The Algiers putsch

On the night of 7/8 November 1942, a few hours before American and British troops landed, the French underground rose in Algiers. Some four hundred poorly armed volunteers, mostly young civilians, occupied police stations, telephone exchanges, the prefecture, the main post office and the radio station without firing a shot, cut the command’s communications and arrested the most important commanders of the Vichy forces, among them General Alphonse Juin and Admiral François Darlan. The participants later called the action a “putsch”, a wry allusion to the date: on 8 November 1923 Adolf Hitler had tried to seize power in Munich.

It is sometimes claimed that the volunteers “neutralised” XIX Army Corps and the Vichy generals. This needs to be qualified. A few hundred civilians could not defeat a corps that numbered some twelve thousand men in the Algiers area. The conspirators paralysed its command and communications for a few hours, and when the Vichy units counter-attacked after dawn they had to give up most of the points they had seized. Their action nevertheless made the landing much easier, because in the critical hours of the night and early morning the French troops in Algiers received no orders at all.

The Algiers conspirators

After the defeat of 1940, Algeria, formally part of France, was subject to the Vichy government and its laws. These struck above all at the Algerian Jews. On 7 October 1940 the Minister of the Interior, Marcel Peyrouton, repealed the Crémieux Decree of 1870, which had given them French citizenship. More than a hundred thousand people ceased overnight to be citizens and found themselves in the position of “natives”. Jews were removed from public office, the army and the professions, and the number of Jewish pupils in state schools was drastically limited. Among the French settlers, the pieds-noirs, Pétainist and collaborationist sentiment was strong, and Joseph Darnand’s paramilitary Service d’ordre légionnaire (SOL) and the followers of Jacques Doriot were also active there.

As early as the autumn of 1940 José Aboulker, a medical student and the son of a well-known Algiers surgeon, began gathering a group of opponents of Vichy, while his cousin Roger Carcassonne did the same in Oran. They soon came into contact with Henri d’Astier de La Vigerie, a monarchist and former officer who linked various conspiratorial circles. Together with the industrialist Jacques Lemaigre Dubreuil, his former secretary Jean Rigault, the diplomat Jacques Tarbé de Saint-Hardouin and Colonel Alphonse Van Hecke, head of the Chantiers de la Jeunesse in Africa, d’Astier belonged to the so-called Group of Five, which kept in touch with the American diplomat Robert Murphy and General Henri Giraud. The military backbone of the conspiracy was General Charles Mast, a divisional commander in Algiers, and in the city itself Colonel Germain Jousse, the garrison commander.

The conspirators took part in the secret meeting with General Mark Clark near Cherchell in October. According to French accounts, they undertook there to seize Algiers and paralyse its defences for at least two hours before the landing. The Allies were to supply them with weapons; there was talk of 750 Sten sub-machine guns. The weapons never arrived, because the vessel that was to land them failed to reach the agreed spot. The volunteers had to make do with old Lebel rifles hidden from the armistice commissions. For that reason, of the nearly eight hundred men expected, only about four hundred turned up at the assembly points that night.

The night of 7/8 November

The plan was simple and audacious. In the event of a landing, the Vichy authorities had a plan for maintaining order under which strategic points in the city were to be occupied by volunteers wearing “VP” armbands (Volontaires de Place). Colonel Jousse issued these armbands to the conspirators, and their leaders, in the uniforms of reserve officers and NCOs, carried orders signed by General Mast or by Jousse himself. At about half past one in the morning groups of volunteers relieved the guards at barracks, telephone exchanges, police stations, the main post office, the Governor-General’s headquarters, the prefecture and the Radio Alger station. The sentries handed over their posts without objection. Only the Admiralty could not be taken, for want of men. José Aboulker, then twenty-two, set up his post in the central police station and directed the whole operation from there by telephone. Meanwhile policemen from the group of Commissioner André Achiary were detaining known collaborators.

A group of pupils from the lycée at Ben Aknoun, led by a reserve officer cadet, Bernard Pauphilet, surrounded the Villa des Oliviers, the residence of General Juin, commander of the land forces in North Africa. At around one in the morning Murphy arrived there with a message from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Woken from sleep, Juin learned that the Americans would begin landing in a few hours (Murphy, as he himself recalled, deliberately exaggerated and spoke of half a million men), and heard a request that the French army receive them as friends. He replied that if the decision were his, he might agree, but his superior, Admiral Darlan, was in the city.

Darlan’s presence in Algiers was an accident that no one had foreseen. The commander-in-chief of the Vichy armed forces and the designated successor of Marshal Philippe Pétain had flown in a few days earlier to see his son Alain, who had contracted polio and was lying in hospital in an iron lung. Juin summoned him to the villa by telephone, and the conspirators let the admiral in. Darlan flew into a rage. According to Murphy’s memoirs, he said that he had long known the British were stupid, but had thought the Americans more sensible. He refused. Soon Henri d’Astier appeared and declared both commanders under arrest. Murphy nevertheless allowed Darlan to send a message to the Admiralty. According to French accounts, the conspirators intercepted the first message, but the second got through, and in it Darlan reported the situation to Vichy via the Admiralty.

The Vichy counter-attack

The conspirators were supposed to hold the city for two hours. Meanwhile the landing on the beaches near Algiers was dragging on, boats were losing their way, and the commander of the landing force, Major General Charles Ryder, with few men and no vehicles, did not move on the city at once. Nor did the Allies really believe that a handful of civilians actually controlled Algiers. At about three in the morning gunfire broke out in the harbour: two British destroyers were trying to land troops in the port, and the Admiralty battery opened fire on them. The shooting woke the city and the French officers.

The head of General Juin’s private office (chef de cabinet), Major Dorange, alarmed at the sight of armed civilians outside headquarters, alerted the Garde Mobile. Its commander, Colonel Zwinglin, arrived with a squadron at the Villa des Oliviers at about half past five. The pupils, who had orders not to shed French blood, offered no resistance. Juin and Darlan were freed, and Juin moved his command post to Fort l’Empereur and ordered that the first priority be to retake the points seized by the volunteers. The Garde Mobile, the armoured cars of the 5th Chasseurs d’Afrique and Senegalese tirailleurs went into action. Resistance was token. The volunteers, obeying their orders, did not want to fire on Frenchmen and tried only to spin out negotiations for as long as possible.

Outside the main post office Lieutenant Jean Dreyfus rejected a call to surrender and urged a Vichy officer to rejoin the fight against the Germans. As he turned away, an NCO of the 5th Chasseurs d’Afrique shot him in the back. Dreyfus was killed. Captain Alfred Pillafort, who had held the headquarters of XIX Corps for several hours and then, with Aboulker, set up roadblocks in the streets, was mortally wounded in the afternoon in an exchange of fire with Colonel Jacquin, who was killed on the spot; Pillafort died two days later. At the radio station José’s cousin, Dr Raphaël Aboulker, read out a speech by Giraud, who at the time was still sitting in Gibraltar. The appeal, “One aim – victory”, did not have the effect the Allies had hoped for. Giraud’s name did not carry away the officers of the Army of Africa.

By early afternoon the Vichy troops had retaken most of the points seized, and many volunteers captured near the Admiralty were thrown into the cells. No one, however, attempted to storm the central police station, and Aboulker held it until the evening. The Vichy officials detained by the conspirators, among them the secretary-general of the Governor-General’s administration, remained in the cells until the end of the day.

The ceasefire in Algiers

The hours that Vichy lost in recapturing offices from civilians were gained by the Allies. While Juin’s troops were busy with the volunteers, the Americans took Maison Blanche airfield without a fight, and in the afternoon surrounded Algiers from the hills. Juin and Darlan, convinced that the forces of the conspirators and the Allies were much larger than they really were, judged further fighting hopeless. In the evening Darlan authorised Juin to negotiate, and according to the US official history, at about 6.40 p.m. Juin agreed with General Ryder on a ceasefire in the city. Only then did the volunteers leave the central police station, having first released their prisoners.

The ceasefire covered only Algiers. At Oran and in Morocco the French fought on, and Darlan and Juin, although in Allied hands, delayed for two more days before issuing an order for the whole of North Africa. The negotiations with them were conducted by Major General Mark Clark, who flew into Algiers on 9 November, the same day as Giraud.

Place in the war

The Algiers putsch was one of the few instances in which a resistance movement took control of a large city for several hours, and it helped ensure that the landing near Algiers met almost no resistance and that the Allies obtained an intact airfield at once and, after the ceasefire, a port. Its significance is variously assessed. French historians such as Christine Levisse-Touzé, and the participants themselves, stress that it paralysed the command of XIX Corps in the most important hours. American accounts of the operation often passed over it or reduced it to an episode. At the same time, the fact that Darlan and Juin were caught by surprise in Algiers meant that the Allies held a man whose order could end the fighting throughout French Africa.

For the conspirators themselves victory proved bitter. The Allies, who needed the army’s obedience, came to terms with Darlan, who kept his power and the whole of Vichy’s legislation, including its anti-Jewish laws. After Darlan’s assassination on Christmas Eve 1942, the new authorities headed by Giraud had José Aboulker and some twenty other underground activists arrested, accusing them of involvement in the killing. They were released only at the beginning of 1943, and Aboulker made his way to London to join General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French. The Crémieux Decree was restored only in the autumn of 1943. The part played by Algerian Jews, who according to French studies made up about two-thirds of the participants in the putsch, long remained in the shadows, although Aboulker himself was awarded the Order of Liberation.

For the Allies the night of 8 November was their first lesson in French politics in Africa. It turned out that Giraud’s name would not carry the army with it, and that the only man the officers would obey was a Vichy admiral. From this grew the deal with Darlan, which brought the Allies a swift end to the fighting but also a sharp political dispute, and which weighed on Washington’s and London’s relations with de Gaulle until the end of the war.