Ontological security: An overview

Ontological security was first developed in psychology in the 1960s by Ronald Laing and in sociology by Anthony Giddens, before entering IR scholarship in the 2000s. IR scholars have defined and used ontological security differently, resulting in a lack of conceptual clarity.

Early IR scholarship depended disproportionately on Giddens – for whom the self and identity were essentially indistinguishable, unlike Laing – thus resulting in a literature that reduced ontological security to the security of one’s identity.Footnote ⁹ While early IR works drew a sharp contrast between ontological security and physical security, recent IR works have challenged this body/mind distinction and the conflation of the self and identity, undermining our understanding of how identity stability/change can impact an actor’s ontological security. Instead, as Nina Krickel-Choi observes, we should examine actors’ security of ‘self-in-the-body’ – how our psychological and physical senses of security are intertwined and partially mutually constitutive.Footnote ¹⁰ Algeria had intertwined physical and psychological stakes for France, underlining the need to look past a Giddensian view of ontological security. Ontological security may still be a state of mental stability based on a perception of continuity in life supported by routinised behaviours and narratives. Still, those behaviours and narratives depend on feeling safe in one’s body and environment. Territory constitutes the physical body of states. Thus, when parts of a state’s territory – functionally limbs of the body – erupt in a way that upsets narrative and behavioural stability, physical security threats become ontological security threats.

In addition to disagreeing about what constitutes ontological security, scholars agree that the stability of a state’s sense of self matters but disagree regarding in what contexts and for whom it matters. Brent Steele suggests that states might choose to avoid conflict that would be materially beneficial but irreconcilable with their autobiographical narratives.Footnote ¹¹ In contrast, Jennifer Mitzen and Bahar Rumelili argue that states might become attached to conflict, leading them to continue conflicts with no material benefit.Footnote ¹² (The case of Algeria comes closer to Steele’s vision.) There is also divergence about whether ontological security is externally (internationally) or internally (domestically) derived.Footnote ¹³ Some scholars take a middle approach, examining discrepancies between international norms of state behaviour and domestic narratives that push states to break those international norms.Footnote ¹⁴ This distinction results from disagreements about the source of ontological insecurity, which is the opposite of ontological security.Footnote ¹⁵ Domestic perspectives emphasise shame that destabilises a country’s sense of self, constraining foreign policy choices.Footnote ¹⁶ On the other hand, more internationally focused accounts underscore anxiety about change in relationships.Footnote ¹⁷ Additionally, there is the question of whose ontological security is at stake. Some suggest that leaders respond to their internal understandings of the nation.Footnote ¹⁸ In contrast, others suggest that political leaders selectively activate narratives to fit their goals, indicating that the general public’s ontological security is at stake.Footnote ¹⁹ These perspectives all have validity: France’s ontological security crisis was domestically and internationally derived, and the crisis was defined both by political actors and citizens responding to their understandings of French history and identity, but also by the deft manipulation of narratives by de Gaulle to make change appear like continuity. Because of the multifaceted nature of France’s ontological security crisis, I examine ontological security as a collective state of being belonging to a national self comprised of members of the national community – a point I elaborate on in the next section. (By ‘ontological security crisis’, I refer to a situation causing actors to experience ontological insecurity, which is functionally equivalent to what other scholars call ‘critical situations’.)

The recent shift towards anxiety in IR Ontological Security Studies has placed it in greater conversation with its existentialist-phenomenological roots.Footnote ²⁰ Scholars disagree about whether the anxiety underlying ontological insecurity is normal or extraordinary and, thus, whether ontological security is achievable.Footnote ²¹ Some argue that actors can never achieve ontological security.Footnote ²² Others correctly point out that making ontological insecurity a permanent state reduces its analytical utility and conceptual sharpness.Footnote ²³ Another problem of conflating anxiety and ontological insecurity is that if ontological insecurity is the opposite of ontological security, anxiety has no apparent opposite because all individuals face some degree of anxiety at any given point. Nina Krickel-Choi helpfully argues that ontological security is a question of degree – anxiety is always present, but existential anxiety is the threshold for ontological insecurity.Footnote ²⁴ Filip Ejdus echoes this view, arguing that ‘critical situations’ erode ontological security, ‘remov[ing] the protective cocoon created by routines and move fundamental questions, previously taken for granted, into the realm of discursive consciousness’ – even if actors flee from reckoning with those fundamental questions.Footnote ²⁵ As the Algerian War demonstrates, decolonisation is an example of such a critical situation, confronting French society with questions it did not want to answer. Algeria also demonstrates that ontological security is achievable and is perceived by actors as such.

There is also a question of how states respond to this anxiety. Ontological insecurity can generate responses ranging from reinventing autobiographical narratives to massive behavioural changes or reinforcing self-destructive behaviours.Footnote ²⁶ And if behaviours/identities are not immutable or equivalent to the self, actors should be able to pivot their behaviours/identities to re-establish ontological security – even in circumstances of existential anxiety.

This raises the question of how identity shifts help resolve ontological insecurity. Other scholars observe that identities can change when doing so contributes to the stability of the self,Footnote ²⁷ providing the potential basis for renewal.Footnote ²⁸ Moreover, the notion that states are trapped in an either/or situation where they either maintain existing behaviours/identities or collapse into chaos is simplistic. It also defies empirical observation, such as when the United States went from isolationism to interventionism in the 20th century without its sense of self crumbling. John Cash correctly argues that ‘there are more options available, contained within the complexity of a hybrid cultural repertoire that states draw upon to organize their identities’.Footnote ²⁹ Recent comparative politics scholarship on national identity shares this perspective.Footnote ³⁰ As we will see, France’s hybrid cultural repertoire provided the language needed to narrate its departure from Algeria.

Finally, we need to interrogate this hybridity of identities more thoroughly. Some early IR ontological security scholarship treated state identities as monolithic and not relationally defined.Footnote ³¹ However, Giddens believed that subjectivity emerges from intersubjectivity,Footnote ³² and some recent works emphasise the intersubjective formation of identities (i.e. multiple communities/individuals’ identities are defined in relation to one another), particularly in post-colonial contexts.Footnote ³³ State identities, far from monolithic, are characterised by two types of hybridity: different internal strands and intersubjective definition. My theoretical contribution is to apply ontological security to the act of decolonisation itself, where colonial powers must redefine their relationship to the peoples they ruled – and redefine themselves in the process.

Methodology: Evaluating France’s ontological security crisis

My analysis of the end of French Algeria primarily mixes three kinds of primary sources – private discussions of Charles de Gaulle, public speeches and writings by de Gaulle and other prominent political figures (primarily on the French side but with some Algerian sources), and some public opinion polling data from the period – as well as the extensive secondary literature on the Algerian War. For primary sources, I focus on sources written during or just after the war (1954–62) to prioritise examining how actors lived and experienced the war as it was happening. I have also tried to mix various perspectives (the French right and left, Algerian revolutionaries, and ordinary citizens without firm ideological commitments) to provide an appraisal as multidimensional as possible of how the war looked from different perspectives. I particularly focus on influential politicians and prominent intellectuals (such as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre) to show how France’s exit from Algeria was narrated to the broader public. Additionally, I draw on some of de Gaulle’s private conversations – the content of which was only revealed decades after the war – to see how de Gaulle was motivated by his values and principles amid his careful public efforts to project continuity and stability to an anxious public. Finally, by including the voices of Algerian revolutionaries, we can better understand how the intersubjective definition of identities in a colonial context impacted France’s pursuit of ontological security, which involved a substantial degree of erasure.

It is important to note that while discussing France’s ontological security, I treat France as a collective – but not unitary – actor. I focus on France’s collective sense of self that resulted from a dialogue between different parts of French society and Algerians seeking independence. In this, I borrow from understandings of the construction of narratives and senses of self from scholarship on nationalism. National senses of self are ‘dialectically engendered’ between societies and within them.Footnote ³⁴ Within societies, collective reactions to historical events paradoxically happen at the individual level. As Benedict Anderson observes, the simultaneous consumption of news in the modern world creates a ‘mass ceremony … performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull’.Footnote ³⁵ French society was collectively meditating on what Algeria meant for France as a whole, but this meditation was conducted by individuals – ordinary citizens, soldiers, public intellectuals, and politicians. I examine the contours and content of that meditation through the lens of what I call narrative strands. This approach allows me to examine ontological security – traditionally associated with individual actors or states seen as monolithic wholes – as belonging to a collective national self.

Narrative strands, decolonisation, and the appearance of continuity

At critical historical junctures, I argue that states can maintain ontological security by reweaving ‘narrative strands’ to project continuity despite drastic changes in state identities and behaviours. Moreover, preserving those narrative strands is essential to maintaining a consistent sense of self, and thus critical situations threatening their integrity – such as the Algerian War and phenomena like decolonisation more broadly – can force states to change their role-identities and behaviour drastically.

‘Narrative strands’ is the term I use to separate two different forms of identification: timeless characteristics (narrative strands) and (theoretically) temporary role-identities. The difference between them is intuitive – we inhabit changing role-identities over our lives (father, daughter, student, boss, friend) that come and go even as a stable sense of self continues. As the name suggests, narrative strands link these disparate parts together across time, articulating a coherent story. The stability of our sense of self thus comes from our ability to assign attributes (characteristics, passions) that describe our behaviour in each of these roles and distinguish us from others. Hence, narrative strands mentally link evolving identities, offering a consistent sense of self and a frame that stabilises our perception of reality.Footnote ³⁶

My idea of narrative strands derives from two insights in the comparative politics literature on the construction of national identity. First, historical events have no inherent meaning beyond those we ascribe to them, and many historically crucial events could have easily gone the other way. However, narratives of nationhood can absorb and give meaning to these accidents of historical contingency, transforming ‘fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning’.Footnote ³⁷ Specific role-identities are often accidents of fate, but national narratives stretching back into the mists of time provide psychological stability by making those accidents seem like destiny. This is achieved by ascribing to the nation ‘timeless’ characteristics (France as a beacon of progress, for instance) that link together various role-identities. But the function of narrative strands is not merely retrospective linkage: by tracing the logic and meaning of a country’s history, they give meaning and context to choices the country faces in the present – such as whether France should stay in Algeria or leave – and provide a language in which policy changes can be narrated as continuity.Footnote ³⁸ Additionally, scholarship on national identity emphasises the varying degrees to which countries have multiple national narratives that are in dialogue but cannot be subsumed into one another.Footnote ³⁹ I use the term ‘narrative strands’ to emphasise the multiplicity of national narratives and how they serve a linking/framing function across time.

The inherent malleability of national senses of self and the multiplicity of interconnected narratives is relevant for ontological security because the self is not fixed but must orient itself in a world it does not control.Footnote ⁴⁰ Potential disorientation is especially likely with a shift as drastic as decolonisation, which changed how peoples see themselves and relate to one another to a degree rarely seen in human history.

Decolonisation is an example of a critical situation because it disrupts established routines of behaviour, eliminates a major state role-identity, and challenges colonial powers to redefine their place in the world and, thus, their understanding of themselves. Giddens recognised that our sense of self is formed intersubjectively,Footnote ⁴¹ and some scholars warn that our autobiographical narratives can marginalise others and reinforce power dynamics based on an unfavourable comparison with others, making the aspiration to ontological security potentially problematic.Footnote ⁴² Other scholars observe that decolonisation is a particularly potent example of a process leading to erasure and deliberate forgetting in France and other former colonial powers – reinforcing dynamics of inequality even as colonised peoples gained freedom.Footnote ⁴³ Decolonisation thus provides a powerful example of the complexities of maintaining/pursuing ontological security and the costs thereof.

The argument: Ontological security and France’s exit from Algeria

Faced with a revolt that confronted French society with the violent reality of colonial domination in a way that ordinary French citizens had been able to avoid until then, France chose to withdraw in part to secure its ontological security. For over a century in France, there was a consensus in favour of French imperialism supported from the perspective of two narrative strands of French nationalism: France as a white and Catholic country and France as a missionary of universal human rights. This consensus allowed for a remarkable consistency in French colonial policy given the volatility of French domestic politics, which witnessed three different monarchies, four republics, and one fascist dictatorship during the 132 years of French Algeria.

This consensus shattered during the Algerian War of Independence, and the only way to reunite the ethnic and universal visions of French identity was to leave Algeria. France shed its role-identity as a colonial power while maintaining its ontological security by repurposing its liberal-universal and Catholic-European narrative strands in favour of decolonisation. Some in France, such as Sartre,Footnote ⁴⁴ wanted to work towards the mutual recognition that Frantz Fanon, the Martinican Marxist psychiatrist and philosopher who joined the Algerian independence struggle, thought to be the true path towards universal liberation.Footnote ⁴⁵ However, France as a whole did not want to engage in such introspection – it chose a path of erasure and forgetting, which allowed it to move on with minimal psychological cost.Footnote ⁴⁶

A frayed colonial consensus

The connection between white supremacy and colonialism is self-explanatory. But, as Raoul Girardet observes, there was also ‘a paradoxical but very real harmony’ between French colonialism and French liberal universalism.Footnote ⁴⁷ Nicolas Bancel and Pascal Blanchard also argue that colonialism ‘fit perfectly’ into French republican ideology, serving as a means to export French Enlightenment values.Footnote ⁴⁸ Although it seems ironic today, the French Human Rights League organised a ‘colonisation and human rights’ conference in 1931.Footnote ⁴⁹ Even French conservatives incorporated ideas about spreading Enlightenment values into their colonial visions.Footnote ⁵⁰

While very real, this overlap was not stable in the long term, meaning that colonialism favouring ontological security in the short term would undermine it in the long term. The liberal interpretation of colonialism was predicated on the empire’s eventual end once France’s civilising mission was over.Footnote ⁵¹ One French resident-general in Morocco compared France to the Roman Empire, which strove ‘to allow peoples to flourish and to call the barbarians they administered to civilisation and a full life’. He saw it as inevitable ‘that in the not-too-distant future, an evolved, civilised, and self-sustaining North Africa’ would become independent.Footnote ⁵² Martin Evans notes that ‘French rule in French Algeria [was not] ideologically unified. Ideas of the inherent inequality of races coexisted with others based upon paternalist notions of the protection of the indigenous people’, followed by a reformism that sought to make Algerian Muslims full French citizens starting in the late 1920s.Footnote ⁵³ Regardless of whether the ultimate destination would be French citizenship or independence, liberal colonialism inherently embraced the idea that once France’s mission was completed, colonial subjects would become equal to ethnically European French, either as French citizens or citizens of their own countries.

Even in the interwar period, the ethnocultural and liberal-universal visions of French identity started pulling apart, creating cracks that split wide open in the 1950s. One liberal governor-general of Algeria, Maurice Viollette, was driven from office by pieds-noirs outraged at his plan to expand French citizenship to Algerian Muslim elites. Upon leaving Algeria, he warned his opponents, ‘By your own fault, the natives of Algeria, undoubtedly, do not yet have a country [patrie]: they are searching for one. They are asking you to be part of the French nation. Give it to them quickly, or, failing that, they will make another nation.’Footnote ⁵⁴ Viollette’s fall was perhaps inevitable given that race was critical to how the French state institutionalised democracy and human rights, just as in the United States.Footnote ⁵⁵ In practice, French universalism was not that universal.

However, the contradictions of colonial rule do not constitute an ontological security crisis by themselves. And indeed, none of France’s other colonial wars of independence sparked crises of ontological insecurity. The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) was largely hidden from public view before the age of mass communication, and French liberalism had yet to take hold on both the French left and right. Additionally, the Haitian Revolt happened concurrently with the French Revolution and its aftermath, and the First French Republic helped the slave revolt against the royalist landowners in Haiti. Other rebellions, such as in Indochina, also largely escaped public attention. Far away and with no French settler presence, Indochina felt more like a genuinely foreign war than Algeria. Additionally, French soldiers in Indochina were predominantly from other French colonies, rather than white ethnic French who could relay what they saw to family members back home. Heavy mediatisation and the presence of massive amounts of metropolitan French soldiers made Algeria a ‘guerre d’opinion’ in a way that does not apply to other French colonial conflicts. Unlike previous wars, French public opinion could not look away, which made Algeria more destabilising.Footnote ⁵⁶ Unlike Indochina, France objectively won the Algerian War militarily but left of its own accord.Footnote ⁵⁷ It did so partly because of Algeria’s threat to French ontological security.

The start of France’s ontological security crisis

When conflict broke out in 1954, the FLN represented a minuscule segment of Algerian society due to poverty, illiteracy, and demobilisation. Knowing a conventional war against France was impossible, the FLN adopted a strategy of terrorist attacks to goad the French military into lashing out with indiscriminate violence.Footnote ⁵⁸ This violence united Algerian Arabs and forced France to face the brutality of colonial domination.Footnote ⁵⁹ The FLN calculated that the French response would be middling: neither ethnically cleansing Algerians nor acting with such restraint that they would not ultimately alienate Algerians and domestic/international public opinion.Footnote ⁶⁰ By goading France to overreact, the FLN gained the upper hand despite conventional political-military weakness.Footnote ⁶¹ As David Fromkin notes: ‘Even though the FLN had written the script, the French, with suicidal logic, went ahead to play the role for which they had been cast.’Footnote ⁶²

The FLN – many of whose leading members once believed in the promise of a universal, liberal France only to confront the wall of institutionalised racism – was intent on making France reckon with its bad faith in Algeria. One high-ranking FLN official wrote that ‘there were two Frances, and one of them had profoundly impacted me, allowing me to denounce the other one better’.Footnote ⁶³ Bad faith – a key concept in existentialism developed by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre – is ‘pretending to oneself that one is not “in” what one is doing’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The French conscience had enjoyed a period of stability after the Second World War precisely because it could separate itself from the reality of colonial domination. The FLN wanted to end that and, in so doing, shake France’s sense of self.Footnote ⁶⁵

The situation was different for most pieds-noirs, who saw the reality of colonial domination daily. Colonialism ensnared coloniser and colonised alike in their attempts to define themselves.Footnote ⁶⁶ The reality of colonial domination meant that pieds-noirs had substantially less attachment to French liberalism because their place in Algerian society depended on ruling over the native Muslim Arab-Berber majority, something incompatible with French liberal universalism. Frantz Fanon notes that the few Europeans in Algeria who sincerely argued for multicultural democracy and equal citizenships were labelled as ‘Arabs’ by other pieds-noirs – a sign that the racial dynamics of colonialism ultimately forced everyone into dichotomous categories.Footnote ⁶⁷ While Fanon acknowledged a sincere attachment to liberal democracy in metropolitan France, ‘in Algeria, democracy [was] inherently treason’ for the local European population.Footnote ⁶⁸ While France’s liberal-universal and European-Catholic narrative strands coexisted in Europe, the former largely disappeared in Algeria, leaving behind only European ethnonationalism. The two sides of the Mediterranean were on different wavelengths. Still, the situation was stable so long as metropolitan France was not forced to face its bad faith and complicity.

With the outbreak of war, metropolitan French public opinion crossed a threshold into the severe anxiety characteristic of ontological insecurity. Although metropolitan opinion had disregarded pied-noir excesses for over a century, suddenly, as Fanon noted, there was a ‘revolt that happen[ed] in French public opinion after each revelation about torture in Algeria’.Footnote ⁶⁹

The French military, frustrated by an elusive enemy, tortured many Algerians with blowtorches, partial drowning, and electric shocks, among other techniques. French military forces also indiscriminately bombed villages suspected of housing or aiding FLN militants. French forces forced entire villages to move from the mountains to the plains where they could be easily monitored, disrupting the economic and social balance in those communities and sowing even more seeds of resentment.Footnote ⁷⁰

Although most pieds-noirs had no issue with extreme violence to maintain control, the same was not true of many soldiers from metropolitan France who came to help suppress the insurgency. The military also relied extensively on reservists who, unlike some of the elite paratroopers, balked at what they saw and were made to do in Algeria.

France’s ontological security crisis began with these soldiers. A survey of over 500 regular soldiers who had served in Algeria showed that the soldiers were seven times as likely to sympathise with Arab Algerians than with European settlers.Footnote ⁷¹ Many arrived in Algeria with negative views about the Arab majority due to what they heard from French media and their officers. Still, after arrival, those views often turned into sympathy for exploited Algerian Muslims and antipathy towards the European population of Algeria, especially the wealthy grands colons. Footnote ⁷² Letters and testimony from the soldiers show widespread shame about French crimes. Raphaëlle Branche, France’s leading expert on torture during the Algerian War, notes that this shame expresses an ‘incapacity to give meaning’ to their actions and that ‘it was less about their relationship with others than with themselves’.Footnote ⁷³ Shame, of course, is an emotional manifestation of the existential anxiety associated with ontological insecurity.Footnote ⁷⁴

Many soldiers faced long-lasting psychological destabilisation because of their experiences in Algeria,Footnote ⁷⁵ with many feeling disorientation and shame that remained decades later.Footnote ⁷⁶ However, the impact of these accounts went beyond the soldiers: they brought their attitudes back to France and conveyed what they had seen in letters, helping to shift public opinion against the war.Footnote ⁷⁷ Many in France reacted with shame to reports emerging from Algeria that forced them to confront their bad faith: France’s sense of self did not match the French state’s actions in Algeria.Footnote ⁷⁸ Many soldiers joined the ranks of anti-war activists precisely because they wanted their actions to match their sense of self.Footnote ⁷⁹

Knowing that revelations would force French society to face its bad faith, the government tried unsuccessfully to cover up what was happening in Algeria. Government seizures of newspapers occurred 265 times in metropolitan France and 586 times in Algeria during the war to prevent the revelation of French misconduct.Footnote ⁸⁰ Many of the accounts profoundly impacted the public, including Simone de Beauvoir’s vivid account of the torture inflicted on the female Algerian militant Djamila Boupacha.Footnote ⁸¹

One representative example was Henri Alleg’s book La Question. Alleg, a communist imprisoned and tortured by the French military in Algeria, published a book about his experiences by smuggling chapters from his cell to his lawyers. The French government allowed the book’s publication only to seize thousands of copies shortly thereafter, but not before the book and news of its contents had spread throughout France.Footnote ⁸² The apparent ‘suicides’ of FLN leader Larbi Ben M’hidi and the pro-FLN lawyer Ali Boumendjel, who had many friends in Paris legal circles, shocked the conscience of France and created an enormous media backlash against the French military in Algeria.Footnote ⁸³

In a country still traumatised by the horrors of Nazi occupation, the fact that the French state committed many of the same crimes was a disorienting experience.Footnote ⁸⁴ Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that:

This view was not restricted to leftist intellectuals like Sartre: some soldiers in Algeria compared themselves to the SS in letters sent back home.Footnote ⁸⁶ An article appeared as early as 1955 in the political magazine France Observateur entitled ‘Your Gestapo in Algeria’.Footnote ⁸⁷ The Nazi comparisons were particularly responsible for undermining support for the war on the left, whose sense of self was based on unwavering opposition to fascism.Footnote ⁸⁸

However, rather than genuinely introspecting and grappling with the dynamics of colonial domination and how those dynamics were baked into the history of French republicanism, France pursued a path that would allow itself to maintain its ontological security. French public opinion thought the France of universal rights could not be responsible for the atrocities, but rather a rogue branch – the military – that the government could not control.Footnote ⁸⁹ Along with La Question, another bombshell book published about military excesses in Algeria was La Gangrène (1959), a collection of testimony from Algerians tortured by the military. The book explicitly framed the violence inflicted on Algerians by the French military as an aftereffect of a Nazi ‘pox’ – an infection introduced into the body that needed to be flushed out. Such a portrayal allowed Algeria to become a ‘gangrenous limb that, though rotted through, can still be amputated to heal the national body from a threatening infection’.Footnote ⁹⁰ The danger of this approach – and perhaps pursuing ontological security – is that it impeded ‘contemplating alternate genealogies of French state violence. Torture becomes visible as criminal precisely because it is a defect that can be imagined as alien to the French Republic.’Footnote ⁹¹ France needed to feel secure about itself, and that need became the start of a practice of erasure that continues today.Footnote ⁹²

This is where the binary choice between physical and ontological security, already challenged by recent works,Footnote ⁹³ shows its weakness. Algeria – legally as much a part of the French Republic as Bordeaux or Marseille – had become gangrenous. The only way the self-in-the-body could survive was to amputate France’s Algerian limb.

The diagnosis of gangrene, however, was not entirely wrong. Fanon had foreseen that the war would make untenable France’s internal contradictions (racist imperialism existing alongside strong democratic reflexes). He also foresaw that pied-noir and military hardliners would try to bring Algeria to France.Footnote ⁹⁴ While some pieds-noirs who hated Arabs suddenly embraced integration, Alistair Horne writes that ‘the pieds-noirs were never strictly honest, even to themselves, as to what they really wanted … it was not Algérie française … [but] a pied-noir Algeria, ranging between South Africa at its best and its worst, but under the umbrella of French protection’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The provisional president of Algeria during the war, Ferhat Abbas – who in his youth had believed in French democracy and the cause of Franco-Algerian integration – concurs with this judgement by citing a rare example of the honesty that Horne largely found missing among pieds-noirs. In his book La Nuit coloniale (The Colonial Night), he cites one pied-noir’s letter to the French newspaper L’Express asking, ‘Do I believe in democracy? **** your democracy! Your democracy makes me sick! You don’t see where this leads? Eight million dirty and illiterate rats that mock France … Just wait for our arrival from Algeria, which will happen soon if you continue ****ing with us … and you’ll see what we’ll do to your democracy.’Footnote ⁹⁶

This threat was no idle bluster. The first pied-noir/military threat to French democracy came in 1958 when part of the French military seized power in Algeria and invaded Corsica in a revolt against the French government, which the putschists saw as insufficiently committed to the war effort. In exchange for not invading mainland France, the putschists demanded the return to power of Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French forces in the Second World War. Fearing civil war, President René Coty appointed de Gaulle as prime minister. De Gaulle then drafted a new constitution, expanding executive powers and inaugurating the Fifth Republic, and became president. De Gaulle brought firm leadership to France, but not the kind the partisans of French Algeria envisioned.

French society and de Gaulle negotiate the crisis of ontological insecurity

By 1958, the FLN had succeeded in forcing France to look at the violent consequences of colonial domination, even if it could not force French public opinion to draw the correct conclusions about how that situation emerged in the first place. Still, it had made the role-identity of France as a colonial power untenable. Raymond Aron, the right-wing philosopher and editorialist for Le Figaro, France’s leading right-wing newspaper, wrote that ‘a country cannot be half-free, half-slave. If Algeria is integrated in a totalitarian way, the metropole will not continue to enjoy a democratic regime. The pieds-noirs, colonels, and ultras will have to go all the way. France itself will be governed by the methods used to hold French Algeria together.’Footnote ⁹⁷ At least on this one issue, the Black anti-colonial Marxist Fanon and a leading figure of white French conservatism agreed. Alain Savary, a future first secretary of the Parti socialiste (PS), also concurred.Footnote ⁹⁸

The status quo would thus have to end. But what would replace it? This is where France’s two narrative strands (liberal-universal and European-Catholic) appear to push towards massive changes. Without Algeria, France would be mostly just another continental European country, albeit one with a global cultural influence and a nuclear programme. However, with Algeria, France would no longer be a fundamentally Catholic and European country. Still, de Gaulle effectively distinguished between France’s various identities (such as being a colonial power) and its immutable, stable self, telling the public that France needed ‘an immense renewal. The question is how to accomplish this without France ceasing to be France’ – providing the appearance of stability despite a drastic shift.Footnote ⁹⁹

In public, the white blood cells of French republicanism mobilised against racial inequality and colonial violence, favouring integrating Algerian Muslims as full French citizens. In April 1956, a declaration appeared in Le Monde saying that French military victory would have no meaning unless France rebuilt Algeria based on actual political equality. ‘Who else, if not the country of human rights’, the statement asked, ‘can pave a humane path towards the future?’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The signatories were a curious group – two former governors-general of Algeria, a Catholic archbishop, a Second World War general who had initially worked for the Nazi collaborationist Vichy regime before defecting to the Allies, and the president of a major labour union, among others – demonstrating that the Algeria question partly transcended the traditional left–right cleavage in French politics.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Except for right-wing extremists in the military and reactionary members of the pied-noir community, France’s political class broadly agreed that the solution to Algeria must be liberal and democratic. Marc Lauriol, a conservative pied-noir member of the National Assembly from Algiers, claimed that ‘any valid long-term solution must satisfy a major imperative: offering Muslims a way to express their adherence to the presence and policies of France. This demand is essentially liberal.’Footnote ¹⁰² Ludovic Tron, a socialist senator, similarly emphasised that France’s road to salvation would involve restoring republican values. He wrote that ‘for many people, France is betraying its history and undermining its image [in Algeria]. Yet, one of its saving graces, its greatest strength perhaps, is this image of itself … Today, those people do not understand why [France] refuses what is asked of it in the name of the maxims that are its raison d’être.’Footnote ¹⁰³ Michel Debré, de Gaulle’s first prime minister (1958–62), echoed these comments, arguing that ‘French legitimacy in Algeria … is fundamentally established in view of eternal values because [France] alone is inspired by the will of human fraternity’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ (Prime Minister Debré also fretted about the Algeria War’s impact on its Western allies, who embraced decolonisation.)Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In public, De Gaulle agreed, declaring that in Algeria, there were only full French citizens (Français à part entière).Footnote ¹⁰⁶ From the perspective of ontological security, the striking thing about these statements is that they all paradoxically present a massive break with precedent (racialised citizenship laws and colonialism) as continuity with France’s past.

Still, under his initial public endorsement of equality and integration, de Gaulle doubted that Muslim Algerians preferred integration to independence.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ More importantly, regardless of what Muslim Algerians wanted, he did not favour integration. He wondered in private, ‘If all the Arabs and Berbers of Algeria were considered French, how could we stop them from coming to live in metropolitan France? My village would no longer be Colombey-Les-Deux-Églises [Colombey-The-Two-Churches] but Colombey-Les-Deux-Mosquées [Colombey-The-Two-Mosques]’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Even François Mitterrand, who later became the first socialist president of the Fifth Republic, asked, ‘What Frenchman would accept a parliament a fourth of whose members, or even a third, are Muslim?’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Aron wrote that ‘integration is neither a desirable nor realistic objective. All foreign observers wonder by what blend of ignorance, vanity, [and] mythologising so many French have given their heart to an enterprise even more unreasonable than grandiose.’Footnote ¹¹⁰

Beyond desirability, there was also the question of feasibility. Noting that Algerian Arabs and pieds-noirs were divided by culture, language, and religion, de Gaulle rhetorically asked, ‘You think that they have the feeling of a common country capable of overcoming racial, class, and religious divisions? You think that they really have the will to live together?’Footnote ¹¹¹ Moreover, ‘keeping the Algerian departments in France would cost us not only a grave moral prejudice in the world but also a ruinous effort … If Algeria remained French, we would have to ensure the same standard of living for the French and Algerians, which is beyond our reach.’Footnote ¹¹² (In 1953, the average individual income in Algeria was 22.5% of the average in metropolitan France.)Footnote ¹¹³ ‘Equality is nice’, he said, but ‘since we cannot offer them equality, it is best to give them liberty.’Footnote ¹¹⁴

These comments, made in private, were widely echoed in public across the political spectrum. Alain Savary, a future first secretary of the PS, made the same argument about true Franco-Algerian equality causing unacceptable damage to France’s standard of living. French public opinion did not have much sympathy for pied-noir oppression, but neither did it have much desire to lift Algerian Arabs out of poverty at the expense of their own standard of living.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Many conservatives concurred.Footnote ¹¹⁶

In the interim, however, de Gaulle’s government launched the Constantine Plan, an ambitious economic development project to raise wages in Algeria, build housing for one million people, expand educational access for Algerian Muslims, and institute a massive land redistribution programme. Muslims were also given greater opportunities to join the civil service and the military. The French government specifically framed the initiative as an attempt to live up to the country’s motto of liberté, égalité, fraternité.Footnote ¹¹⁷ But far from being a genuine attempt to integrate Algerian Muslims into the French nation, de Gaulle envisioned the Constantine Plan (along with his reforms giving Algerian Muslims equal civil and political rights) as a way of preparing Algeria for independence and allowing France to exit with its head held high. These efforts were meant to give Algeria a chance at a prosperous, democratic future – just not in France.Footnote ¹¹⁸ France’s liberal-universal and European-Catholic narrative strands were coming together in service of massive policy changes.

French public opinion polling shows that the evolution of these two narrative strands was pushing ordinary French voters towards Algerian independence, not just elites and intellectuals. In 1958, most French voters supported granting equal rights to Algerian Muslims (52 per cent versus 21 per cent), but a plurality thought that Algeria would ultimately have to become independent rather than remain in France (41 per cent versus 36 per cent).Footnote ¹¹⁹ Looking at how these results overlapped, only 26 per cent were in favour of both equal political rights for Algerian Muslims and for Algeria remaining in France, versus 41 per cent in favour of Algerian independence, with (44 per cent of those in favour of independence) or without (56 per cent) equal rights for Muslims in the interim. Another 10 per cent of voters favoured apartheid (against independence and equal rights for Muslims), while another 21 per cent were undecided on the question of independence.Footnote ¹²⁰ These results – which are from a year before de Gaulle publicly embraced Algerian self-determination – point out that while there was not a consensus about how best to resolve the Algerian question, there could be no consensus around full equality and Franco-Algerian unity (26 per cent in favour, and only 20 per cent firmly in favour) or around the status quo of maintaining French Algeria without political equality (10 per cent in favour, and only 5 per cent firmly in favour). The only remaining path was decolonisation, which would – as de Gaulle and his advisors were aware – reaffirm the principle of equality, save France money, and put France in line with a world that had moved away from colonialism towards universal self-determination. The question was how to redefine French identity away from being a colonial power in a way that still projected narrative stability and continuity.

Unstable identity, stable self: De Gaulle leads France out of Algeria

De Gaulle recognised that his task was to extract France from its Algerian quagmire. Even during the early period of his presidency, when he publicly embraced granting Algerians equal rights, he privately wondered:

In de Gaulle’s comments, we see both narrative strands – liberal-universal (France should never have exploited and oppressed Algerians) and European-Christian (we cannot have too many Arabs in France) – intertwined in favour of a drastic change in state identity. Moreover, de Gaulle privately conceded that ‘the Algerian nation has been born in blood. Nothing will stop it from existing today. The Muslim masses from Senegal to Indonesia want a sovereign Algeria. No force today can stifle a people that fights for its independence.’Footnote ¹²²

Here, we see de Gaulle confront the key challenge to maintaining a stable sense of self: we must orient ourselves in a changing world we do not control.Footnote ¹²³ The first dominoes of post–Second World War decolonisation in the late 1940s (India, Indonesia) had become a cascade. De Gaulle publicly acknowledged this challenge in a 1959 speech promoting global racial equality, claiming that ‘France needs to be an example, leading the movement of progress … France needs to adapt to its era [il faut que la France épouse son temps]’.Footnote ¹²⁴ De Gaulle was not alone in realising that France faced a critical situation and needed to reorient itself. Reacting to de Gaulle’s speech, the editor of Le Monde wrote that France’s ‘error today, common to a certain number of other nations, is to not understand … that, except by turning to terror, it is impossible to maintain a people under tutelage when others nearby regain their freedom’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Aron concurred, writing that ‘decadent nations are those that refuse to adapt to a changing world. Gravediggers of the nation are those who, under the pretext of preventing decadence, orient patriotism towards a dead end.’Footnote ¹²⁶ This is an observation with direct implications for ontological security: blind adherence to routines and pre-existing identities in the name of stability can undermine – rather than reinforce – ontological security.

Reorienting France meant ending France’s identity as a major colonial power. However, as Savary pointed out, the massive change that the end of French Algeria implied did not mean France would cease to be France. He observed that ‘France has gained a large global audience thanks in part to its revolutionary attempt to ensure equal individual political writes and also in part to its recognition and defence of the right of peoples to self-determination’.Footnote ¹²⁷ (De Gaulle and Prime Minister Debré also fretted about the impact of keeping Algeria on France’s image abroad, particularly among Western allies who fully embraced decolonisation.)Footnote ¹²⁸ Algerian independence would renew those credentials, making an unexpected volte-face – there was broad support across the political spectrum for preserving French Algeria in 1954 – seem like a natural development in the life of the French nation.

In a speech endorsing Algerian self-determination, de Gaulle framed the end of France’s status as a colonial power as one of a series of significant changes that France has gone through in its history: ‘France has gone through periods that required her to evolve throughout her life.’ Note that de Gaulle compares France to an individual here, possessing a life cycle with different phases marked by different role-identities. Still, these phases are connected by a continuous narrative logic. Referring to successive periods of social and political disruptions throughout French history that pushed the country in the direction of progress, de Gaulle underlined that in 1962, ‘the appearance of new states [and] the ideological rivalries of empires impose upon us, within ourselves and in our relations with others, an immense renewal. The question is how to accomplish this without France ceasing to be France. I repeat, this transformation entails inevitable tumult in rescuing the ship.’Footnote ¹²⁹ Here, we see de Gaulle’s fullest understanding of France’s ontological security challenge: how to drastically redefine France’s place in the world without sacrificing France’s stable sense of self. De Gaulle privately worried to his colleagues that, beyond the threat of civil war, ‘France will lose itself’ were he to fail.Footnote ¹³⁰

Preserving French greatness – its grandeur – was President de Gaulle’s overarching foreign policy objective.Footnote ¹³¹ Fortunately for French ontological security, de Gaulle’s grandeur did not depend on France adopting a particular role-identity and was highly adaptable to a changing environment.Footnote ¹³² Ultimately, de Gaulle’s decision to embrace Algerian self-determination came down to his belief that French grandeur could depend on other forms of French exceptionalism – nuclear weapons, for instance – rather than its colonial empire.Footnote ¹³³ France’s sense of self, its sense of grandeur and playing a vital role in the world, could shed old role-identities and adopt new ones to meet the challenges of a changing world. Alain Peyrefitte, a close collaborator of de Gaulle, observed that de Gaulle’s reversal on Algeria embodied his talent for dressing up cold political calculations as grandeur.Footnote ¹³⁴ In this case, de Gaulle justified this massive reversal as a continuation of France’s liberal-democratic narrative strand, saying that ‘the fate of Algerians belongs to the Algerians, not as would be imposed upon them by knives and submachine guns, but as they will decide themselves, legitimately by universal suffrage. With them and for them, France will guarantee their freedom to choose.’Footnote ¹³⁵

The overwhelming approval of the Évian Accords, the treaty between de Gaulle’s government and the FLN to end the war and grant Algerian independence, and public polling demonstrate that de Gaulle was in line with French public opinion. In 1961, 78 per cent of French voters thought Algeria was the country’s most pressing issue.Footnote ¹³⁶ By a 66 per cent versus 11 percent margin, respondents believed that France was responsible for helping Algeria’s social and economic development. Still, an even larger majority (69 per cent versus 3 per cent) thought Algeria would become independent. These results echo de Gaulle’s reformist agenda to prepare Algeria for independence rather than long-term integration.Footnote ¹³⁷ In the months before the Évian Accords referendum, an overwhelming majority (80 per cent versus 10 per cent) of French voters indicated satisfaction with the agreement.Footnote ¹³⁸ Still, voters were far more likely to say that the deal benefited Algeria (57 per cent versus 6 per cent) than France (32 per cent versus 28 per cent).Footnote ¹³⁹ The only unquestionably positive aspect of the accord was that voters said the agreement would benefit France’s global image (75 per cent versus 5 per cent).Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The 70 per cent margin on that question mirrors the margin in favour of the agreement, suggesting that de Gaulle was not alone in seeing the end of French Algeria as a moral victory for France, even if it meant giving up the ‘jewel of the empire’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ But French public opinion’s satisfaction with the accords was one of ‘cowardly relief’, according to Benjamin Stora: ‘Shame and guilt transformed into their opposite: necessity and self-absolution.’Footnote ¹⁴²

New identity, same self

Once de Gaulle publicly endorsed the end of French Algeria, many pieds-noirs and figures within the military tried to derail the process. During a pied-noir uprising against him in early 1960, de Gaulle called for a ‘solution that is French’ in Algeria – an extremely ambiguous statement but one that is telling: it did not define a specific kind of solution – independence, apartheid, or integration – that would cause France to take on a particular role-identity, but simply called for France to be true to its sense of self. He also declared that ‘the unity, prestige, and fate of France would be compromised all at the same time’ were he to fail to resolve the Algerian crisis, an acknowledgement of how destabilising the Algerian War was for France’s internal cohesion (unity), how others saw it (prestige), and its understanding of the meaning and direction of its historical trajectory (fate).

Four days later, with the insurgents still on the streets, de Gaulle delivered a nearly 20-minute address on national television, declaring that ‘self-determination is the only policy that is worthy of France, it is the only way forward … it is clear that the progress, unity, and prestige of the French people are at stake and that the future [of France] is obstructed as long as the Algerian problem is not resolved’.Footnote ¹⁴³ De Gaulle was even more explicit about how psychologically disorienting not resolving the Algerian question would be, leaving France adrift, ‘a poor broken toy on an ocean of adventures’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The image of an object being pushed around on the surface of the ocean without moving in any particular direction of its own volition testifies to the importance in ontological security of a sense of direction – narrative strands – linking various events together and narratively framing the self’s journey through life as it and the world around it both evolve.

In April 1961, with the backing of much of the pied-noir community, four generals launched an unsuccessful coup in Algiers to invade metropolitan France and overthrow de Gaulle. (The French military became exceedingly bitter about de Gaulle’s decision to allow for Algerian self-determination because it knew it was defeating the FLN on the ground.Footnote ¹⁴⁵) De Gaulle made another appearance on national television to condemn the coup attempts and plead for the support of his fellow compatriots. Trying to emphasise everything at stake, he implored his listeners to ‘look where France risks going compared with what it was in the process of rebecoming’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

The use of ‘rebecoming’ (redevenir) is telling here because de Gaulle cannot be referring to France’s role-identity as a significant colonial power, which he was actively trying to end. Instead, he means returning to France’s path in life as a country that promotes freedom, democracy, and human rights. For him, following that path was the only option worthy of France. This was not the only instance in which de Gaulle pursued ‘internal moral unity and worthiness’ to provide domestic stability during his presidency.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ France shed an important identity, but it did so in a way that could be narrated as a logical evolution that allowed France to remain itself even as the world around it changed.

But if France’s ontological security was preserved by the activation of a liberal-democratic narrative by de Gaulle and other public figures, it was also maintained by not disturbing France’s other narrative strand: an understanding of France as a fundamentally European, Catholic country was shared by pieds-noirs as well as people in metropolitan French on both the right and left. As Todd Shepard correctly notes, ‘France chose to forget that Algeria was France and to stop pretending that (“Muslim”) Algerians could be French, this promise [of colour-blind egalitarianism] seemed less and less a concrete possibility … and more and more an abstract principle with limits marked by ethnic or racial difference’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ This is fundamentally correct: the fact that France was now willing to give Algeria its independence did not mean that it wanted to engage in the kind of intersubjective recognition that would have forced it to reckon with its darker side. Shedding its role-identity as a colonial power enhanced French ontological security, ‘allow[ing] the French to avoid facing the challenges that Algerian nationalism and the Algerian Revolution posed to classic conceptions of French values and history, at least temporarily … [France] chose to purge [its] past and present of signs that empire mattered, rather than either reinventing or repudiating the universal in defining’ the French nation.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

Of course, Shepard is wrong to argue that the arguments in favour of integration by many pieds-noirs were made in good faith. Shepard claims that, ‘summoned by proponents of keeping Algeria French to implement the republican rhetoric that for 131 years had explained French domination of Algeria, most French people, politicians, and intellectuals refused to respond’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ In reality, the idea of a greater France that would include previously colonised peoples, popular with parts of the French left, failed to gather momentum on either side of the Mediterranean.Footnote ¹⁵¹

De Gaulle also thought that many pieds-noirs’ new-found support for equal citizenship for Algerian Muslims was made in bad faith. Arabs would be a minority overall (under 20 per cent) in a combined France–Algeria, which would solve the dilemma of preserving white rule while adhering to the principle of equal citizenship. De Gaulle observed that given different birth rates, that demographic balance would not last, and Muslims would eventually control the French state.Footnote ¹⁵² (De Gaulle was not wrong: Muslims would be well over 40 per cent of France’s population today if Algeria were still a part of France.) This is one of the reasons that he thought proponents of integrating Muslims were ‘short-sighted’ while he was looking after the long-term interests of France.Footnote ¹⁵³ As we have seen, this demographic concern about too many Muslims in France was also a consideration on the French left. If France was universal for de Gaulle, as the epigraph demonstrates, it was also white, European, and Christian. France did not want to reconfigure its sense of self enough to imagine what a genuinely multicultural France of equal citizens would look like, and sacrificing Algeria was thus the easy way out.