The SAS and AMG doctors improvised when it came to their offices. They set up tables outside and worked in abandoned buildings or from their vans. Their workstations were far removed from the government offices in Paris and Algiers, granting them a degree of flexibility. These doctors saw more men than women and a significant number of children under the age of twelve. The notebooks did not indicate which member of the medical team assisted which patient, but they did show a consistent and dedicated medical team that was able to consult with Algerians every day for fifteen months. They did not report supply shortages that would have prevented them from meeting with patients, nor did they report any Algerian animosity toward them or their medical initiatives. In fact, they demonstrated the opposite. The medical personnel were able to establish a permanent presence in the Tizi-Ouzou community and saw Algerian patients of all ages and genders regularly. What the notebooks do not confirm was whether the same physicians and assistants remained in Tizi-Ouzou for the duration of the time described in the consultation log. Judging by the pervasive shortage of doctors throughout the country, it is doubtful that those seeing patients in July 1958 were the same ones doing so in October 1960. In any event, their steady presence represented a marked departure from the period prior to 1955.
These notebooks, along with numerous others, obscured a reality that French military officials and colonial leaders did not frequently acknowledge.103 The SAS targeted poor, hungry, and malnourished Algerians who might never have been to a doctor or interacted with a colonial official before in their lives. Therefore, this interaction may not have been wrought with as much suspicion as the theorist Frantz Fanon described. For him, “the French medical service in Algeria could not be separated from French colonialism in Algeria.”104 Even though Fanon did not write directly about the SAS, his observations about how connected medicine and colonialism were remained applicable to the wartime project.105 Jacques Soustelle’s reform initiatives were predicated on inherent power differentials, and the SAS were another opportunity to prove the administration’s moral and physical strength. Medicine was a way for French politicians advocating Algérie française to hold themselves up as the savior and solution to Algerians’ health problems, and they cast doctors and nurses in the role of benefactor to the millions of Algerians who were struggling to survive the war. But Fanon overstated the amount of resistance the French doctors encountered. He described how Algerians “rejected” and “mistrusted” doctors and how “the colonized person who goes to see the doctor is always diffident.”106 He imagined that every interaction between a French doctor and an Algerian patient was a colonial confrontation and could only be understood in dialectical terms. This was certainly not the case when SAS units drove into town and were surrounded by entire families who eagerly awaited their help.
The military captured these moments and published many of the images for the world to see (Figures 2 and 3). These were the kinds of interactions and benevolent behavior the army wanted to highlight—not the war tactics behind them. In Le Service de santé des armées en Algérie, 1830–1958, the military described its glorious history in Algeria from the time of the conquest up to the war and connected the achievements of the military doctors in the nineteenth century to the current physicians working in SAS and AMG teams.107 The publication asked where the “native population” would be without the military’s services and credited the military for bringing preventative health care to Algeria.108 What was more striking than the many chapters that documented the army’s accomplishments was how grateful and happy the Algerians seemed to be when interacting with medical ambassadors of the colonial state. Long lines and crowds of people did not appear to discourage Algerians from waiting their turn to see a doctor. Men, women, and children of all ages gathered around the mobile health unit, their smiles revealing a level of excitement. Doctors cradled infants and caressed little patients who were timid and afraid. Nurses held women’s hands as they waited their turn. Military personnel were seen laughing and at ease with Algerians. These were not the pictures of war, death, and devastation newspapers commonly printed. But that did not make them any less a tool of war. And as Chapter 3 shows, the FLN adopted this strategy and circulated images of their physicians treating Algerian soldiers and civilians.
Figure 2. French medical personnel in Zemoura, Algeria. Dr. Resillot (seated, right) examines an Algerian infant, 1956. (Établissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense)
Figure 3. French medical personnel in Mecheria, Algeria. Chief of medicine Dr. Clément and Sergeant Heurtaux treating Algerian patients, 1957. (Établissement de Communication et de Production Audiovisuelle de la Défense)
Conclusion
The Special Administrative Sections were active through the end of the war, but some contend that the program was destined for failure once President de Gaulle came to power in 1958 and changed the political objectives of the war.109 His advocacy of self-determination beginning in September 1959, and ultimately his willingness to negotiate the Evian Accords, were in direct competition with the policy of integration and thus undermined SAS objectives. In Jacques Soustelle’s memoirs, he recalled how hopeful he felt about the possibility of integration in 1955 and 1956. At the time, he considered “the colonial phase” to be over and was committed to finding different solutions for France and its colonies.110 He firmly believed integration initiatives, such as the SAS, would fuse the Algerian economy with that of the metropole and ensure the “survival and the development of Algeria.” Additionally, “on the moral plan,” he suggested that integration “would put an end to inferiority complexes that fed nationalism.”111
When Soustelle created the SAS in 1955, he was drawing not only on his extensive political experience but also on an ideological tradition dating back over a century when French military physicians were sent to settle Algeria through medical pacification. The colonial administration launched the SAS and its complementary programs, Assistance Médicale Gratuite, Adjointe Sanitaire et Sociale Rurale Auxiliaire, and Équipe Médico-Sociale Itinérante, to reassert authority over the population through less violent measures and offer a viable alternative to the FLN. Medical personnel did not wear camouflage uniforms, and they were instructed to present themselves as “peaceful pacifiers.” But at their core, these medical programs were first and foremost a military project whose social services were a necessary means to a desired military end, crushing the Algerian nationalists’ war efforts and keeping Algeria under French control.112
But this tool of conquest did not lead to its intended goals. Even though the SAS grew to seven hundred units and the number of annual medical consultations exceeded several hundred thousand per year, persistent shortages of equipment, staff, and medicine curtailed the program’s effectiveness and exposed the harsh realities of the French administration’s long-term failure to develop and manage Algeria during the colonial period. The administration’s focus on rapprochement through health was not misguided. However, its intense focus on its own programs led officials to severely underestimate and overlook the FLN’s parallel medical initiatives that emerged simultaneously. The French did not have a monopoly on winning hearts and minds in Algeria. In fact, the FLN took advantage of this strategy and incorporated it into its domestic social outreach and went one step further by exporting it internationally.
Chapter 3
“See Our Arms, See Our Physicians”: The Algerian Health-Services Division
In
