have no positive outcome. It would only have reaffirmed Mr Pinay’s attitude of prudent reserve, an attitude he has so far displayed despite the pressure put on him by numerous French and foreign leaders (including Chancellor Adenauer), who have repeatedly begged him to lend his support to Mr Pflimlin. In the meantime, the situation continues to evolve in favour of the General, who, thanks to the mystery with which he has surrounded himself, is gradually gaining ground in all areas. It is strange, to say the least, that Msgr. de Sérigny, one of the most fanatical defenders of colonialism, and Francois Mauriac, champion of the emancipation of Muslim peoples, both find themselves invoking the intervention of the former leader of Free France”.25 Despite the Nunciature’s expectations, the Pflimlin government could not withstand the tension following the Algerian putsch and on 29 May after weeks of crisis the President of the Republic, René Coty, turned to the “most illustrious of Frenchmen”, General de Gaulle, to form a new government, which won the support of the National Assembly on 1 June. The next day, the MPs granted de Gaulle the power to govern through ordinances for a period of six months and authorised him to redraft the Constitution to introduce a new institutional order. Despite the climate of enthusiasm and hope aroused by de Gaulle’s investiture, the Nunciature in Paris maintained its scepticism towards the General, in the knowledge that the breakdown in democratic legality marked by the Algerian coup d’état would not be easily remedied because of the extremism of the military who – Marella observed in his report of 2 June – “notwithstanding their repeated affirmations of total submission to General de Gaulle, do not seem at all disposed to give up the idea of achieving the aims for which they had rebelled against the last government of the Fourth Republic”.26

162  The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic The Nuncio’s pessimism was dictated by the worrying news from Msgr. Duval, who had described the problems of the archdiocese of Algiers and the growing hostility of the conspirators of the coup of 13 May towards the Algerian Episcopate in a long report dated 9 June, accompanied by the note “intended exclusively for the Holy See, it is strictly confidential”. The Archbishop of Algiers claimed that the insurrectionary movement of 13 May had been “on the whole” “peaceful” and that Soustelle had wanted to address the Muslims with a “very special greeting”, a “sincere and affectionate greeting”, received with “applause and shouts of approval”. With regard to the methods employed, Duval pointed out that intense “moral pressure” had been exerted and criticised the “spectacular exhibition” of the unveiling of Muslim women, as a demonstration of French emancipation of the Arab female condition. In his view, the unveiling “was not only in bad taste, but lacking in psychology and delicacy (the renunciation of the veil and other antiquated customs is a matter of education)”.27 Duval’s most scathing criticism of the French generals concerned the “abuse” of massive propaganda aimed at manipulating consensus and based on increasingly “advanced and scientific” political communication techniques which, through the press, slogans, stage settings, and above all “tendentious” radio programmes, “inspired more by hatred (particularly towards those in charge of the former French government) than by brotherly love”, had the sole purpose of forcing the entire population, including religious authorities, to side with the army. In this regard, Duval’s report, which denounced the serious deterioration in relations between the civil and religious authorities after the events of 13 May, reveals not only the background to the talks held with the military junta in the aftermath of the coup, but also the archbishop’s real political thinking. The beginning of the talks and consequent friction between the Archbishop of Algiers and the military junta is dated 18 May, the day on which General Massu despatched a captain with a message for Duval telling him to go to General Salan’s office to discuss the organisation of a great patriotic ceremony. On that occasion, Duval proposed a triduum of prayers “for Algeria, for France and for peace” that would be concluded on Pentecost Sunday with a solemn mass in Algiers Cathedral, celebrated “according to liturgical prescriptions”, and not of a political nature, in the presence of the city authorities, including General Salan. After this ceremony, which was obviously disappointing for the propaganda objectives of the military junta, the Committee of Public Safety of Algiers voted a motion, which was “essentially a warning”, asking Duval to “publicly testify in writing to […] the union of hearts in the Province of Algiers”, a document that would be read throughout the diocese and transmitted to the Archbishop of Carthage, Primate of Africa and therefore hierarchically superior to the Algerian Episcopate.28 Duval replied to the representatives of the president of the Committee of Public Safety Jacques

The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 163 Merlo that he interpreted the motion as a “hostile gesture” and explained to Nuncio Marella that “the manoeuvres employed were intended to force me to take sides”.29 During his talks with the military junta and the Committee of Public Safety, Duval clarified his political vision that was explicitly in tune with Georges Bidault’s moderate positions and contrary to the escalation of violence and the radicalisation of the conflict which would have had the counter-productive effect of increasing social disorder and accelerating the loss of Algeria, with enormous risks for the stability of the French political order, both in the mother country and throughout Africa. This is what Duval said in his report to the Secretariat of State: I took care to emphasise how necessary the union of all the French people was and the danger represented by the state of ‘pre-secession’ in which Algeria found itself. My reasoning was as follows: if this state of affairs were to continue, it would be difficult to avoid civil war in the metropolis. With civil war in France, what would become of the French in Tunisia, in Morocco? What would become of Black Africa? Would we not be playing into the hands of communism, in this case the USSR? Would we not then be heading for a new world war? Recalling a word spoken to the government by Mr. Georges Bidault ‘Not to repress but to re-weave, I said to the authorities in Algiers, ‘Don’t become harsher, but re-weave’. The high authorities expressed their views to me on the urgency of Mr Pflimlin’s resignation. I replied to them that I could not intervene positively in favour of such a resignation, although I had no prejudice against General de Gaulle. I insisted on the need to avoid any ministerial crisis and of acting in such a way that, if Pflimlin’s government resigned, it would be immediately followed by another government.30 Therefore, as the document shows, Duval was loyal to the Catholic Prime Minister Pflimlin and against the hypothesis of de Gaulle’s appointment, strongly wanted by the military. However, after President Coty had installed de Gaulle at the beginning of June, the Archbishop of Algiers, along with the Bishop of Laghouat, Msgr. Mercier, met him in the hall of the Palais d’Eté, seat of the governorship in Algiers, and he reassured the Archbishop in a “very pleasant tone” that annoyed “the civil and military authorities present […] who had had to be content with a very brief greeting from the general”, about his commitment to “give an account to History and to God” to “avoid above all a ‘failure of the State’” and to promote “a necessary restructuring, but one that had to be accomplished ‘with no disasters’”.31 Lastly, with regard to the consequences on interreligious coexistence, the Archbishop of Algiers told the Holy See of his conviction “that all Christians are ready to make great sacrifices for the common good, on condition, however, that they are assured that ‘Algeria will remain French’” ; as for the Muslims, it seemed to him “that the position of the FLN had

164  The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic hardened and an upsurge in military activity was foreseeable” although, in general, the Arab masses were waiting for the course of events to unfold and showing “unequivocal signs of reluctance to adhere to the Committee of Public Safety”.

The Vatican from the coup d’état of 13 May to the Evian Accords: Ralliement to the Fifth Republic and the humanitarian emergency In the days following de Gaulle’s appointment, the Holy See’s attention focused in any case on the institutional transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic and the consequent morphological change of the party system, dwelling above all on the Catholic political world, particularly affected by the events connected to the Algerian crisis and the constitutional process. To the right of the MRP, the traditional point of reference of the ecclesiastical hierarchies, two political and cultural aggregations of a religious nature had formed, resolutely aligned in defence of French Algeria, namely the Christian Democrat dissident fringe led by former Prime Minister Georges Bidault, who was inspired by the conservative model of European Christian parties, in particular the West-German CDU, and the extreme Catholic right, a complex galaxy of organisations and magazines characterised by authoritarian and fundamentalist thinking polemically defined by the magazine Esprit as “national-Catholicism”, with clear reference to the ideology of the confessional dictatorships of the Iberian peninsula (Madeleine Garrigou-Lagrange, 1959). On 13 June 1958, at the head of a breakaway faction of the MRP, Bidault appealed to the Catholics present in the various political alignments to federate a new conservative party which came into being the following 1 July under the name of Démocratie Chrétienne de France (DCF). Among its members, there were many former republican-popular leaders, such as Robert Bichet, Alfred Coste-Floret, and Jean Letourneau, who joined forces in a bid to relaunch France’s Christian mission in Algeria in the name of the fight against communism and the preservation of national greatness (Fouilloux, 1988: 63). This initiative, which would soon meet with opposition from the Catholic associations closest to workers’ circles, such as Action catholique ouvrière and Action catholique indépendante (Letamendia, 1995: 126), was also met with the disapproval of the Nunciature. Marella was convinced that a “confessional” party belonged to “an old idea of France” and would only reawaken anticlericalism in circles where it was “hibernating”, thus contributing to a bipolarisation of the system between progressives and reactionaries that would embarrass the Church that would be forced to side openly with the conservatives.32 After discussing the matter first with Pinay and then with Pflimlin, the Nuncio wrote to the Holy See that Bidault’s Christian Democrats could

The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 165 only be useful as a force in a broader temporary electoral coalition and not as a permanent party,33 as this would harm the MRP in the traditional strongholds of the popular republicans, i.e. Brittany and Alsace-Lorraine, and would not gain votes from the right, where the electorate was firmly in the hands of the nationalists and Gaullists.34 In fact, the most important consequence of the Algerian crisis, in terms of the relationship between Catholicism and the political system, was the revival of the extreme religious right. The ideological mainstay of the mobilisation of the extreme Catholic right revolved around Cité catholique, an organisation founded on 29 July 1946 by Jean Ousset, Denis Demarque, and Jean Massoncon under the name of Centre d’études critiques et de synthèse, with the aim of setting up cells of small groups that met periodically to study the methods of proselytising and infiltrating Catholic elites into the political, social, and professional frameworks of French society and to convey national and religious values consistent with the legacy of Charles Maurras and Action française (Venner, 2006: 341). The Cité catholique was created in the 1950s after acquiring the periodical Verbe, and its annual congresses enjoyed the participation of personalities of the Catholic right such as General Maxime Weygand, who had been attached to the Vichy Regime. In 1959, Ousset published what is considered not only his most important work but also one of the breviaries of traditionalist Catholics close to French Algeria, an intensely controversial piece of writing against progressive Catholicism in favour of decolonisation and dialogue with Marxism entitled Pour qu’Il règne, with a preface written by the bishop of Dakar, Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre (Michel, 2009: 211). As his biography recalls, from 12 to 20 May 1958, during the days of the putsch, Ousset stayed in Algiers, where a number of soldiers already in contact with Cité Catholique were working. One in particular was Air Force General Lionel Max Chassin, founder of MP13, Mouvement Populaire du 13 mai, which counted among its sympathisers one of the reactionary Catholic components of the colonial movement, and Georges Sauge, a former Marxist converted to intransigent and nationalist Catholicism, founder of the Centre d’études supérieures de psychologie sociale – CESPS, an organisation for the anti-communist crusade that used psychological warfare (de Neuville, 1998: 242, 246). Verbe’s articles dedicated to Algeria, signed with the pseudonym Cornelius, staunchly defended the most heinous repressive techniques, euphemistically defined as a “special code of justice adapted to the revolutionary war” but which in fact was simply torture, as the Jesuit Father JeanMarie Le Blond did not fail to denounce in critical interventions against Ousset published in Études.35 Within the ideological universe of Catholic fundamentalism (which also included the magazine Pensée catholique directed by Father Luc J. Lefèvre, the monthly magazine Itinéraires founded by Jean Madiran in 1956, and the Association Universelle des Amis de Jeanne d’Arc chaired by General

166  The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic Weygand), the theme of colonial warfare as an inevitable clash of civilisations in defence of the Christian West was one and the same thing as the battle against secularism which, on the contrary, represented a fundamental value in the draft Constitution presented by de Gaulle (Supplément au n° 96 de Verbe, 1958, cited in Ferron, 1997: 304). In fact, as soon as the National Assembly authorised de Gaulle to redraft the Constitution, the more fundamentalist Catholic movements endeavoured to achieve the recognition of God in the document. Contrary to their expectations and a great disappointment for those who had hoped for the establishment of a military dictatorship, in his investiture address, General de Gaulle reaffirmed that the source of all power was universal suffrage. During the ensuing parliamentary debates, an MP from the independent group Guy Jarrosson, with ties to Jean Ousset’s Cité Catholique, challenged this statement and declared, “It must be recognised that the only source of power is God. […] What is to become of liberty, equality and fraternity if their foundation is only in law, a fleeting expression of majorities; a law that can be incessantly questioned?”36 Jarrosson’s declaration was enthusiastically endorsed by Pierre Lemaire, a staunch advocate of the family values at the heart of Pius XII’s magisterium, who in 1946 founded COPARE (Comité de parents pour la réforme de l’enseignement) and the traditionalist periodicals Paternité and Défense du Foyer. In his editorial in Défense du foyer, Lemaire presented Jarrosson’s position as the theoretical basis for a possible Catholic reaction. In August, however, the government tabled a draft Constitution that in Article 1 proposed the same values as the 1946 Constitution of the Fourth Republic: “France is an indivisible, secular, democratic and social republic”. The various organisations of the Catholic extreme right, separately or in concert, tried to have this article amended so that the future Constitution would at least refer to God. Pierre Lemaire had a four-page leaflet published, denouncing “the secularity of the State, and the rejection of God and his law” and firmly stating, “We want God in our families, our schools and our institutions” (cited in Chiron, 2022: 75). In the run-up to the referendum, Pierre Lemaire devoted the entire issue of Dossiers-Paternité to the question, Dans la confusion du referendum: une France à l’envers? (In the confusion of the referendum: an upside-down France?) and also published a pamphlet entitled, Oui ou non? On ne se moque pas de Dieu (Yes or no? You don’t make fun of God; cf. Chiron, 2022: 75–76). For these radical right-wing Catholic groups, it was therefore a moral obligation to vote “no” in the referendum, because the Constitution proposed by de Gaulle not only did not mention Christianity in its Preamble but also reaffirmed the secular character of the Republic, thus following in the footsteps of the principles of 1789 and the French Revolution. There were many exponents of Cité catholique, mentioned by Father Le Blond in his polemical exchanges with Ousset, who were against the new Constitution

The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 167 and aligned with the legitimist intransigent Catholic circles engaged in a hard-line anti-referendum campaign (Le Blond, 1958: 385). Despite the organisational fervency that seemed to restore political centrality to the Catholic extreme right, the Holy See did not underestimate the anti-democratic threat they posed. Marella’s report to the Secretariat of State in July 1958 meticulously listed the array of groups of the religious ultra-right, from the Mouvemert du 13 Mai to the Cité Catholique and the Présence française grouping of Poujadist inspiration, in the shadow of the notorious “Doctor Martin” of the old secret fascist and anti-communist organisation La Cagoule, namely Henri Martin, who, according to the Nuncio, was the person responsible for the execution in Paris of the anti-fascist brothers Carlo and Nello Rosselli in 1937.37 Marella was convinced that the aim of these movements was to create “a single national party of a fascist nature” to oppose de Gaulle, in continuity with the old Maurrassian and Petenian right, but trained in modern techniques of psychological manipulation “based on the scientific propaganda systems of the Soviets”, which inspired the doctrine of the former communist Georges Sauge.38 When the Nuncio spoke to Msgr. Villot, the latter confirmed the strong ideological influence of Catholic extremism on young officers and the Committees of Public Safety in Algiers and pointed out that the ideas disseminated by the Cité, “love of the family, respect for authority, discipline, and patriotism”, were “the staple doctrine of the Service psychologique de l’armée” and that it was necessary to ascertain whether the military were “also making use of the capillary organisation that it [the Cité] has established on its own account throughout the country”.39 Marella was greatly disturbed by this information because there was a real risk that “the enthusiastic support given by some Catholic newspapers (such as “I’Homme Nouveau”) to the revolutionary ideas propagated by young officers and the ‘Comités de Salut Public’ would easily lead the [French] people to believe that the Church would welcome the establishment of a military dictatorship in France”.40 On receiving this information, the Vatican hierarchies considered it essential that the Church of France dissociate itself from the subversive movements of Catholic inspiration and distance itself above all from their anti-Gaullist campaign in the run-up to the constitutional referendum. In the summer, Domenico Tardini informed the Nunciature of the instructions given by Msgr. Pierre Veuillot, responsible for French affairs at the Secretariat of State, to the conservative deputy Guy Jarrosson, a member of the Centre nationale des indépendants et paysans, CNIP, who was in Rome on 18 August for a “special audience” (i.e. as a group) with the Holy Father. Msgr. Veuillot replied to Jarrosson, who advocated the freedom to vote “according to conscience” in the referendum and asked whether the Holy See intended to “intervene with General de Gaulle to obtain from him a satisfactory interpretation of the adjective “laïque” [in the preamble]”,

168  The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic that it was necessary “to abide by the directives of the French ecclesiastical authorities” and that it was “opportune to note that the Holy See constantly assumes an attitude of great prudence and reserve, especially when it is election time”.41 As Election Day – 28 September – drew nearer, the dispositions given to the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops of France, although kept “confidential”, explicitly clarified the point of view of the ecclesiastical hierarchies who were in favour of approving the constitutional project, albeit with modifications to counter the opposition of the most intransigent clerical circles. In this regard, in his confidential letter to the members of the Assembly of Cardinals and Archbishops of France, Villot said he had contacted de Gaulle’s “Head of Cabinet” (Georges Pompidou at the time) on 8 July to address the problem of the use in the constitutional draft of the word “laicity”, unbearable for many of the faithful because “the word itself is full of passionate resonance and the adversaries of the Church seize upon it simply to vex [brimer] Catholics”.42 At the same time Villot’s letter expressed all the unease of the Episcopate at the “vigorous reactions” of the groups of fundamentalist Catholics most actively engaged in propagandising against de Gaulle’s constitutional project, that is Paternité-Maternité and Défense du foyer linked to Pierre Lemaire, the Jeanne d’Arc Alliance, the Cité catholique, and the magazine L’Homme nouveau. Villot also pointed out that following an intervention by Cardinal Feltin, L’Homme nouveau had said it would be willing to limit its anti-Gaullist campaign if it were assured that the new Constitution would not contain “equivocal formulas” “likely to harm religious convictions”, while Défense du foyer had promised to instruct its militants to vote “yes” in exchange for recognition of the name of God in the preamble to the constitutional text. In a subsequent letter, Villot announced that he had managed to wrest from a Catholic exponent of de Gaulle’s entourage, René Brouillet (former First Counsellor at the French Embassy to the Holy See, recalled to Paris as Secretary General for Algerian Affairs), the insertion in Art. 2 of the preamble (the current Article 1 in the final draft) of a sentence on “respect for all religious convictions” alongside the reaffirmation of the “indivisible, secular, democratic and social” nature of the French Republic.43 Despite this success, many bishops continued to write to Villot to express their “embarrassment in the face of the propaganda ‘for the rejection of the secular constitution’ [because] they consider this propaganda dangerous and inappropriate […] but do not see how to repudiate it without showing, at the same time, that they are taking sides and willing to approve a state of affairs that they do not consider fully consistent with the doctrine of the Church”.44 Nuncio Marella believed that the mobilisation of the extreme right was undoubtedly inspired by motivations based on ideological values, since every Catholic would prefer a social order based “on the sacrosanct rights

The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 169 of God” rather than “on the rights of man”. However, at the same time, he deemed it would be desirable if this mobilisation did not result in the rejection en masse of de Gaulle’s referendum to avoid the creation of an institutional power vacuum and therefore anarchy, and that the bishops should have endeavoured to convince the leaders of the extreme Catholic right to abandon their battle, even though it was based on just principles, for reasons of realism and tactical expediency. In his report sent to the Secretariat of State on 1 September, Marella wrote: This office [of the Secretariat of State] is certainly already aware of the activity carried out in this regard by the groups known here under the name of ‘extreme right’, which, while defending a highly doctrinal thesis and one very much in line with the wishes of every French Catholic, have gone so far as to use exaggerated methods, as on other occasions, by staging a campaign to prevent Catholics from saying ‘no’ on 2 September. If this were to happen, paradoxically the Catholics and Communists would find themselves on the same side but for opposite reasons; however, the advantages, if any, would undoubtedly be reaped by the latter and certainly not by the Church. […] Who among Catholics would not want to see the name of God in the Constitution of the Fifth Republic? Who would not be proud to see that finally the sacrosanct rights of God and not ‘les Droits de l’homme’ become the foundations of society and the State? Who would not be delighted to no longer read the words ‘République laïque’, an adjective that recalls a series of persecutions, abuses and humiliations against the Church in France? Nevertheless, desire for something is one thing, the possibility of achieving it is quite another. Not only General de Gaulle’s will is at stake, but also the time is not yet ripe for this radical change. Even if it could be achieved today, a campaign of Masonic anticlericalism would be unleashed against us in order to suppress what has been achieved. […] It is not an act of faith that is required on 2 September, but a practical judgement. Approving the Constitution as a whole will be a principle of new life for France, not approving it will lead to chaos.45 Despite the fact that Villot had judged his conversation with Brouillet to be “greatly distressing” (“fort pénible”),46 he agreed to enforce the pro-government line established by Marella and, almost on the eve of the referendum, personally met the leader of the Cité Catholique Jean Ousset to convince him “that principles are one thing, the practical possibility of applying them in this circumstance is another”.47 That the ecclesiastical hierarchies distanced themselves from the extreme Catholic right did not however imply a rehabilitation of the Christian left that was dialoguing with Marxist forces and mobilising pacifists. Contrariwise, its repositioning alongside General de Gaulle seemed to be induced by a need for order and social preservation, almost like a new Ralliement, that

170  The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic is to say the political attitude French Catholics were advised to adopt during Leo XIII’s Pontificate with the encyclical Inter innumeros sollicitudines (February 1892), meaning accepting the Constitution and the republican institutions and renouncing the old monarchical legitimism. In addition, the substantial disempowerment of the Catholic extreme right involved in the Putsch of 13 May did not bring any significant change of perspective regarding the decolonisation of Algeria, as shown by a long document of the Équipe nationale of Pax Christi entitled Enseignements de la Hiérarchie concernant le problème de l’Algérie (Teachings of the hierarchy concerning the Algerian issue), an undated text in the French archives, but undoubtedly written after May 1958. On one hand, the document reiterated the condemnation of “exaggerated nationalism”, defined as “an idol, an absolute, to which even more essential values, such as the dignity of people and their mutual love, would be seriously sacrificed”; on the other, it renewed the invitation not to take radical positions in favour of Algerian independence because “Catholic universalism is careful not to transpose the absolutism of its religious principles into contingent fields”, starting with the highest ideals of “justice, charity and respect for the human person [which] cannot be put into practice in a uniform manner in situations that in reality differ”.48 In fact, in the specific case of Algeria, where “French occupation had been older, more numerous and fertile in advanced economic and social achievements”, “respect for the aspirations of Muslims, or at least some of them, towards greater political freedom, poses particularly delicate problems” because “it implies changes in the relations of force, influence and prestige between the two races, or one might say between two communities marked on the whole by significant differences in evolution, culture, customs and economic advantages”.49 The stance taken by the Catholic Church with regard to the Algerian question had not changed after the events of May 1958 and this can also be explained in light of the fact that General de Gaulle’s North African policy, at least initially, appeared to be based more on choices of continuity than on an actual change of course. In fact, De Gaulle simply retabled the dual strategy that former governments were familiar with that was a reforming action for the development of Algeria combined with an intensification of military repression. With the Constantine Plan, officially the Algerian Economic and Social Development Plan (Plan de développement économique et social en Algérie), presented on 3 October 1958, de Gaulle promised to invest billions of francs in industrialisation, agricultural modernisation, and housing development to accompany the country into the “modern civilisation” of “well-being and dignity”.50 However, the idea that greater economic investment in the colonies would suffice to reinforce metropolitan control over overseas subjects was nothing new as it was already part of interwar “colonial reformism” (Thomas, 2005).

The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 171 A few months later, between February and August 1959, the Challe Plan, named after General Maurice Challe who coordinated the operations, was carried into effect. Algeria suffered intensive aerial bombardment (including napalm bombing) and a massive campaign of population displacement and destruction of crops and livestock, resulting in a dramatic refugee crisis (250,000–300,000) along the borders of Morocco, Tunisia, and Mali. During the months the Challe Plan was underway, the French army also further intensified the already widespread practice of mass rape during raids on villages and regrouping camps (Branche, 2001). The appalling plight of displaced Algerians became public knowledge thanks to the journal France Observateur and daily newspaper Le Monde, following the publication on 16 and 18 April of the report on the regrouping camps drawn up by a finance inspector, 28-year-old Michel Rocard (future socialist prime minister between 1988 and 1991) for the Delegate General in Algeria, Paul Delouvrier, and finally revealed to the press after details were leaked from the office of the Minister of Justice, Edmond Michelet (Duclert, 2003). The revelations contained in the Rocard report prompted Protestant pastor Marc Boegner and Cardinal Feltin to launch an appeal on 30 May calling on Christians of both denominations to come to the aid of the masses of dispossessed people interned in the regrouping camps.51 In the meantime, the Catholic Church had entered a new era in its history, that of the Pontificate of John XXIII, former Apostolic Nuncio in Paris and former Patriarch of Venice Angelo Roncalli, who ascended to the papal throne on 28 October 1958. The extreme brutality of the new military offensive presented the new Pontificate with an ethical dilemma: how could the policy of Ralliement to the Fifth Republic be reconciled with the duty to intervene in the Algerian humanitarian emergency at the cost of openly denouncing the conduct of the French government? At the beginning of March 1959, even before the publication of the Rocard Report, Msgr. Domenico Tardini, who had risen to the rank of Secretary of State on 17 November of the previous year, informed Nuncio Marella that the Holy See was aware of the situation in the camps and had received numerous requests for help. Tardini suggested that the Nuncio take advantage of the climate of détente that had developed between the Vatican and the Élysée Palace to deal with the Algerian question: You recently reported on the desire expressed by the President of the Republic [de Gaulle] to maintain close and friendly relations with the Apostolic Nunciature. In this atmosphere of mutual trust, I think that Your Excellency will have the opportunity to also touch - at one time or another - on the delicate matter of the Algerian question. You have already sent us ample information on this issue and I am sincerely grateful, confident that you will continue to keep this Secretariat informed

172  The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic with your habitual diligence. In fact, the situation in Algeria cannot fail to interest the Holy See, especially because of the obvious negative consequences it has for religious life. I believe it is opportune to add that appeals for help have been received here on behalf of the numerous (it is said that there are more than 200,000) Algerian refugees in Tunisia and Morocco, deprived of food and decimated by disease. The Holy See, moved solely by a spirit of Christian charity, certainly cannot remain indifferent to the pain and suffering of such a large number of people.52 About a month later, Marella sent Tardini a detailed report on the outcome of the talks between the Nunciature and the Elysée Palace on the humanitarian emergency. The Nuncio was annoyed that Cardinal Feltin had not previously informed the Nunciature of the initiative taken with Pastor Boegner, which had ended up upsetting the government, now inclined to consider the “requests for aid for refugees in Tunisia or Morocco” as “a reprobation of French policy in North Africa”. The Elysée’s irritation did not spare the Holy See that through René Brouillet received a barrage of harsh and polemical remarks from de Gaulle. Firstly, while acknowledging that “the Church has the duty and the right to try to alleviate the suffering of the war victims”, the General considered it “however unjust and inadmissible that, under the pretext of charity, an attempt should be made to put the work of France in Algeria in a bad light, as was indirectly done by the appeal signed by the Emo Cardinal Feltin and by Pastor Boegner”. Furthermore, he demanded that the welfare work in favour of Algerian refugees be “carried out as anonymously and discreetly as possible” since he had “no intention of tolerating it if said action is carried out in such a way as to ‘mettre en agitation l’opinion internationale’”. From an operational point of view, de Gaulle demanded that the Vatican, Caritas Internationalis, and other foreign charitable organisations renounce “distributing aid directly to Algerian refugees in Tunisia and Morocco” and proposed a complicated compromise as a solution: the Holy See would have to allocate the funds at its disposal, not directly to Algerian refugees, but officially to “Catholic charitable works in Tunisia and Morocco”, then unofficially request the Archbishops of Carthage or Rabat to pass them on to the Algerians. “The French government”, Brouillet concluded on behalf of de Gaulle, “does in no way oppose the exercise of the Holy See’s charitable mission; it only wishes it to be carried out with the necessary precautions so that it may not indirectly harm the development of the policy of the V Republic in Algeria”.53 Tardini was evidently impressed by de Gaulle’s determination as in a letter of 11 July to Marella he showed that he totally accepted the Elysée’s point of view: Obviously, after the recent stance taken by this Government, the matter appears to be a delicate one. It is clear, therefore, that the charitable organisations dependent on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy will have to

The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 173 exercise particular caution. As far as this Secretariat is concerned, I assure you that the suggestions contained in the aforementioned Report will be taken into account.54 The founder of Secours Catholique, Msgr. Jean Rodhain, responsible for the coordination of the Catholic Church’s humanitarian aid, who was called into question by the correspondence between Tardini and Marella, was not prepared to accept the dictum of silence. After writing a long report to the Nunciature in which he described the apocalyptic scenario of the Algerian evacuees as a human “agglomeration” composed, according to his estimates, of at least a million people, “pinned against a watchtower”, almost “a re-enactment of an 11th-century village close to a fortified castle”, he warned that Catholic voluntary work could not be restricted to the mechanical distribution of aid without a clear political stance: “it is obvious that this aid must be intensified. However, this is not enough. The real help consists in awakening consciences. Distributing, yes, but also making people aware. A charity is not just a grocery; it is a form of pedagogy. Currently in mainland France and Algeria, most people are unaware of the magnitude of the refugee problem”.55 The subsequent events, rife with problems and setbacks, which would eventually lead to the signing of the Évian Accords, all fall within the chronological span of John XXIII’s pontificate and thus within a historical period that cannot be studied through Vatican documents, as it will be possible to consult them only several years after Pope Roncalli’s archives are opened. However, it is possible to make use of the papers of the Church of France, which show how difficult it was to deal with the lacerations of the Catholic community due to the repatriation of the pieds-noirs and the all-French clash between the faithful of the Republic and the extreme right-wing insurgents of the OAS. This documentation spans a period so full of historical events that here it is only possible to briefly summarise the fundamental passages. As commonly known, on 16 September 1959, de Gaulle spoke for the first time of “self-determination”, albeit still with reference to a “federal” solution, that is to say, in his words, mid-way between “Frenchification” and “secession”, and however consisting of the recognition of an Algeria governed by the Algerian people themselves but with close ties of interdependence with France in key sectors such as the economy, education, defence, and foreign policy. In 1960, the independence of Mauritania, Niger, Mali, and Chad posed a threat to the Organisation commune des régions sahariennes (OCRS), a new territorial partition established by France in 1957 in an attempt to maintain French control over the region, under the pretext of financing the development of these areas with oil revenues. In the same year, UN Resolution 1573 of 19 December recognised “the right of the Algerian people to self-determination and independence” and “the territorial integrity of Algeria”, thus paving the way for the subsequent referendum of

174  The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 8 January 1961 on the self-determination of Algeria, which was voted by an overwhelming majority (almost 75%) both in France and in the overseas departments and territories. In response to the result of the referendum, the Secret Armed Organisation (Organisation Armée Secrète), composed mainly of fascists, but also of conservatives such as Jacques Soustelle and Georges Bidault, united by the objective of preserving French Algeria by any means whatsoever, including violence, was founded in January 1961. However, the failure of the military putsch of 21 April 1961, an attempted coup d’état by the generals led by Maurice Challe, had the sole effect of hastening the start of a first round of negotiations between the FLN and the French government on 20 May 1961 in Évian-les-Bains. The correspondence between Msgr. Duval and Msgr. Rodhain, in the two-year period 1959–1960, paints a picture of disorganisation, almost of disorientation, of the French and Algerian Catholic Church in the face of the humanitarian problems connected to the rapidity of the transition to independence. Their correspondence speaks of the “paralysis” of the Secours catholique algérien,56 of disagreements over the drafting of a new statute, and of recriminations over the use of aid from the N.C.W.C. (National Catholic Welfare Conference) and the German organisation Misereor super turbarn, as well as differences of opinion on priorities regarding humanitarian intervention (health care or aid to unemployed workers).57 The thorniest problem was that of assistance for French returnees from Algeria, the so-called répliés. On 16 June 1959, Duval addressed the issue, saying he was “painfully surprised” (“péniblement surprise”) by the fact that he could only count on US aid from the N.C.W.C. and not on that of the Metropolitan Church’s charities as well. The Archbishop of Algiers feared that the Metropolitan Church’s disengagement concealed a political motivation and added: Whatever help Secours Catholique can provide to returnees, it seems to me necessary that the independence of the Church’s action be safeguarded and that there be no confusion on this subject in the minds of those who watch us from the outside. We maintain the best relations with the official authorities, but these same authorities have no interest in any confusion, even if merely apparent, between the spiritual and the temporal.58 In his reply dated 6 July 1959, Rodhain reproached Duval for his use of the expression “painfully surprised”, which sounded inappropriate and unfair to him in view of the appeal of Cardinal Feltin and the Protestant Church in favour of the Algerian refugees.59 Rodhain seemed to make no distinction between the issue of displaced Algerians and that of the repatriated pieds-noirs, which on the other hand was particularly dear to Duval’s heart. At the end of 1961, however, the Archbishop of Algiers sent a long report to the Secretariat of the French Episcopate on the assistance policies

The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 175 that, in his opinion, should be put in place to welcome European Algerians to France. The document demonstrates how, at the end of 1961, thus still a few months before the signing of the Évian agreements, Duval had not yet fully understood the extent of the epochal change taking place in Algeria, especially with regard to the European presence. He deemed, in fact, that to manage the exodus of the pieds-noirs, it would have been sufficient to reuse the note entitled The Emigration of Catholic Families from Tunisia that had been sent to the French Episcopate by the Archbishop of Carthage on 31 January 1957, although he nurtured the hope that the Algerian Europeans would not meet the same “tragic fate” as the French in Tunisia had. Above all, Duval recommended the secrecy of the reception plan as Europeans should not be encouraged to leave Algeria. As if nothing had changed since the outbreak of war in 1954, Duval insisted that the European presence in Algeria was necessary and that their abandoning the country would not be a liberation for the Muslim population: One should not be responsible for favouring a massive and sudden departure of Europeans from Algeria, because such a departure would have disastrous consequences on the country’s economic and social development: contrary to what is stated in some studies, the superficiality of which is explained by a political postulate, a massive departure of Europeans would not liberate.60 The Archbishop of Algeria also recommended that the image of the pieds-noirs, denigrated by the “nefarious influence” of the press, be revalued in the eyes of French public opinion. Finally, he entrusted to the care of the French parishes the fate of working-class refugees who in Algeria had been able to keep away from bad company, “but falling back into de-­ Christianised circles in France, would easily fall prey again, at least in part, to communist propaganda”.61 The Archbishop of Algiers was now grappling with the need to maintain a small Catholic flock in his diocese, a humble and concrete goal, now light years away from the resounding missionary imagination that had motivated the Catholic intransigence of Algerian Catholics at the dawn of the colonial venture.

Notes

1 Dossier Jean Muller. De la pacification à la répression. Cahier du Témoignage chrétien, 38, 15 February 1957. 2 Louis Delarue, Avec les paras du 1er REP et du 2e RPIMa. Paris: NEL, 1961, p. 50–51. 3 Émile Guerry, L’Action catholique. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1936. 4 CNAEF, Correspondance Joseph Vialatoux (1957–1958), letter from Joseph Vialatoux to Msgr. Jean Villot, 26 June 1957. 5 Ibid.

176  The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 6 CNAEF, Correspondance Joseph Vialatoux (1957–1958), letter from Joseph Vialatoux to Msgr. Jean Villot, 15 June 1957. 7 CNAEF, Correspondance Joseph Vialatoux (1957–1958), letter from Msgr. Jean Villot to Joseph Vialatoux, 2 June 1957. 8 CNAEF, Correspondance Joseph Vialatoux (1957–1958), letter from Joseph Vialatoux to Msgr. Jean Villot, 5 August 1957. 9 CNAEF, Correspondance Joseph Vialatoux (1957–1958), letter from Joseph Vialatoux to Msgr. Jean Villot, 30 November 1957. 10 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 711, fasc. 36, letter from Msgr. Léon-­ Étienne Duval to Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella, 24 January 1957, ff. 203r–203v. 11 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 711 fasc. 36, letter from Msgr. Henry Houche Titular Canon of Constantine Archpriest of Bona Cathedral, 25 March 1957, ff. 220r–223r. 12 Ibid. 13 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 711, fasc. 36, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 6 April 1957, ff. 329r–336r. 14 Ibid. 15 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 713, fasc. 40, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 6 March 1958, ff. 19–24, here f. 19. 16 Ibid., ff. 21–22. 17 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. Paris Nunciature Archive Parigi 713, fasc. 40, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 17 March 1958, ff. 30–35, here f. 30. 18 Ibid., f. 33. 19 Ibid., ff. 34–35. 20 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 713, fasc. 40, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 16 May 1958 ff. 55–60, here f. 56. 21 Ibid., f. 57. 22 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 713, fasc. 40, letter from Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, to Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella, 29 May 1958, f. 61. 23 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 713, fasc. 40, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 20 May 1958, ff. 62–67, here f. 67. 24 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 713, fasc. 40, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 24 May 1958, ff. 76–78, here f. 78. 25 Ibid., ff. 77–78. 26 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 713, fasc. 40, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 2 June 1958, ff. 100–105, here ff. 103–104. 27 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 711, fasc. 35, Rapport concernant les incidences religieuses des évènements du 13 mai au 6 juin en Algérie. Ce rapport, destiné exclusivement au Saint-Siège, a un caractère absolument secret, from Msgr. Léon-Étienne Duval, 9 June 1958, ff. 141r–149r, here f. 141r. 28 Ibid. ff. 145–147r. 29 Ibid. f. 147r. 30 Ibid. f. 148r. 31 Ibid., ff. 148r–149r.

The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 177 32 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 713, fasc. 40, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 23 June 1958: Crisi dei partiti politici (Crisis of the political parties), ff. 117–123, here ff. 119–120. 33 Ibid. f. 122 (Opinion expressed by Antoine Pinay to the Nuncio). 34 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 713, fasc. 40, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 11 July 1958, ff. 127–135, here (opinion expressed by Pierre Pflimlin to the Nuncio), ff. 129–130. 35 See the controversy between Jean Ousset and Father Jean-Marie Le Blond S.J. in Le Blond, J.-M. (1959). Pour et contre Cornélius. Études. Revue de culture contemporaine, 2(300): 238–250. 36 J.O. Débats de l’Assemblée nationale, séance du 2 juin 1958, p. 2648. 37 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 713, fasc. 40, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Vatican Secretariat of State, 11 July 1958, ff. 127–135, here f. 132. 38 Ibid., ff. 132–133. 39 Ibid. f. 134. 40 Ibid., ff. 134–135. 41 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 713, fasc. 40, Relazione di una conversazione tra l’On. Guy Jarrosson, deputato del dipartimento del Rodano all’Assemblea Nazionale Francese, ed il Rev.mo Mons. Pierre Veuillot (Report of a conversation between the Hon. Guy Jarrosson, deputy of the Rhone department in the French National Assembly, and the Most Reverend Msgr. Pierre Veuillot), August 1958, f. 291. 42 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 713, fasc. 40, Msgr. Jean Villot, Communication confidentielle à NN. SS. les Membres de l’Assemblée des Cardinaux et Archevêques (Confidential communication to Our Lords, Members of the Assembly of Cardinals dnd Archbishops of France), 1 September 1958, ff. 306–307, here f. 307. 43 Ibid. 44 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 713, fasc. 40, Msgr. Jean Villot, Communication confidentielle à NN. SS. les Membres de l’Assemblée des Cardinaux et Archevêques (Confidential communication to Our Lords, Members of the Assembly of Cardinals dnd Archbishops of France), 2 September 1958, f. 305. 45 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 713, fasc. 40, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 1 September 1958, ff. 300–304, here 301–302. 46 Ibid. f. 303. 47 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 713, fasc. 40, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Vatican Secretariat of State, 21 September 1958, ff. 357–360, here f. 359–360. 48 CNAEF, Archives du Mouvement Catholique International pour la Paix Pax Christi, 123 Pax Christi et l’Algérie, Enseignements de la Hiérarchie concernant le problème de l’Algérie (Teachings by the Hierarchy regarding the problem of Algeria, undated but with handwritten annotation “post-Mai 1958”). 49 Ibid. 50 Charles de Gaulle, De Gaulle parle des institutions, de l’Algérie, de l’armée, des affaires étrangères, de la Communauté, de l’économie et des questions sociales, edited by André Passeron. Paris: Plon, 1962, 169. 51 Appel solennel aux chrétiens. Un million de réfugiés en Algérie, par Marc Boegner et Maurice Feltin. Réforme, 30 May 1959, 741, 1.

178  The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 52 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 711, fasc. 35, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 8 March 1959, ff. 247r–247v. 53 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 711, fasc. 35, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Vatican Secretariat of State, 19 June 1959, ff. 265r–268r. 54 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 711, fasc. 35, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Vatican Secretariat of State, 11 July 1959, f. 269r. 55 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 711, fasc. 35, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Vatican Secretariat of State with an attached Report by Msgr. Jean Rodhain entitled Les réfugiés en Algérie (Refugees in Algeria, undated), ff. 250r–255r. 56 CNAEF, Fonds Mgr Jean Rodhain, from Msgr. Léon-Étienne Duval to Msgr. Jean Rodhain, 17 April 1959. 57 CNAEF, Fonds Mgr Jean Rodhain, from Msgr. Jean Rodhain to Msgr. Léon-Étienne Duval, 16 February 1960 and letters from Duval to Rodhain dated 24 May 1960, and 19 October 1960. 58 CNAEF, Fonds Mgr Jean Rodhain, from Msgr. Léon-Étienne Duval to Msgr. Jean Rodhain, 16 June 1959. 59 CNAEF, Fonds Mgr Jean Rodhain, from Msgr. Jean Rodhain Msgr. Léon-­ Étienne Duval, 6 July 1959. 60 CNAEF, Fonds Mgr Jean Rodhain, Report by Msgr. Léon-Étienne Duval to the Secretariat of the French Episcopate Msgr. Gouet, 27 December 1961. 61 Ibid.

References Blanchard, Emmanuel (2011). Quand les forces de l’ordre défient le palais Bourbon (13 mars 1958). Les policiers manifestants, l’arène parlementaire et la transition de régime. Genèses, 83: 55–73. Boniface, Xavier (2001). L’aumônerie militaire française, 1914–1962. Paris: Cerf. Boniface, Xavier (2003). L’aumônerie militaire française en guerre d’Algérie. Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, 1(77): 47–57. Branche, Raphaëlle (2001). La Torture et l’armée pendant la Guerre d’Algérie, 1954–62. Vingtième siècle, 75: 123–132. Chapeu, Sybille (2004). Des chrétiens dans la guerre d’Algérie. L’action de la Mission de France. Paris: Les Éditions de l’Atelier-Éditions ouvrières. Chiron, Yves (2022). Histoire des traditionalistes. Paris: Tallandier. Cholvy, Gérard, Comte, Bernard & Feroldi, Vincent (1991). Jeunesses chrétiennes au XXe siècle. Paris: Éditions Ouvrières. de Neuville, Raphaëlle (1998). Jean Ousset et la Cité catholique. Bouère: Dominique Martin Morin. Duclert, Vincent (2003). Un rapport d’inspecteur des finances en guerre d’Algérie. Des camps de regroupement au principe de gouvernement. Outre-Mers. Revue d’histoire, 38–339: 163–197. Feichtinger, Moritz (2017). A Great Reformatory: Social Planning and Strategic Resettlement in Late Colonial Kenya and Algeria, 1952–63. Journal of Contemporary History, 52(1): 45–72. Ferron, Rodolphe (1997). Aux sources du traditionalisme catholique: La Cité catholique, mémoire de D.E.A. en Sciences politiques. Rennes: Université de Rennes I.

The Vatican, the Algiers Putsch, and the advent of the Fifth Republic 179 Fontaine, Darcie (2016) Decolonizing Christianity: Religion and the End of Empire in France and Algeria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fouilloux, Étienne (1988). Ordre social chrétien et Algérie française. Les Cahiers de l’Institut d’Histoire du Temps Présent, 9: 63–87. Fouilloux, Étienne (1991). Intellectuels catholiques et guerre d’Algérie (1954–1962). In: Jean-Pierre Rioux, Jean François Sirinelli (eds), La Guerre d’Algérie et les intellectuels français. Bruxelles: Éditions Complexe, 79–114. Fouilloux, Étienne (2011). Eugène cardinal Tisserant (1884–1972). Une biographie. Paris, Desclée de Brouwer. Garrigou-Lagrange, Madeleine (1959). Intégrisme et national-catholicisme. Esprit, 278(11): 515–543. Giroux, Bernard (2011). La JEC de la Libération aux années 1960. In: Christian Sorrel, Bernard Barbiche (eds). La Jeunesse étudiante chrétienne 1929–2009. Lyon: LARHRA, 39–56. Impagliazzo, Marco (1994). Duval d’Algeria. Una Chiesa tra Europa e mondo arabo (1946–1988). Roma: Edizioni Studium. Le Blond, Jean-Marie (1958). Les Dangers religieux de la politique. Études. Revue de culture contemporaine, 12(299): 385–396. le Moigne, Frédéric (2005). Les évêques français de Verdun à Vatican II: Une génération en mal d’héroïsme. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Letamendia, Pierre (1995). Le mouvement républicain populaire: le MRP, histoire d’un grand parti français. Paris: Editions Beauchesne. Michel, Florian (2009). Intégrisme catholique et politique. Études, 9(411): 211–222. Mouton, Claude (1972). La Contre-Revolution en Algerie: Le combat de Robert Martel et ses Amis. Montreuil: Diffusion de la Pensee Française. Pflimlin, Pierre (1989). Itinéraires d’un européen. Entretiens avec Jean-Louis English et Daniel Riot. Strasbourg: La Nuée bleue. Rioux, Jean-Pierre (1983). La France de la Quatrième République, t. 2, 1952–1958. Paris: Le Seuil. Thénault, Sylvie (2005). Personnel et internes dans les camps français de la guerre d’Algérie: entre stéréotypes coloniaux et combat pour l’indépendance. Politix, 69: 63–81. Thomas, Martin (2005). Albert Sarraut, French Colonial Development and the Communist Threat, 1919–1930. Journal of Modern History 77 (4): 917–955. Venner, Fiammetta (2006). Extrême France. Les mouvements frontistes, nationaux-radicaux, royalistes, catholiques traditionalistes et pro-vie. Paris: Grasset. Wall, Irwin M. (2001). France, the United States, and the Algerian War. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Conclusions

The analysis of the Vatican documentation consulted made it possible to draw some conclusions that challenge the interpretative model prevalent in historiography to date, according to which the Catholic Church, long before the epilogue of the independence processes, had achieved a sort of “religious decolonisation” through the “indigenisation” of the clergy and local episcopal hierarchies, so as to separate the missionary calling from the political interests of colonial nations. This interpretative ideal type, drawn from missionary literature, has been consolidated in political historiography in the form of the binary opposition between colonial Europe and the Church as one of the initiators of the decolonisation process (see Introduction, para. 1). Paradoxically, it was the anticlerical detractors of the colonialist front who crystallised the image of a decolonising Church, thus attributing the pacifist mobilisation of French Catholics and the interventions of Propaganda Fide for the formation of local clergy in the overseas territories to an alleged Vatican control room. This was the thesis of a controversial book published in 1958 entitled Le Vatican contre la France d’Outre-­ Mer (The Vatican against Overseas France), written by François Méjan, president of the Lille Administrative Court who had been a colonial official in French West Africa, and was politically close to the socialist Guy Mollet.1 Father Joseph Michel sent a detailed analysis of the book attached to a report on the October 1958 congress of African Catholic students enrolled in French universities, and “on the problems that the black student movement poses to ecclesiastical authorities in France”,2 to the Holy See, written at the request of the Paris Nunciature. According to P. Michel, Méjan’s book was well documented but lacked interpretative finesse, “addressed the partisans of the colonial system” and went so far as to “evoke the ‘white race’ in terms that were to say the least singular”. The tone of the text, concealed behind the screen of an erudite and apparently moderate legal language, was, in his opinion, to be traced back to a “violent campaign, unleashed by the extreme right, [which] interprets the current attitude of the Church as pure and simple encouragement aimed at local nationalisms”. Father Michel, however, did not believe that this “denunciation of the ‘progressive vestries’ on the part of the extreme right” correctly reflected reality and chose to pose a DOI: 10.4324/9781003230175-8

Conclusions 181 problematic question, “Is the Church anti-colonialist? What is Pius XII’s policy in French black Africa?”3 Today, the Vatican documents make it possible to attempt to answer these questions and to understand the real political strategy of the Holy See underlying Pius XII’s fleeting allusions to the recognition of the political “progressive freedom” of non-European peoples contained in the Christmas radio messages broadcast in 1953 and 1954 and in the encyclicals Evangelii Praecones of June 1951 and Fidei donum of April 1957. The Vatican desired a gradual process of decolonisation, or rather a postponement of the achievement of political independence to an indefinite future that was incompatible with the real claims of the Maghreb and African national movements. From this point of view, the document entitled La doctrine de l’Église par rapport au problème algérien (The doctrine of the Church in relation to the Algerian problem), drafted on 21 March 1958 by the auxiliary bishop of Lyon Alfred Ancel for the Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne, appears particularly significant, as in it he wrote, “the Church admits the legitimacy of peoples’ aspiration to independence, but it does not say that one is morally obliged to grant Algeria independence immediately. This is a different issue and one must not confuse the legitimacy of aspirations to independence with the date on which independence is given. They are two different things”; furthermore, “the Church asks colonial nations to work positively to prepare colonised peoples for independence and to give them independence when they are prepared”. In the original document, the verb “prepare” was emphasised, as if to imply the opportunity for an octroyée independence of colonised peoples, granted by concession from France. Was the Catholic Church convinced that “religious decolonisation”, or rather its missionary renewal, was sufficient to make up for the deprivation of political, civil, and social rights of the indigenous populations in the overseas territories, which were, moreover, predominantly Muslim or non-Catholic? One cannot attempt to answer this question if one does not take into account that the Catholic Church’s position on decolonisation was one of the aspects of the dialectical tension between religion and nation, between faith and politics, and, in this respect, was the testing ground for Catholicism’s entry into 20th-century modernity. Therefore, Catholics were called upon to untie the problematic and still unresolved knot of the relationship between religious vision and democracy, between a theology still based on the theorisation of an objective and absolute natural order that also involves the State and of which the Church is the custodian (see Mystici Corporis Christi, 1943), on one hand, and the recognition of the non-denominational principle of ethical and social pluralism, on the other. This challenge was particularly demanding in the political contexts of Mediterranean Europe dominated during the 1930s by extreme right-wing clerical dictatorships (Italy, Vichy France, Portugal, and Spain). While after the Second World War, Spain and Portugal, where dictators were still in power, were the Catholic Church’s

182  Conclusions last Mediterranean and Atlantic outposts of Catholicity in a largely secularised Europe exposed to communist propaganda, and Italy, as the seat of the Papacy, maintained its traditional ties with the Holy See, France, on the contrary, engaged in the reconstruction of its own republican democracy, was an unknown quantity for the Vatican. The relationship between the Holy See and the governments of the Fourth and the Fifth Republic therefore appears particularly complex, conditioned by the international dynamics of the Cold War, the fear of communism, and the difficulty of understanding and accepting the modernisation of French society, which also involved a considerable segment of the Catholic world, no longer willing to passively accept ecclesiastical directives from above. The colonial question is a mirror of this complexity. During the years of the Vichy regime, the Vatican saw in Portuguese colonialism the creation of a model of institutional cooperation between State and Catholic missions that was perfect and worthy of being transferred to French Africa. In the Holy See’s evaluation, the traditionalist and counter-revolutionary government of Pétain, considered a sort of new Salazar, should therefore have adopted the Portuguese system in its colonies, namely an overseas extension of an ultra-conservative regime based on the moral values of Catholic doctrine which, by ensuring missionaries had a monopoly on education, would have put an end to the traditional benevolence shown by France towards Islam (chap.1, para. 1). A constant in the relations between the Holy See and the French authorities throughout the chronological span of the events examined is the perennial polemic against France, accused of protecting and favouring Islam for political motivations related to maintaining social peace in the colonial order while underestimating the importance of Catholic education as a bulwark of European civilisation in overseas society. This was a central issue in the documents of the Vatican Secretariat of State and Propaganda Fide addressed to the Vichy regime in January to February 1941, chap. 1, para. 2, and repeated throughout the 1950s in the correspondence of the Apostolic Delegation of Dakar and partly in that of the Algerian Episcopate herein cited. This controversy reflects the feelings of the Catholic Church towards France, which, with the exception of the brief interlude of the Vichy regime, is judged through the ideological filter of anti-Republican criticism following the 1905 law separating the Churches from the State that founded the French model of secularism. Although this law was applied in the overseas territories with so many derogations that in fact the Catholic Church continued to receive State subsidies, the ecclesiastical hierarchies had the perception that secular and republican France had not invested enough in the Catholic missions in the overseas territories to curb the propagation of the nefarious tendencies of Islam and communism. Significantly, this position of the Roman Church was summed up in the note sent to the French bishops by the Secretariat of the Episcopate of

Conclusions 183 France in the autumn of 1954 to settle the diatribe that pitted the pro-colonialist Ambassador Charles-Roux against Father Joseph Michel. The note, drafted by Abbé Jean Blanc, a former professor of ecclesiastical history who had become Secretary general of the Missionary Union of the Clergy of France (Union Missionnaire du Clergé de France), argued that in the colonies “Christian France was probably more harshly contrasted by secular France (persecution, ostracism, indifference) than in mainland France”, and that the French administration could have spared itself the anti-colonial nationalist insurrection in Madagascar in 1947 if only it had heeded the warning of Father Henri Prouvost of the Missions Étrangères de Paris (apostolic visitor of the Holy See to Africa from 15 December 1945 to 15 August 1946) about the need to support Catholic missions (cited in Brasseur, 1986: 66). It is therefore difficult to determine whether Catholic anti-French polemic should always be interpreted as authentically anti-colonial or sometimes simply anti-Republican. From the Vatican documentation consulted, there emerges a consistent ideological interpretation of national independence movements in Africa as a late epigone of the libertarian thought of the French Revolution, which the Arab movements in particular would have drawn on through the secular French schools that were autonomous or even antagonistic towards the missionary ones. For Msgr. Duval, “secularism has contributed to weakening religious values, and to creating ‘evolved’”, indigenous people, whose objective is “political liberation without reference to moral laws”, in other words, a rebellion that is the result of French left-wing thinking, and yet dangerously close to the “new form of Jihād” orchestrated from Cairo (Report of 8 August 1955). Likewise, for Msgr. Pinier, who in 1957 signed a collective document of the Algerian Episcopate intended for the Secretariat of State, the Holy See was called upon to face the “growing threat of communist influence throughout Africa starting from North Africa, favoured by the secularism of French schools and Arab nationalism” (Notes sur quelques problèmes missionnaires en Afrique du Nord, January 1957). While in the case of the Algerian Episcopate, the criticism against secularism can perhaps be interpreted as an attempt to reaffirm, in the eyes of the Holy See, the strategic importance of Catholic educational institutions in a territory now invested by a process of rapid decline in the European presence, in the case of the apostolic delegation in Dakar, this polemic is an essential part of a clearly reactionary and ultra-worldly vision of the world and the Church. For Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre, all the provisions of the French Republic introduced in sub-Saharan Africa in an attempt to democratise the French Union, such as the “Overseas Labour Code” on trade union rights introduced in December 1952, or the Defferre framework law of June 1956 on the establishment of elective bodies with a degree of political autonomy, confirmed the weight of the historical legacy of the false ideas

184  Conclusions of political and social equality of secular and revolutionary France, which in the post-war period had definitively given up defending its prestige as a colonial power (chap. 3, para. 2; chap. 5, para. 1). Alongside Catholic unease with the presumed secularism exported by the French Republic to the overseas territories, the documentation analysed also reveals a fundamental difficulty of the ecclesiastical hierarchies in understanding and accepting the phenomenon of the cultural reawakening of Islamic identity as a prerequisite for the independence of the French African colonies. Throughout the 1950s, the correspondence sent from the French African colonies still confirmed the permanence of the fundamentally negative judgement on Islam already expressed in 1939 by the North African Episcopate in the observations sent in response to the enquiry promoted by Cardinal Tisserant. Islam is portrayed as an intrinsically political religion based on intrusive social control in the lives of its faithful and on a religious education that renders them passive (see notes of the Apostolic Vicariate of French Morocco and the Oran diocese March and June 1939, chap. 1 para. 1). The Vatican papers contain repeated references to the alleged inability of the peoples hitherto subjected to European rule to govern themselves and paint a bleak picture of the decolonisation of French Africa. Neither is the stereotypical image of the behavioural immaturity of the Muslim population as a result of Islamic upbringing regarding the tasks of administering public affairs, disproved by the reports sent to the Holy See by figures recognised as reference points for interreligious dialogue, namely the White Father André Demeerseman in Tunis and Msgr. Duval himself. Their respective reports of October 1953 (see chap. 3, para. 2) and August 1955 (chap. 4, para. 2) both underline the need for an extremely gradual decolonisation that would allow the Catholic Church to maintain educational primacy and speak of an Islam that in an ineluctable way forges a mentality “instinctively” inclined “to reabsorb itself into a totalitarian system” (Demeerseman), as well as the “inadequacy of the Koranic schools” due to the intrinsic inability of the Koran to “provide a social doctrine suited to the conditions of society” (Duval). All in all, the Catholic judgement of Koranic schools was no different from that of the French colonists who, contrary to the Vatican’s view, had not been at all protective of Islam but had opposed Muslim religious education that they judged by the yardstick of the obscurantist reactionary republican schools in metropolitan France (Triaud, 2009: 124–125). In the light of these considerations, one cannot help but question the historiography regarding the shortcomings of the interreligious dialogue experienced by the Catholic world in the Muslim environment in the first half of the 20th century, following the missionary spirituality of Charles de Foucauld and the Badaliya theorised by Massignon, whose objective however remained that of the Christian redemption of the souls of Muslims without contemplating Islam as a religious message from the perspective of salvation.

Conclusions 185 To date, with the partial exception of Pierre-Jean Luizard’s work on the relationship between mission and colonisation (Luizard, 2006), there does not exist even one complete summary document of the history of relations between French Catholics and Muslims, the subject of doctoral research conducted by the Institut d’études politiques de Paris and the Universities of Bordeaux and Aix-Marseille (Galembert, 1995; Dussert-Galinat, 2010, 2013; Caucanas, 2012, 2015). What appears to be missing is above all an analysis of the IslamicChristian dialogue from a Muslim perspective, that is to say from certain critical voices in the Arab world that were inclined to downgrade the ecumenical value of the Badaliya. In 1959, Sheikh Mohammed Bahy of Al-Azhar polemically referred to Massignon’s thought as “missionaryism disguised as scientific Orientalism” (cited in Armstrong, 2005: 290). Even the Conferences for Peace and Christian Civilisation, open to the Arab and African worlds, inaugurated in the early 1950s by the mayor of Florence Giorgio La Pira and hailed as pioneering experiences of interreligious dialogue, testified to the permanent ambiguities of the Church’s magisterium inherent in its confrontation with the Muslim world. Already at the first Florentine conference in 1952, the representatives of non-­European countries, sceptical about the Eurocentric approach of such conferences, were keen to point out that the very term “Christian civilisation” had been and continued to be, in the historical experience of their peoples, synonymous with colonisation and exploitation.4 Although organised in response to the activism of the Partisans of Peace movement of communist tendency, the Florentine conferences, conceived as an opportunity for cultural reflection on the contribution of all religions to the building of peace in the dramatic Cold War years, were in fact proposed as a sort of “council” of Christian nations called upon to reaffirm the political validity of Christian civilisation (Giovannoni, 2007). They referred to the common fatherhood of God of all peoples of the Abrahamic tradition without clarifying, however, whether this brotherhood implied the recognition of the equal value of their respective civilisations and religious traditions. At the 1956 conference, the delegate of the Holy See, Msgr. Alberto Castelli, reiterated that, according to the Magisterium of Pius XII, mankind found its salvation solely in Christ and consequently in participation in his mystical body, the Roman Catholic Church. Genuine peace between peoples would only be possible within a Christian social order, placed under the moral guardianship of the Church, the only authority capable of restoring the proper meaning to “venerable” words such as understanding and fraternity, which have sometimes become “blurred and weak” in political discourse.5 It is also in this cultural context that the genesis of the encyclical Fidei donum, promulgated by the Pope on 21 April 1957 to respond to the pressing demand for new priests in mission territories, is placed. In particular, between 1956 and 1957, both Msgr. Duval and Msgr. Lefebvre urged the Holy See, with equally dramatic insistence, to send more European priests

186  Conclusions to Africa to support the local Churches that had become more fragile following the demobilisation of the French State apparatus (chap. 5, para. 2). This request was undoubtedly one of the motivations that drove Pius XII to write Fidei donum, an encyclical of great importance for its theological and ecclesiological aspects, to be interpreted as a renewal of the outdated Maximum Illud of 1930 since it introduced the new definition of the figure of the diocesan priest sent by his bishop to mission territories to encourage the missionary union of the clergy and redefine the terms of evangelisation and missionary work in the perspective of greater communion (Nicoli, 2007). The encyclical, however, actually resulted in the presence of a greater number of European clergy in the colonies that was providential for the local Churches at the time suffering from a power and identity crisis, as well as from great tension between the minority of European origin and the Muslim majority. The practical application of the encyclical in the French territories affected by decolonisation thus seemed to counterbalance the indigenisation of the native clergy. On the other hand, Lefebvre, who on 14 September 1955 had completed the establishment of the local French African hierarchy in accordance with the line of indigenisation established by the encyclical letter Evangelii praecones, did not believe in the cultural self-sufficiency of African society as compared to European society. During the Second Plenary Conference of the Heads of Mission of French West Africa and Togo (18–23 April 1955), where the legitimacy of the African aspiration for autonomy and economic development was recognised,6 the apostolic delegate in Dakar did not fail to reiterate that African customs and the lack of Christian spirit among European colonial officials hindered the evolution of the colonised peoples towards a normal social life (cited in Brasseur 1986: 61). Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre’s Reports sent to Propaganda Fide and the Secretariat of State, analysed here, often appear to be marked by a negative ethnocentric characterisation of the behaviour of Arab and African populations described as instinctive, violent, and irrational (see for example his Report of 5 May 1957). The disvaluing anthropological conception of the African personality outlined in Lefebvre’s correspondence is symptomatic of a general ambiguity in the Catholic missionary culture of the time. As noted, during Pius XII’s pontificate, with the exception of reflections on anti-Semitism, there was a lack of any real theological exploration of the problem of colonial racism and, “until the mid-1950s, appeals about the desolating ‘condition of the Negroes’ that were not solely aimed at their religious and moral redemption, or eventual conversion, found little echo in the Catholic press” (Caponi, 2021: 26). From this point of view, the discourse on négritude advocated by the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions’ monthly magazine Le Missioni cattoliche was emblematic. Indeed, by idealising a primitive innocence of the African continent (Mudimbe, 1988), it evoked its mission that was aimed at awakening the conscience of a Europe by now “corrupted by a practical materialism no less deleterious than

Conclusions 187 atheism” that had betrayed Christianity because of “faith in progress and money”.7 Le Missioni cattoliche, during a meeting of African political and cultural personalities at the Sorbonne in September 1956, in the presence among others of Senghor and Aimé Césaire, emphasised how African culture could only redeem decadent European civilisation if it freed itself from “exaggerated anti-colonialism and anti-Westernism”.8 The ambiguities of the racial discourse in the missionary culture of those years lead to a critical reconsideration of one of the pillars of the theory of “religious decolonisation” linked to the indigenisation of the local clergy, namely the adaptation of evangelisation to purely intercultural criteria, attentive to the recognition of local languages and the acceptance of elements of indigenous identity in ceremonies and devotional celebrations. Undoubtedly, the Catholic missionary experience in the 1950s experimented with innovative forms of religious enculturation that went beyond a mechanical and external reproduction of liturgical formulas and forms of aid and assistance already tried and tested in the homeland. However, as the Italian historian Mauro Forno observed in his book La cultura degli altri (The culture of others), taking his cue from the reflections of the African intellectuals and theologians Jean-Marc Ela and Jean Ilboudo, Catholic missionary theology had often remained strongly anchored to the cultural traditions of the West, which appeared, in the eyes of the peoples who had undergone their imposition, as the expression of “a non-African history”, the paradigmatic manifestation “of a project of others” (Forno, 2017: 21). Forno himself also recalls how the missionary mentality was in some cases also marked by the legacy of a certain 18th-century polygenetic scientism, which, by theorising the existence of races, undermined the biblical concept of humanity as a unitary race, as well as by a particular mental condition, defined by Bert Hellinger as the “benefactor syndrome”, namely the subjective certainty of having “given everything” for one’s neighbour, which translates into the rejection of the emancipation of colonial subjects, considered as a form of “ingratitude” (Forno, 2017: 21). This last aspect introduces another issue that emerged as fundamental in the documentation consulted, which is the economic solidarity on the part of the Catholic world towards the populations involved in the decolonisation process. The problem of poverty is central to the missionary discourse of the Catholic Church, which sees charity as an indirect form of religious apostolate and witness to evangelical life among the non-Christian populations of the colonies. The charitable approach to the problem of poverty also has a political significance since the Catholic Church considered, throughout the entire period of Pius XII’s pontificate, that economic assistance to progressively emancipating countries was a duty of the West, called upon to remain in Africa to promote development policies and prevent the explosion of local nationalisms (Pius XII, Radio message broadcast on 24 December 1955, par. Pacificazione preventiva, AAS, XXIII: 39–40).

188  Conclusions In the early years of the IV Republic, in his correspondence to the Secretariat of State, Archbishop Augustin-Fernand Leynaud of Algiers spoke of the presence of independence movements of Islamic origin as being dangerous for Christians in North Africa and complained about an alleged democratisation of relations between France and the native population, sanctioned by the Algerian statute of 1947, which would make the Arabs more autonomous and pretentious. At the same time, however, he described the strengthening of Catholic charitable organisations and forms of economic assistance for the poor as a means of survival for the Catholic Church in an environment that would become progressively hostile (correspondence of June and August 1947 and June 1949, chap. 2, para. 1). On this front, there emerges the ambivalence of the political discourse of the North African and sub-Saharan African Episcopate, which, even during the 1950s, while pursuing a social apostolate attentive to the issue of economic inequalities remained tied to a concept of solidarity circumscribed to “friendly cooperation” between European minorities and indigenous populations (Lettre collective de l’épiscopat, 2 October 1955) which presupposed the rejection of a prospect of France’s rapid withdrawal from colonised countries, in this case destined to plunge into anarchy (see among others the reports of Msgr. Mercier of 17 May 1956, of Msgr. Duval of 26 March 1956, and of Msgr. Lefebvre of 15 November 1957, chap. 5, para. 1). The solidarity-based argumentation in church documents, almost always expressed in terms of compassionate Christian “pauperism”, brings out the cultural inheritance of “social Catholicism” which, in the first half of the 20th century, had paved the way for the French Catholic Church’s reflection on colonialism. In fact, “social Catholicism” (Introduction, para. 1) had begun to mobilise itself after the launch of the Sarraut plan, one of the countless attempts at renewal of the colonial order that were aborted after an inconclusive theoretical discussion on the reformability of the French model. Indeed, it was this theoretical discussion that inspired the Catholiques Sociaux with a critical theory of colonialism that, however, did not go beyond a political pedagogy aimed at the progressive education of subject populations.9 African society was still paternalistically regarded as intellectually and socially inadequate and therefore in need of the European presence in Africa, which, once purged of its selfish and predatory intentions through sound missionary cooperation, would continue to carry out civilising action inspired by the obligation of Christian charity. The experience of the “Cahiers du Sud” (Introduction, para.1), which proposed a Mediterranean cultural synthesis that sought in the tradition of a mythologised East a way of salvation for a “disoriented” Europe, showed all the shortcomings of a Western humanism that, as suggested by Edward Said in Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Said, 2004), did not really question colonial society but on the contrary sublimated it. The reports of the White Fathers of the Laghouat diocese focused on the contrast between the moral vices of Westerners enriched by oil and the

Conclusions 189 virtues of the colonists of modest social extraction dedicated to charity towards the poorest Arabs, who remained immune to the revolutionary violence of the fellaghas (chap. 5, para. 1), and summarised perfectly the interpretative model that the Catholic Church frequently used to understand the relationship between Europe and emerging countries on the eve of their decolonisation. The French presence was judged negatively not only and not so much on account of its colonial mentality as on the level of its values, but that is also to say because of its economic and social homologation to the modernising canons of post-World War II Europe, while the Arab world was viewed with paternalistic sympathy insofar as it was poor, humble, and anti-modern, as long as its need for missionary assistance placed it on pre-political ground, whereas its autonomous political demands of various leanings – socialist, nationalist, or Islamic – were often a matter of great concern and mistrust. The fundamental tenets of the Holy See’s diplomacy, against the backdrop of the decolonisation of French Africa and the Maghreb in particular, were in fact anti-communism and a profound distrust of Arab nationalism. These constants did not fail to condition the relations between the Holy See and the French authorities as early as the Second World War when, following the Allied landings in North Africa in November 1942, the Vatican had to redirect its diplomatic activity from the Vichy regime to France libre. The first contacts with Charles de Gaulle were anything but easy as the Holy See had begun to get to know the figure of the General through the correspondence sent from the North African Episcopate that was loyal to Pétain and deeply disoriented by the Gaullist approach to the Resistance struggle, aimed at including socialists and communists and avoiding religious and confessional rifts (chap. 1, para. 2). After the Liberation, the Vatican built its network of relations with the political class of the Fourth Republic through the mediation of the Catholic centre party, Mouvement républicain populaire, MRP, its main point of reference in the Hexagon’s political arena. The Vatican papers testify to the alternation of the most prestigious leaders of the MRP – Georges Bidault, Francisque Gay, André Colin, PierreHenri Teitgen, Robert Schuman, Pierre Schneiter, and Pierre Pflimlin, as well as the centre-right independent Antoine Pinay at the Apostolic Nunciature in Paris headed by Msgr. Angelo Roncalli from December 1944 to January 1953 and by Msgr. Paolo Marella from April 1953 to April 1960. It is with the MRP that the Nunciature discusses both the thorniest problems on the French political agenda, such as the Algerian question and the institutional transition to the Fifth Republic, and several strategic issues in the internal life of the Church, such as the establishment in 1948 of the Apostolic Delegation of Dakar (chap. 2, para. 2) and the episcopal appointments, in particular that of Duval, recommended by Bidault for the post of Primate of Africa (letter from Nuncio Roncalli to Cardinal Fumasoni Biondi, 28 October 1947) and then as Archbishop of Algiers (note of the

190  Conclusions French Ambassador to the Holy See Wladimir d’Ormesson, 7 November 1953). Msgr. Duval himself refers to Bidault’s thoughts on the Algerian question during a dramatic confrontation with the generals of the Putsch that took place on 13 May 1958 (Report of 9 June 1958). The MRP’s African policy during the first Constituent Assembly (6 November 1945 to 10 June 1946) and the second (11 June 1946 to 27 November 1946), as well as throughout the Franco-Algerian war, advocated the maintenance of the French colonies within the framework of a new institutional structure, the French Union, which would have ensured the overseas territories greater political autonomy, and, in perspective, relative independence, albeit within the framework of federal links with republican France. Unlike the similar position adopted by the left wing of the SFIO, that of the MRP was much more cautious about the extent of the political concessions to be granted to the indigenous peoples and certainly ran counter to the communist battle in favour of the immediate emancipation, tout court, of the African possessions into fully sovereign and independent States. The Paris Nunciature adopted the hypothesis of the “third way”, an alternative both to the inflexible preservation of the old colonial order and to total and immediate independence under the leadership of the Arab nationalist movements, in many ways similar to the “integration” approach envisaged by Jacques Soustelle during the Mendès France and Faure governments. In all the reports sent from the Paris Nunciature to the Holy See the idea of the “third way” compromise is strongly advocated, as transpires from the exhortations of the Metropolitan Episcopate of France and Algeria to defend peace and human rights without, however, ever lacking loyalty to patriotic values or resorting to extremist solutions. Even the Confidential Reports sent by Msgr. Duval to the Holy See (in particular that of 26 March 1956) show that the former was personally in favour of an extremely gradual vision of Algerian decolonisation and therefore opposed to the hypothesis of an electoral reform guaranteeing the Arab electorate the same rights as European voters in the first constituency, as he feared the danger of social anarchy and the economic underdevelopment of Algeria in the event of an immediate withdrawal on the part of the Europeans and the concrete risk of the disappearance of the Catholic Church in a country with an Islamic majority. The Vatican, which appreciated Duval’s moderation, on the other hand took a stern attitude towards the more radical positions of Catholic anti-colonialism, represented by the journals La Quinzaine, Esprit, and Témoignage chrétien, as they did not appear to realise how Islamic nationalism and communism constituted the real dangers threatening the future of colonial societies. Indeed, ever since the outbreak of the crises in the Tunisian and Moroccan Protectorates, it was this key to interpreting decolonisation that had persuaded Vatican diplomacy to reject, with an adamant “fin de non-­ recevoir”, any attempt by the Maghreb independence movements to involve

Conclusions 191 the Holy See, through the Cairo Internuncio, in an international negotiation process aimed at accelerating the completion of the independence processes (see the Reports of 14 May 1952 and 15 October 1952, chap. 3, and of 25 June 1955, chap. 4, para. 2). When anti-colonial criticism matured to the point of legitimising the political independence of non-European peoples – as in the case of Father Joseph Michel – the Holy See abandoned its apparent neutrality that was aimed at seeking a theoretical synthesis between the anti-colonialism of the African Students, whose chaplain was Father Michel, and the colonial lobby of Charles Roux, and intervened to contain all Catholic positions liable to have direct political effects on the stability of the French Union. In July 1957, the Secretary of the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, Cardinal Antonio Samoré, after having “attentively examined” the Résolutions de la rencontre des Etudiants catholiques africains (Resolutions of the Meeting of African Catholic Students) adopted in Rome from 17 to 24 April, pointed out to Nuncio Marella that “the document is drafted in a rather strong tone and that, in particular, certain expressions, even if they should not perhaps be interpreted as indicating extremist attitudes, lend themselves to misunderstandings” and that was why it was opportune to urge Father Michel “to be vigilant during subsequent meetings”.10 In the months leading up to the 1958 Algiers Putsch, the Holy See became increasingly convinced of the concrete possibility that political Islam, an ally of communism, would spread from North Africa to the rest of the continent. In fact, in January 1958, the Cairo Internunciature informed Propaganda Fide of the dangerous dissemination of the pamphlet De l’Algérie au Cameroun edited by the Foreign Delegation of the President’s Office of the UPC (Union des peoples du Cameroun) which, in formulating the wish for the immediate independence of the Algerian people, argued the impossibility for any African country to coexist with colonialism.11 The report attached to the pamphlet stated that the aim of the UPC was to turn Cameroon into “a propaganda platform” and “a springboard for Marxist infiltration and imperialist [Soviet] conquest in the heart of Africa”.12 The disintegration of the French Union loomed as a disturbing scenario for the Paris Nunciature which, in March 1958, in a report on the Congress of African Parties in Paris, anxiously described the political drift of the former Protectorates of Morocco and Tunisia, which were increasingly drawing nearer to “breaking with France”, and the situation in Algeria where: Despite the undeniable military successes achieved by the French, the uprising is regaining strength! As H.E. the Most Rev. Monsignor Duval confirmed to me recently, the arrival of more improved weapons from Tunisia has breathed new life into the insurgents! In the motherland, terrorism is rampant and does not stop even in front of police stations […] Finally, as if the picture were not already gloomy

192  Conclusions enough, the representatives of the French territories of ‘black’ Africa have come forward with greater demands, and they too have not hesitated to speak of independence.13 Nonetheless, Nuncio Marella praised the attempts at mediation on the part of the socialist and Catholic MP Léopold Senghor, president of the Convention Africaine, who “behind closed doors” had encouraged “the unanimous acceptance of the principle of the unification of all African political entities” in order “to obtain internal autonomy and recognition of the right to independence as soon as possible for all the territories”, but within the framework of “a Franco-African federal republic” linked by “confederal ties with States that are now ‘associated’ (Laos, for example) and with countries that are already independent or on the way to becoming so (Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria)”.14 The Constitution of the IV Republic (that was also the result of the MRP’s contribution) was still in force in the spring of 1958 but did not contemplate any consensual procedures for achieving the independence of colonial possessions inside or outside the French Union. In this regard, in 1960 in Le Monde, Roger Pinto, Professor at the Faculty of Law in Paris, recalled that the proposals advanced by Ferhat Abbas and the Intergroup of Overseas Parliamentarians had been rejected in the Constituent Assembly and pointed out that the 1946 Constitution did not actually recognise the threefold option of “independence, association, integration” but “by blocking the possibility of a peaceful pathway towards progressive transformation for the overseas nationalists” had ineluctably opened the infernal cycle of insurrections and civil wars (R. Pinto, “La Communauté 1946–1960”, Le Monde, 30 July 1960). Ultimately, the “imperial” reformism embraced by the architects of the French Union (MRP included) had taken the form of what Uday S. Mehta has termed Liberal Strategies of Exclusion (Mehta, 1990). The reforms aimed at the gradual democratisation and constant improvement of the indigenous peoples’ standard of living, conceived with a view to “integrating” the colonies into metropolitan France, had ended up by crystallising the political demands for genuine independence that France was not willing to concede, and had thus brought out the essential contradiction of any “third way”: however liberal a reform might seem, it could not be called truly democratic if it continued to presuppose colonial control. However, the reformability of the overseas political order of the French Union from within is the almost constant expectation of the Holy See even after the watershed of 13 May. Faced with the possible dangerous spread of communism and Islam in sub-Saharan Africa, Msgr. Lefebvre had applauded the “sound reaction” of the military on 13 May in Algeria which, in his view, had brought about “a halt to the anarchy and disorganisation of France and the French Union, which was to the advantage of communism”, thus preventing a predictable revolutionary chain reaction across the continent.15

Conclusions 193 The Algiers Putsch, carried out by the most radical fringes of the French army with the full support of the extreme Catholic right, although extolled by the apostolic delegate in Dakar, was not, however, the optimal solution for the diplomacy of the Holy See, which, tied to the myth of the “third way”, still hoped for a moderate and as peaceful as possible evolution of the French Union (which after 4 October 1958 would be called the French community) towards forms of Franco-African cooperation. Moreover, the torture practised by the French army, denounced in the strongest terms by Msgr. Duval following his condemnation on 25 January 1955 of any inhuman “physical and psychologic” practice contrary to natural law, had not left even the Paris Nunciature indifferent, which, in a report of November 1957 described to the Secretariat of State the emotions aroused by the establishment of the Commission de sauvegarde des droits et libertés individuels and the “bombshell effect” of the book Pour Djamila Bouhired concerning the case of the Algerian militant tortured for 17 days by the French army in April 1957, condemned to the guillotine and finally pardoned by President Coty following heated public protests. Bishop Marella welcomed the intervention in the National Assembly by MRP MP Teitgen who, speaking of “abominable methods”, had asked the “government for greater diligence in verifying and repressing abuses”.16 However, beyond the humanitarian aspects, the Nunciature was keen to avert the risk of French society precipitating towards a bipolar clash between the extreme right and the extreme left due to the escalation of military violence, torture, and colonialist extremism. To the right of de Gaulle, a reactionary and traditionalist Catholic universe openly inspired by Iberian national Catholicism was stirring. Bernard Lefèvre, an exponent of the “Group of Seven”, a secret subversive association founded to overthrow democracy and defend French Algeria, and an overt admirer of both António Salazar (Rioux, 1983: 150) and the cult of Our Lady of Fatima around which the symbolism of the 13 May Putsch revolved, was emblematic of an anti-communist mobilisation which, as in the Iberian dictatorships, used an emotional communication of the religious message to replicate, in devotional forms, the mechanisms of modern propaganda and the manipulation of conscience. The Vatican documentation shows how the Nunciature, in concert with the Secretary of the French Episcopate, Msgr. Jean-Marie Villot, worked to contain the anti-Gaullist mobilisation of the extreme religious right by steering the Catholic electorate’s vote towards the approval of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic. The General, who forcefully re-proposed the principle of secularism in the preamble of the new Constitution, was still the old Resistance leader, while what appeared to change was the Catholic Church, for which it was no longer time to chase the dream, cherished by the Vatican during the war, of an authoritarian and clerical France on the model of neighbouring Spain and Portugal. But was this actually so? What were the real motivations for

194  Conclusions the new Ralliement of Catholics to republican institutions? According to the Nunciature, in the event of a civil war between opposing extremisms, leftwing radicalism would prevail under the leadership of Moscow’s subservient Communist Party (chap. 6, para. 2). It should be noted, in this regard, how the arguments used by the French Episcopate and the Nunciature to stem the propaganda of the extreme Catholic right were centred on reasons of expediency (the need to avoid social disorder that would have created the conditions for a communist offensive) without ever going so far as to disavow the ideological content of the Catholic counter-revolutionary movements, whose traditionalist theses they sometimes approved in principle. On the other hand, the attitude of the ecclesiastical hierarchies towards the Catholic left, which was constantly subjected to repressive and censuring interventions by the Holy Office aimed at condemning at grassroots level the doctrinaire positions in favour of theological renewal, class equality, and dialogue with Marxism, was quite different. The Catholic left’s commitment to the defence of human rights and peace during the Franco-Algerian war was, as is well known, one of the driving factors behind the dynamics of “national awareness” that accompanied French society towards the recognition of Algeria’s right to independence, sanctioned by the 1962 Évian Accords, a fundamental stage in the decolonisation of French Africa. This commitment was an expression of a cultural and theological transformation of French Catholicism, which, however, can hardly be ascribed to the merits of Pius XII’s pontificate, towards which the French Christian Left considered itself opponent. While the Évian Accords were the milestone of the decolonisation of Catholicism, they were not a safe harbour for the complex and ambiguous cultural process of revising missionary paradigms and renewing the relationship between the Roman Church and non-European cultures. On 20 January 1962, a few months before the agreements that ended the Franco-Algerian conflict were signed, during the other terrible colonial war between Portugal and Angola, Portuguese Patriarch Cardinal Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira published a pastoral note urging young men to enlist “in the service of the great ideals for which it is worth dying”, such as that of “making Christian civilisation flourish overseas”.17

Notes 1 François Mejan, Le Vatican contre la France d’Outre-Mer. Paris: Librairie, Fischbacher, 1958. 2 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Msgr. Domenico Tardini, Pro-Secretary of the State for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs, 28 April 1958, f. 300r. 3 Ibid., ff. 301v–302v.

Conclusions 195

4 Mohraj Ruman’s speech. In: Civiltà e pace. Atti del primo Convegno internazionale per la civiltà e la pace cristiana, Firenze, 23–28 giugno 1952. Firenze: Tipografia L’impronta, 1953, 86–87. 5 Msgr. Alberto Castelli’s speech. In: Storia e profezia. Atti del quinto Convegno Internazionale per la Pace e la Civiltà Cristiana. Firenze, 21–27 giugno 1956. Firenze: Tipografia R. Noccioli 1957, 281–284, in particular 286. 6 The collective declaration of the A.O.F. and Togo heads of mission was published by the Documentation catholique of 29 May 1955, col. 665. Msgr. Chappulie re-proposed it in the article entitled «L’Eglise et la fraternité des peuples» in the Semaine religieuse du diocèse d’Angers of 16 October 1955, reproduced in Documentation Catholique, October 30, 1955, col. 1373–1384. 7 Angelo Lazzarotto, Africa continente in crisi. Missioni cattoliche, 1956, 6: 122–125. 8 Piero Gheddo, La “Bandung” della cultura nera. Missioni cattoliche, 1957, 5: 115–116. 9 Eugène Duthoit, Compte-rendu de la Semaine Sociale de Marseille. Lyon: Grabalda, 1930; Joseph Folliet, Le travail forcé aux colonies. Paris: Cerf, 1938. 10 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, letter from Msgr. Antonio Samorè to Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella, 29 July 1957, f. 309r. 11 ACPF, NS, vol. 2064, f. 301, Brochure “De l’Algérie au Kamerun”. 12 ACPF, NS, vol. 2064, Report from the Cairo Internunciation to the Propaganda Fide, 27 January 1958, f. 284. 13 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 710, fasc. 32, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Vatican Secretariat of State, 4 March 1958, ff. 292r–296r. 14 Ibid. Marella’s document goes on to say: “It should also be noted that for the time being none of them want the development towards the exercise of this right [independence] to take place ‘against France’ and thus assume the appearance of secession. Two Senegalese delegates, who demanded the immediate achievement of independence, if necessary by force, were forced by the conference leaders to leave the room”. 15 ACPF, NS, vol. 2064, Report by Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre, 8 November 1958, ff. 536–537. 16 AAV, Paris Nunciature Archive, b. 711, fasc. 36, letter from Nuncio Msgr. Paolo Marella to Vatican Secretariat of State, 16 November 1957, ff. 422r–427r. 17 Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira, «Nota pastoral de confiança e exortação nacional» de 20 de Janeiro 1962. In: Obras Pastorais, vol. VII (1964–1970). Lisbo: União Gráfica, 1970, 412.

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196  Conclusions de Galembert, Claire (1995). L’attitude de l’Église catholique en France et en Allemagne à l’égard des Musulmans ou le pari sur l’islam de l’Église de France, thèse de doctorat, Institut d’études politiques de Paris- IEP. Dussert-Galinat, Delphine (2010). Le dialogue interreligieux en France de 1945 à 1997. Acteurs et enjeux entre discours officiels et initiatives locales, thèse de doctorat, Université Bordeaux III. Dussert-Galinat, Delphine (2013). Le dialogue interreligieux. Entre discours officiels et initiatives locales. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes. Forno, Mauro (2017). La cultura degli altri. Il mondo delle missioni e la decolonizzazione. Roma: Carocci. Giovannoni, Pietro Domenico (2007). “A Firenze un concilio delle nazioni”. Il primo Convegno per la pace e la civiltà cristiana. Firenze: Edizioni Polistampa. Luizard, Pierre-Jean (2006). Le choc colonial et l’islam. Les politiques religieuses des puissances coloniales en terres d’islam. Paris: La Découverte. Mehta, Uday S. (1990). Liberal Strategies of Exclusion. Politics and Society, 18: 427–454. Mudimbe, Valentin Yves (1988). The Invention of Africa. Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 135–145. Nicoli, Dario (2007). Il movimento Fidei Donum: tra memoria e futuro. Bologna: EMI. Rioux Jean-Pierre (1983). La France de la Quatrième République, t. 2, 1952–1958. Paris: Le Seuil. Said, Edward W. (2004). Humanism and Democratic Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press. Triaud, Jean-Louis (2009). Une laïcité coloniale. L’administration française et l’islam en Afrique de l’ouest (1860–1960). In Christine Peyrard (ed.), Politique, religion et laïcité. Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, 121–143.

Index

Ab del-Keder, Sayah 43, 58 Abbas, Allaoua 113 Abbas, Ferhat 43, 44, 52, 53, 55, 94, 113, 120, 156, 192 Abd-El-Jalil, Jean-Mohammed 12, 21 Abel, Martin 89 Abitbol, Michel 73, 91 Abrial, Jean-Marie Charles 28 Achi, Raberh 29, 47 Adenauer, Konrad 161 Adjel-Debbich, Sarah 139, 151 Ageron, Charles-Robert 42, 43, 47, 51, 56, 68, 69, 113, 115, 124, 195 Ainouche, Azzedine 15, 19 Airiau, Paul 65, 69 Akbal, Mehenni 10, 19 Al Saoud, Saoud ben Abdelaziz 119 Alix, Christine 127, 151 Ancel, Alfred 181 Aouate, Yves-Claude 29, 47 Armstrong, Karen 185, 195 Aron, Robert 44, 47 Artur, Jules 118, 124 Augros, Louis 99, 100 Aujoulat, Louis 50, 82, 83 Aupiais, Francis 8 Auriol, Vincent 58, 68 Avon, Dominique 12, 19 Azéma, Jean-Pierre 47 Badra, Mohammed 74 Badré, Jean 154 Bahy, Mohammed 185 Baida, Jamaâ 10, 19 Balard, Martine 8, 19 Ballard, Jean 7 Bancel, Nicolas 12, 14, 19 Banny, Konan 82, 93 Baquey, Stéphane 7, 19

Barangé, Charles “Barangé law” 128 Barbetta, Giulio 86, 92, 94, 120 Barbiche, Bernard 179 Barrat, Denise 19 Barrat, Robert 19, 78, 79, 90, 91, 122 Barthez, Jean-Claude 133, 155 Bartkowski, Maciej 126 Baubérot, Jean 16, 19 Baudorre, Philippe 22 Bayyoud, Ahmed 107, 108 Bazin, René 9, 18 Bédarida, François 47, 100, 124 Bekkaï, Mbarek 130 Belhassen, Souhayr 42, 47 Belkacem, Benzenine 124 Bellon, Christophe 15, 19 Belmessous, Saliha 43, 47 Ben Bella, Ahmed 108 Ben Youssef, Salah 42, 74–76, 90, 107, 114, 119 Benbahmed, Mostepha 115 Benchennouf, Hachemi 53 Benedict XV pope (Giacomo della Chiesa), x, 4, 17 Bérard, Léon 30, 31, 33, 34, 45 Bérenguer, Alfred 10, 19 Bererhi, Afifa 126 Bernardini, Filippo 71 Bernini, Ilaria 22 Berramdane, Abdelkhaleq 42, 47, 74, 92 Berrar, Émile 79, 91 Berstein, Serge 69 Bertetto, Domenico 45 Berthod, Bernard 91 Bessis, Sophie 42, 47 Bevans, Stephen B. 21 Bichet, Robert 164 Bidault, Georges 55, 62–65, 86, 91, 163, 164, 174, 189, 190

198  Index Billotte, Pierre 117 Blanc, Jean 103, 183 Blanchard, Emmanuel 159, 178 Blanchard, Pascal 12, 14, 19 Blanchard, Pierre 91 Blum, Léon 121 Blum-Viollette Bill 105 Blunt, Craig Simon 106, 124 Bocquet, Jérôme 100, 124 Boegner, Marc 171, 172, 177 Boniface, Xavier 153, 154, 178 Borrmans, Maurice 19, 78 Bouchène, Abderrahmane, 18, 21, 68 Boudiaf, Mohamed 95, 124 Bougeard, Christian 40, 47 Bouhired, Djamila 193 Bourgès-Maunoury, Maurice 116, 120 Bourguiba, Habib 42, 119 Branche, Raphaëlle 5, 20, 171, 178 Brasseur, Paule 103, 124, 183, 186, 195 Brot, Pierre 79 Brouillet, René 155, 168, 169, 172 Brunhes, Jean 8 Brunschwig, Henri 79, 92 Cachin, Marcel 115 Canavero, Alfredo 4, 20 Cantier, Jacques 28, 35, 47 Capdevila, Luc 37, 47 Capitant, René 38 Caponi, Matteo 186, 195 Carcopino, Jérôme 28 Castelli, Alberto 185, 195 Catroux, Georges 43, 129 Caucanas, Rémi 12, 20, 185, 195 Ceci, Lucia 4, 20 Cellier, Jean-Claude 5, 20 Cesaire, Aimé 52, 187 Chaban-Delmas, Jacques 128 Challe, Maurice 171, 174 Challe Plan 171 Chand, Ganeshwar 41, 47 Chapeu, Sybille 88, 89, 92, 99, 100, 124, 155, 178 Chappoulie, Henri-Alexandre 46, 61, 62, 68, 115, 118, 123 Charfi, Abdelmajid 11, 20 Charles-Roux, François 79, 103, 121, 183 Chassin, Lionel Max 165 Chauleur, Sylvestre 185 Chevalier, Jacques 28, 97 Chikha, Elisabeth 9, 20 Chiron, Yves 166, 178

Cholvy, Gérard 153, 178 Clarizio, Emanuele 113, 114, 123 Colas, Dominique 15, 20 Colin, André 62, 159, 160, 189 Combes, Clément 10 Comte, Bernard 153, 178 Conklin, Alice L. 12, 20 Cooper, Frederick 12, 22, 56, 69 Corriou, Morgan 125 Costantini, Celso 45, 46, 54, 67, 68, 71, 89 Coste-Floret, Alfred 164 Coty, René 120, 159, 161, 163, 193 Coulon, Christian 104, 124 Courbe, Stanislas 40 Crémieux Brilhac, Jean 37, 47 d’Ormesson, Wladimir VIII, 76, 80, 85, 90, 91, 190 d’Ouince, René 154, 155 Daniélou, Jean 11, 19 Darlan, François 35, 43 Davezies, Robert 88 de Benoist Joseph Roger 61, 69 de Chaponay, Henryane 78, 79, 90 de Félice, Pierre 157 de Foucauld, Charles 9, 11, 67, 184 de Fürstenberg, Maximilien xii, 63, 66 de Galembert, Claire 196 de Gaulle, Charles xi, 27, 34–39, 41, 43, 44, 46, 56, 57, 140, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 177, 189, 193 De Giuseppe, Massimo 3, 20 de Hauteclocque, Jean 75, 90 de Jonghe d’Ardoye, Georges-Marie 107, 122 de l’Assomption, Marie (Marie-Émilie Taudière) 11 de Launay, Othon 18 De Leonardis, Massimo 149 De Lucia Lumeno, Flavia 149 de Massals, Henri 89 de Menthon, François 37 de Montety, Henri 89 de Moustiers, Roland 105 de Neuville, Raphaëlle 165, 178 de Panafieu, François 38 de Peretti, André 78, 90 de Provenchères, Charles-Marie 67, 68 de Sérigny, Alain 161 de Vitoria, Francisco 103 Debré, Michel 106

Index 199 Defferre framework law, Defferre, Gaston xi, 136–139, 141, 183 Del Boca, Angelo 20 Delanoue, Paul 82, 92 Delarue, Louis 153–155, 175 Delisle, Philippe 5, 20, 22 Dell’Acqua, Angelo 139, 143, 146, 149–151, 156 Delos, Joseph 38 Delouvrier, Paul 171 Déloye, Yves 27, 28, 48 Delville, Jean-Pierre 21 Demarque, Denis 165 Demeerseman, André 9, 82, 84, 85, 91 Demeerseman, Gérard 84, 92 Denis, André 102 Dentu, Jean 121 Depreux, Édouard 55, 56 Dermenghem, Émile 7 Deveze, Michel 67 Dewitte, Philippe 82, 92 Dides, Jean 159, 160 Dinet, Étienne 15 Djermoun, Soraya 139, 151 Domenach, Jean-Marie 158 Dreyer, Victor 9 Dreyfus, Alfred 100 Ducattillon, Vincent (Joseph) 149 Duclert, Vincent 171, 178 Dumas, Joseph 122 Dumons, Bruno 19 Duquesne, Jacques 27, 47 Durand, Jean-Dominique 8, 20, 22 Durand, Léon-Auguste 10, 26, 28, 37, 45, 46 Durrieu, Louis Marie Joseph 87 Dussert-Galinat, Delphine 185, 196 Duthoit, Eugène 8, 195 Duval, Léon-Etienne xi, xii, 64–66, 86–89, 92, 94, 96–99, 108, 109, 110– 112, 114, 116, 120–123, 125, 131–134, 143–145, 148, 150, 155–158, 162, 163, 174–176, 179, 183–185, 188–191, 193 Duval, Raymond 114 Éboué, Félix 40, 61 Ekkehard, Rudolph 12, 20 El Fassi, Allal, 80, 81, 89, 91, 107, 119, 124 El Ibrahimi, Cheikh Bachir 107, 108 El Korso, Malika 100, 124 El Mechat, Samya 19, 74, 92 Ela, Jean-Marc 187 Esquer, Gabriel 43, 47

Essemlali, Mounya 130, 151 Evans, Martin 21, 115, 124, 129, 151 Faidherbe, Louis 16 Falconi, Carlo 89 Fauc, Abel 18 Faure, Edgar 94, 104, 105, 113–115, 120, 130, 134, 190 Faure, Lucie 105 Feichtinger, Moritz 152, 178 Feller, Janine 44, 47 Feltin, Maurice 85, 96–98, 102, 116–118, 134, 135, 148, 153–155, 168, 171, 172, 174, 177 Feroldi, Vincent 10, 19, 20, 153, 178 Ferron, Rodolphe 166, 178 Fitte, Albert 133, 148, 151 Flynn, Gabriel 101, 125 Fofana, Ibrahim 82, 93 Folliet, Joseph 8, 18, 195 Fonlupt-Espéragber, Jacques 105, 112, 122 Fontaine, Darcie 20, 88, 89, 92, 133, 151, 155, 156, 179 Fontaine, Jean 9, 20 Forno, Mauro 4, 20, 187, 196 Foster, Elizabeth A. 4, 20, 128, 148, 149, 151 Fouchet, Christian 106, 122 Fouilloux, Étienne 24, 27, 47, 85, 92, 100, 124, 125, 153, 156, 164, 179 Foulquié, Paul 28 Fournier, Jacques 18 Francis pope (Jorge Mario Bergoglio), x Fumasoni Biondi, Pietro 33, 34, 45, 63–65, 68, 103, 139, 146, 149, 151, 189 Gabel, Emile 98, 135, 148 Gabrieli, Christian 71, 92 Gadille, Jacques 3, 5, 20 Gaillard, Félix 159, 160 Gamble, Harry 82, 83, 92 Garnier-Rizet, Yvette 44, 47 Garrigou-Lagrange, Madeleine 164, 179 Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald 66 Gaudeul, Jean-Marie 12, 20 Gay, Francisque 62, 189 Geffré, Claude 11, 20 Gelin, Joseph 97–121 Gerlier, Pierre-Marie 30, 96–98, 111, 116, 118, 132, 154, 155 Gheddo, Piero 195 Giovagnoli, Agostino 71, 92 Giovannoni, Pietro Domenico 185, 196

200  Index Giraud, Henri 34, 35 Giroux, Bernard 153, 179 Gonçalves Cerejeira, Manuel 194–195 Gonzales, Denis 99–125 Gori, Luca 104, 125 Gorlin, Michel 156 Gosnell, Jonathan K. 12, 20 Gouet, Julien 178 Gounot, Charles-Albert 10, 28, 39, 47 Grandguillaume, Gilbert 6, 20 Grandval, Gilbert 114 Grenier, Clément 116, 125 Grossi, Giulia 22 Guérif, Jacques-Henri 89 Guérin, Daniel 108, 120, 125 Guerry, Émile 153, 154, 175 Guèye, Lamine 51, 52 Gugelot, Frédéric 85, 92 Guillon, Jean-Marie 28, 47 Guissard, Lucien 147 Guitton, Jean 78 Hached, Ferhat 75, 77, 78, 90 Hadj, Messali 44, 53, 54, 94, 95, 113 Harbi, Mohammed 125 Hardy, Georges 8 Hellinger, Bert 187 Henriot, Philippe 39 Henry, Jean-Robert 2, 7, 21, 87, 88, 92 Hincky, Jules 36, 37, 38 Hitler, Adolf 35 Hocine Aït, Ahmed 107, 126 Houart, Pierre 115, 125 Houche, Henry 157, 176 Houpert, Pierre 90 Houphouët-Boigny, Félix 51 Hourdin, Georges 132 House, Jim 75, 92 Ibn Badis, Abd al-Hamid 17 Ikeda, Ryo 73, 75, 77, 92 Ilboudo, Jean 3, 21, 187 Impagliazzo, Marco 65, 69, 88, 89, 92, 148, 155, 179 Isoart, Paul 50, 51, 69 Jačov, Marko 21 Jacquier, Gaston-Marie 157 Jarrosson, Guy 166, 167, 177 Jeanson, Francis 88 Jennings, Éric 28, 47 Johan, Roger 145

John XXIII pope (Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli), papa xii, 54, 57, 61–68, 85, 92, 170, 171, 173, 189 Juin, Alphonse 34, 73 Kalman, Samuel 128, 151 Kerlan, Jobic 100 Keryell, Jacques 12, 21 Khadda, Naget 126 Khalil, Mary 11 Khatib, Abdel Krim 136 Khiari, Sadri 12, 21 Khider, Mohamed 108. Kœnig, Pierre, 113 Kroeger, James 4, 21 La Barbera, Serge 28, 47 La Pira, Giorgio 185 Labouret, Henri 67 Lacaste, Bertrand 122, 150 Lacoste, Robert 129, 152, 156, 158 Lacouture, Jean 90 Lacroix, Jean 86, 91 Lagaillarde, Pierre 160 Lalande, Bernard 97–99, 120, 121 Lançon, Daniel 19 Lanfry, Jacques 67, 155 Langlois, Claude 5, 21 Laurentie, Henri 40, 41, 60 Lavagne, Francoise 44, 47 Lavigerie, Charles-Martial-Allemand 5, 6, 10, 56, 140 Lazzarotto, Angelo 195 Le Blond, Jean-Marie S.J. 165–167, 177, 179 Le Cour Grandmaison, Olivier 12, 21 Le Floch, Henri 64, 65 le Moigne, Frédéric 154, 179 Le Pen, Jean-Marie 154 Lecourt, Robert 58 Lefèbvre, Joseph-Charles 144 Lefebvre, Marcel xi, xii, 64–66, 71, 72, 82–84, 91, 135, 137–140, 144, 146, 147, 149–151, 165, 183, 185, 186, 188, 192, 195 Lefèvre, Bernard 193 Lefèvre, Louis-Amédée 10, 79, 80, 114, 150 Lefèvre, Luc J. 165 Legrain, Michel 103, 125, 135, 151 Lemaire, Pierre 166, 168 Lemaire, Sandrine 2, 19 Lemaître, Alexis 10 Lemesle, Raymond-Marin 46

Index 201 Leone, Alba Rosa 24, 47 Lepp, Ignace 80 Letamendia, Pierre 164, 179 Letourneau, Jean 164 Levame, Albert 76, 77, 80, 81, 90, 91 Levrat, Jacques 12, 21 Levtzion, Nehemia 23 Leynaud, Auguste-Fernand 10, 29, 35–38, 45, 46, 53–60, 67, 68, 86, 188 Lie, Trygve 75 Liénart, Achille 62, 71, 72, 93, 132, 143, 144, 150 Lizop, Édouard 147 Loew, Jacques 11 Lopinot, Calliste 30, 45 Luchaire, François 49, 69 Luizard, Pierre-Jean 23, 185, 196 Madiran, Jean 165, Madjarian, Grégoire 50, 69 Maglione, Luigi 25, 26, 33–39, 44–46 Maillard de La Morandais, Alain 100, 125 Malgeri, Giampaolo 3, 21 Mamet, Pierre 100 Marangé, Céline 105, 125 Marella, Paolo 84, 86, 91, 101, 102, 104, 111, 112, 115–119, 121, 123, 124, 129–131, 136, 137, 139, 140, 143, 144, 146–150, 156–161, 163, 164, 167–169, 171–173, 176–178, 189, 191–195 Marguich, Moussa 10, 18, 21 Maritain, Jacques 63 Marrou, Henri-Irénée 101 Marrus, Michael 27, 47 Martel, Robert 160 Martin, Henri 167 Martin, Jean 125 Martinet, Gilles 120, 124 Maspetiol, Roland 120 Massigli, René 35, 46 Massignon, Louis 7, 11, 19, 78, 81, 184 Massoncon, Jean 165 Massu, Jacques 152, 153, 160, 162 Mauriac, François 66, 78, 79, 81, 90, 91, 110, 118, 128, 129, 147, 148, 158, 161 Maurras, Charles 28, 64, 72, 165, 167 Maury, Jean 132 Mayer, René 55 Mayeur, Jean-Marie 99, 100, 125 Mayeur-Jaouen, Catherine 100, 111, 125 Médard, Frédéric 96, 125 Mehta, Uday S. 192, 196 Méjan, François 180, 194

Mejdoub, Abdelhadi 75, 76, 90 Melloni, Alberto 20, 22 Menant, Guy 36 Mendès-France, Pierre 96, 105, 128, 130, 147 Merad, Ali 11, 21 Mercier, Georges-Louis 141, 142, 150, 163, 188 Merle, Marcel 151 Merlo, Jacques 163 Merveilleux du Vignaux, Charles 138 Metz, René 19 Meynier, Gilbert 95, 125 Mezerna, Ahmed 107, 108 Michel, Florian 165, 179 Michel, Henri 35, 48 Michel, Joseph 103, 112, 118, 121, 127, 135, 149, 180, 183, 191 Michel, Marc 49, 69 Michelet, Edmond 157, 171 Michon, Roger 128, 129, 147 Mitterrand, François 96, 97 Moch, Jules 58 Mohammed V, Sultan, 42, 73, 80 Mohand-Amer, Amar 124 Mokhtar, Badji 100 Mollet, Guy 127–131, 134, 136, 137, 148, 150, 180 Monnoyer, Maurice 10 Montagne, Robert 78 Montuclard, Maurice 101 Mounier, Emmanuel 66 Mounier, Jean 121 Mourad, Boukhris 77, 90 Moussaoui, Abderrahmane 21, 87 Moutet, Marius 49 Mudimbe, Valentin Yves 186, 196 Mulla-Zadé, Paul-Mehmet 12, 21 Müller, Jean 153, 175 Murray, Paul D. 101, 125 Mussolini, Benito 4, 29 N’Zouzi, Bernard 61, 69 Naegelen, Marcel-Edmond 58 Nehru, Jawaharlal 136 Nicoli, Dario 186, 196 Nizard, Maurice 75 Nolan, Francis 5, 21 Nouschi, André 95, 125 Nozière, André 100, 125, 127, 151 Ottaviani, Alfredo 86 Oualdi, M’hamed 125 Ousset, Jean 165, 166, 169, 177

202  Index Paul VI pope (Giovanni Battista Montini), 89 Passeron, André 117 Paxton, Robert 27, 47 Pelletier, Denis 124 Perbal, Albert 24, 45 Périllier, Louis 74 Perrin, Maurice 98, 119, 124, 150 Pervillé, Guy 120, 125 Pétain, Philippe xi, 24, 27–30, 32, 34–39, 182, 189 Peyrard, Christine, 23, 196 Peyriguère, Albert 18 Peyroulou, Jean-Pierre 21, 94, 125 Pflimlin, Pierre xi, 104, 159–161, 163, 164, 177, 178, 189 Phéline, Christian 126 Philippe, Paul-Pierre 129, 147 Pierre, abbé (alias Henri Antoine Grouès) 118 Pinay, Antoine 104, 113, 161, 164, 177, 189 Pinier, Paul Pierre 122, 131, 145, 148, 150, 156, 183 Pinto, João Carlos 30, 48 Pinto, Roger 192 Pius XI pope (Achille Ratti) 4, 17, 24, 29, 30, 45, 70 Pius XII pope (Eugenio Pacelli) x, 1, 4, 18, 24, 30, 36, 38, 39, 45, 46, 58, 59, 64, 66, 68, 70, 71, 75, 86, 89–101, 104, 107, 127, 128, 142, 143, 145, 161, 166, 181, 185–187, 194 Pirotte, Jean 3, 21 Pizzardo, Giuseppe 102, 147 Platon, Charles 46 Pleven, René 34, 40, 41 Poissonnier, Charles-André 18 Pollard, John 4, 21 Pompidou, Georges 168 Pop, Sever 44 Poujade, Pierre 128 Pouwels, Randall L. 23 Prévot, Maryvonne 105, 126 Prouvost, Henri 183 Prudhomme, Claude 2, 3, 5, 22 Quaroni, Pietro 136 Quemeneur, Tramor 117, 126 Quilici, François 55 Rabier, Maurice 55 Rago, Michele 148 Rahal, Malika 95, 126

Ramadier, Paul 55–58, 68 Ray, Marie-Christine 87, 92 Regoli, Roberto 21 Remaoun, Hassan 94, 126 Rémond, René 125 Renault, François 6, 22 Riccardi, Andrea 71, 92, 93 Richaud, Paul-Marie-André 145 Riché, Pierre 101, 126 Rioux, Jean-Pierre 113, 115, 125, 126, 152, 193, 196 Rivet, Daniel 5, 22, 122 Rivlin, Benjamin 89 Rocard, Michel 171 Roche, Anne 10, 22 Roche, Georges 155, 156 Rodhain, Jean 79, 80, 91, 173, 174, 178 Rosselli, Carlo 167 Rosselli, Nello 167 Rousso, Henri 28, 48 Rubinacci, Roberto 167 Rudelle, Odile 55, 69 Ruggeri, Giuseppe 21 Saaïdia, Oissila 5, 6, 7, 15, 16, 22, 44, 128, 151 Sahia Cherchari, Mohamed 14, 22 Said, Edward W. 188, 196 Sainclivier, Jacqueline 69 Salan, Raoul 160, 162 Salazar, António de Oliveira 24, 30, 182, 193 Saliège, Jules-Géraud 101, 121 Samorè, Antonio 156, 191, 195 Sanson, Henri s.j. 10 Sar, Alioune 82, 93 Sarraut, Albert 8, 18, 179 Sauge, Georges 165, 167 Saul, Samir 139, 151 Scherb, Jean 46 Schlegel, Jean-Louis 124 Schnapper, Dominique 14, 22 Schneiter, Pierre 116, 189 Schuman Robert 67, 74, 75, 104, 105, 113, 114, 120, 189 Schumann, Maurice 55 Scotto, Jean 77, 93, 133 Senghor, Léopold Sédar 114, 187, 192 Sergio, Marialuisa Lucia 4, 22, 30, 45, 48 Seridj, Mélinda 107, 126 Serralda, Vincent 121 Shepard, Todd 96, 106, 126 Siari Tengour, Ouanassa 21

Index 203 Sicard, Jeanne 40 Sigismondi, Pietro, 46, 141, 150 Simon, Pierre Henri 158 Simonato, Ruggero 71, 93 Singer, Claude 28, 48 Sirinelli, Jean-François 125, 128, 151, 179 Sorrel, Christian 19, 179 Soumille, Pierre 10, 22 Soustelle, Jacques 104, 106, 112, 113, 115, 120, 122, 126, 129, 160, 174, 190 Spindler, Marc 3, 20 Spiquel, Agnès 126 Stoler, Ann Laura 12, 22 Stora, Benjamin 5, 23, 87, 93, 113, 125, 126 Suhard, Emmanuel 62, 88 Tagliaferri, Maurizio 21 Tardini, Domenico 25, 45, 46, 54, 57, 67, 68, 76, 79, 80, 84, 89, 90, 91, 101, 108, 114–118, 121–124, 148, 149, 156, 161, 167, 171–173, 176–178, 194 Teissier, Henri 20, 87, 93 Teitgen, Pierre-Henri 62, 104, 105, 189, 193 Théas, Pierre-Marie 97, 98, 121 Thénault, Sylvie 5, 21, 23, 107, 126, 128, 130, 131, 151, 152, 179 Thiénard, Emile 37, 46 Thomas, Martin 105, 126, 170, 179 Tisserant, Eugène 24, 27, 35, 44, 45, 47, 61, 156, 157, 179, 184 Tosi, Luciano 149 Touili, Mohamed 127, 151

Toupin-Guyot, Claire 78, 79, 93 Tranvouez, Yvon 102, 126 Triaud, Jean-Louis 15, 16, 23, 184, 196 Turpin, Frédéric 50, 52, 69 Tyre, Stephen 106, 113, 126 Urban, Yerri 14, 15, 23 Valeri, Valerio 38, 39, 46 Valette, Jacques 41, 48 Venner, Fiammetta 165, 179 Verdier, Robert 105 Vergès, Françoise 14, 19 Vermeren, Pierre 6, 23 Veuillot, Pierre 79, 90, 167, 177 Vialatoux, Joseph 154, 155, 175, 176 Viard, Paul-Émile 52, 55 Vielle, Henri xi, 10, 26, 27, 37, 45 Villot, Jean 98, 100, 121, 154, 155, 167–169, 175, 176, 177, 193 Vinatier, Jean 86, 93 Vince, Natalya 96, 126 Vinogradov, Sergei 160 Viollette, Maurice 121 Voillaume, René 11, 78 Vuillemin, Pierre 156 Wall, Irwin M. 159, 179 Weil, Patrick 14, 23 Weygand, Maxime 28, 165, 166 Yacono, Xavier 41, 48 Zerbini, Laurick 5, 22 Zohra Guechi, Fatima 55, 69