Vol. 79/No. 46      December 21, 2015

 
(Books of the Month column)

‘The cause of the Algerian people is
the cause of all free men’

 

Reprinted here is the “Declaration Concerning the Right of Insubordination in the Algerian War,” known as the “Manifesto of the 121.” It was drafted in 1960 by the surrealist group in France and signed by 121 artists, writers and intellectuals. It is contained in What is Surrealism? by André Breton, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month in December. Breton (1896-1966), founder and leader of the surrealist movement, considered himself a revolutionary, a supporter of the Algerian struggle for independence and was a fierce opponent of both capitalist and Stalinist censorship of art.

The Algerian Revolution of 1954-65 was one of the most powerful of the anti-colonial struggles that swept Asia and Africa after World War II, winning independence from brutal French rule and the establishment of a workers and farmers government, headed by Ahmed Ben Bella and the National Liberation Front. The manifesto was banned in France. It was published in English by the International Socialist Review, distributed by the Socialist Workers Party. Copyright © 1978. Reprinted by permission of Pathfinder Press.

An important movement is developing and spreading in France. It is necessary that the public, both here and abroad, learn more about this movement at a time when the new turning point in the Algerian war must help us to see, rather than forget, the full extent of the crisis which began six years ago.

Increasing numbers of Frenchmen are being harassed, imprisoned and condemned for refusing to participate in this war, or perhaps for aiding Algerian fighters. Their reasons, which are misrepresented by their opponents and even glossed over by the very people whose duty it is to defend them, are generally misunderstood. But it is not enough to say that this resistance to public authority commands respect. This protest by men whose sense of honour and concept of truth are outraged — its meaning transcends the circumstances from which it arose. Whatever the outcome of events, it is important to recall it.

For the Algerians, the struggle, whether by military or diplomatic means, is unequivocal; it is a war of national independence. But what kind of war is it for the French? It is not a foreign war. French territory has never been threatened. More than that, this war is waged against men who the State pretends are French but who are fighting for the express purpose of ceasing to be French. It is not even sufficient to say that this is a war of conquest, an imperialist war accompanied by race prejudice. This is true of any war; the ambiguity persists.

Actually the State, by a decision which in itself is a fundamental abuse, has drafted the entire annual quota of citizens into the military service for the sole purpose of waging what it has termed a police action against an oppressed people — a people whose only reason for revolting was a desire for fundamental dignity, a desire for recognition as an independent people.

The Algerian war — which is neither a war of conquest, nor a war of ‘national defence’, nor a civil war — has gradually become an operation belonging to and controlled by the army and a caste which refuses to give in to an uprising which even the civil authorities, recognising the collapse of colonial empires, seem willing to admit.

Today it is principally by the army’s insistence that this criminal, absurd struggle continues. This army, given a political role by several of its highest-ranking members, sometimes acting openly and violently in complete illegality, betraying the trust and purpose invested in it by the country, compromises and runs the risk of corrupting the nation itself by compelling citizens serving under its orders to become accomplices of factious or degrading operations. Is it necessary to recall that, fifteen years after the destruction of the Hitlerian order, French militarism, as a result of the demands of such a war, has succeeded in restoring torture and making it once again an institution in Europe?

  ❖  

These are the circumstances that have led many Frenchmen to reassess the meaning of values and traditional obligations. What is civic responsibility when, in certain circumstances, it becomes shameful submission? Are there not instances when the refusal to serve is a sacred duty; when ‘treason’ means courageous respect for the truth? And when the army, by the will of those who use it as an instrument of racial or ideological domination, declares itself in a state of open or latent revolt against democratic institutions, does not the revolt against the army take on new meaning?

The question of conscience was raised as soon as the war began. As the war drags on, it is normal that the question of conscience should be resolved concretely by an increasing number of acts of insubordination and desertion, as well as protection and help to the Algerian fighters. Free movements have grown up outside the framework of any official parties, without their help and, finally, in spite of their disavowal. Once again, independently of any pre-existing groups or slogans, a resistance movement is born, by a spontaneous awakening; a movement that improvises its actions and methods of struggle in accordance with a new situation, the real meaning and demands of which the political groups and opinionated newspapers have tacitly agreed to ignore, either from apathy or doctrinal timidity or from nationalistic or moral prejudices.

The undersigned, considering that each person must speak out about actions which it is henceforth impossible to pass off as minor, isolated news items; considering that they themselves, working individually and according to their means, are bound to act, not to advise others who are faced with these grave problems and who must make their own decisions, but to ask those who judge them not to be deceived by the ambiguity of words and values, declare:

—We respect and consider justified the refusal to take arms against the Algerian people.

—We respect and consider justified the conduct of the Frenchmen who consider it their duty to help and protect the oppressed Algerians in the name of the French people.

—The cause of the Algerian people, who are making a decisive contribution to the destruction of the colonial system, is the cause of all free men.  
 
 
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