Following a June conference, Lacoste wrote to his primary civilian and military subordinates to explain his three-step program for pacification. He desired the
commanders to use the coming swell of troops to achieve results before the winter
arrived. Lacoste explained that he had finished delegating authority to the prefects to “not only suspend but silence” any functionaries that obstructed pacification efforts. Along these lines, he stressed the importance of decentralizing responsibilities. Lacoste
expressed his intent to abolish the mixed communes. Lacoste then discussed pacification, which he said was so widespread in usage as a word that it had lost the strength of its meaning. To his mind, it implied that a complex of actions both civil and military would be used to restore order. He recognized that situations varied across the country, but nonetheless suggested that pacification should follow a three-step program, beginning with “security of persons and property” and the “pursuit and destruction” of rebel forces. Step two would require taking an entire census of the people, photographing them, and issuing identity cards, while also improving morale. The third step would involve the
117 Hull, Absolute Destruction, 4. Hull discusses how German army colonial experiences influenced the army’s culture leading into the First World War.
“establishment of specific institutions” to coordinate relations between the population and the civil and military administrations. Meanwhile, he stressed that efforts should be made to give work, not simply money, to the unemployed, and attempt to improve their quality of life.
Lacoste recognized the difficult position that the local Muslim population faced, both being terrorized by the rebels yet not accepted by the French-Algerians either, and ordered several actions taken to mitigate this. First, he again stressed the importance of making personal contacts with the local population and ordered that everyone employed by the memo's recipients should do the same. Foreseeing “the brutal rupture of traditional equilibrium that the establishment of profound reforms might risk provoking,” he
supported appointing locals to work in certain public positions, even when elections would typically be the means to select them. When possible, however, he recommended creating “mixed commissions” of several dozen French-Muslims who would be elected at the lowest levels. Regardless of method used for selection, he expected that the civil and military authorities should quickly have a small body of locals to help in a “consultative” manner with pacification. Finally, he endorsed any and all initiatives that might improve relations and public opinion between the metropole and Muslims in Algeria, to include exchange students and vacation opportunities. Lacoste emphasized the critical importance of psychological action, but also the press.118
118 Lacoste, Minister Residant’s thoughts on Current Situation; Gaffney, Political leadership in France, 7. Gaffney suggests that one of the main changes in the public sphere of French politics following de Gaulle’s ascent in 1958 was the importance of the media and public opinion because of the larger-than-life persona and drama he brought with him to office, though clearly some farsighted leaders such as Lacoste were already trying to harness the power of opinion too.
Lacoste’s three-step program reinforced the significance of working with local populations in a cooperative, non-coercive manner, and in so doing tried to establish a willingness in French officials to engender a genuine interest in the well being of the local people. Not only would his program require a tremendous amount of physical effort and organization, such as to make a census of the country and issue identity cards to everyone, but he expected a certain level of moral effort in working with the Algerians that not everyone was capable of providing.119
In November 1956, Lorillot’s intelligence section reported on the success of pacification based on Lacoste’s summer time policies. Probably written for the upcoming meeting of chiefs of staff scheduled for later that month the report indicated that the army's results were not commensurate to the efforts expended, particularly in light of the tremendous troop increase initiated over the summer. The army had focused more intently on building contact and rapport with local peoples, arming and training self- defense groups, undertaking public works, and assisting the civil administration, while trying not to abandon its mission to restore order. The authors implicitly admitted some shortcomings with using social science to peer into the Algerian mind. Since “the evolution of the psychological climate of the host Muslim populations has not obeyed any precise law,” it would be difficult to predict exactly how they would respond to various strategies. Nonetheless, the coming months were judged a critical time for winning over the population while capitalizing on what appeared to be a “seriously shaken” enemy. Despite these seeming military successes, the authors exposed a fundamental dilemma: “while it is simple to account for [successes] on the material
plane, it is a delicate matter to evaluate the profound repercussions upon the
psychological domain.” The authors confronted the fundamental problem with relying on complex matrices built on numbers and statistics to accurately indicate relative progress, namely that the items measured may not necessarily influence local opinion or support in the manner expected.120