Gamal Abdel Nasser, Jean Lacouture, Paris: Bayard, 2005. pp63 Jean Lacouture, the author of this short book on Gamal Abdel-Nasser, is a French writer and journalist and the author of well-known biographies of French statesman and politicians including Charles de Gaulle, François Mitterand and Pierre Mendès France, many of which have been translated into English. However, his writings have not been restricted to France, and he is also the author of a series of books on the Middle East and the Arab Maghreb, an interest that perhaps originated in an early assignment for France Soir as the paper's Cairo correspondent in the 1950s. While Lacouture's Gamal Abdel Nasser, originally a lecture at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the French national library, does not break any new ground it is of interest since Lacouture is also the author of the first comprehensive biography of Nasser to appear in French, his Nasser being published by Editions du Seuil in 1971. More than 30 years later, Lacouture's latest statement on Nasser is worth attending to as the considered position of the author of what is still a standard work on the subject. In it, Lacouture argues that Nasser, potentially a genuine statesman, or homme d'état, allowed himself to be seduced by the glitter of easy popularity, particularly in the Arab world outside of Egypt and in the developing world as a whole. As a result, one sees in him, Lacouture writes, the "extraordinary interest of a character...[who] unlike famous predecessors, started off as a statesman before yielding to heroic fervour, as if in him Cavour had given way to Garibaldi" with all the loss of political judgment that went with such a transformation. "Arriving in Egypt in 1953, eight or nine months after the Free Officers had taken power, I thought I was watching the birth of a statesman in this tall, dark lieutenant-colonel," Lacouture writes. "We watched him go from the agricultural reforms to the purging of the country's political life and from the negotiations to evacuate British troops from the country to the project for the Aswan high dam. In this country, at once so ancient and so adolescent, I thought that I was seeing reason winning out at the expense of power and the development of a statesman-in-waiting, a statesman reasonable enough to postpone the final sorting out of relations between Egypt and the State of Israel." However, "after three years of this kind of austere management, which promised so much for the conduct of the state, Nasser's leadership took a tumultuous turn in 1955 towards a more or less messianic style, his becoming the kind of personification of a hero." Lacouture does not approve of what came next, which he says led the country from disaster to disaster and Nasser to tragedy, and he objects in particular to what he calls "the rearmament, the hardening up of the police state, the setting up of the radio station called 'Voice of the Arabs', the flying off on the 'magic carpet' of pan- Arabism, the fanatical manner in which the nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company was carried out, though this was right in principle, the abortive adventure represented by the United Arab Republic and of course the suicidal confrontations with Israel." Nasser, in short, had given up on statesmanship and had begun to engage in heroics instead, leading to disaster both for himself and for his country. Could the "forces that led Gamal and his people to the legendary funeral of October 1970 have been mastered by a genuine statesman, by a Richelieu, a Cavour, a Bismarck, even by an Egyptian Bourguiba," Lacouture asks, implying that Nasser at least did not master them. Could such forces, born of a "feverish environment and of intense frustrations" have been controlled, rather than allowed to sweep all before them? While Lacouture does not provide a final answer to these questions, the implication is that Nasser allowed himself to be seduced by the popular role he began to play at Bandung and afterwards, causing him to abandon a previously modest path and choose instead the role of messianic leader and popular hero, a form of hubris that invited disaster. "Nasser's transformation, the moment when he went from being a statesman-in-waiting -- reserved, self-controlled and deferring to reason -- to a man who had become a kind of political 'hero' and someone who was less and less self-controlled, is linked to his trip to Bandung and the famous April 1955 conference," Lacouture writes. "I saw Nasser a short while before his departure for Bandung, and I had the occasion to see him again a little while after his return and noticed that he had become a different man. He had become self- regarding. It was not that he had lost his clarity of thought: he had not gone mad, whatever the strange historical circumstances that had led him to various excesses...But I would say that it was at that moment that the transformation from statesman in the making to popular hero took place." There is much here that might be contested, and perhaps some of it has to do with the circumstances of Lacouture's own acquaintance with Nasser. Together with his wife Simonne, also a journalist, Lacouture lived in Cairo from 1953 to 1956 and reported on the early years of the July regime for a French public, many times interviewing Nasser and others and witnessing the early actions of the young Egyptian republic. Indeed, his first book on Egypt, L'Egypte en mouvement (Egypt in Movement), written with his wife, appeared in 1956. In his biography of Nasser Lacouture says that he followed the fortunes of his subject closely after leaving the country and that he continued to visit Cairo. However, there is no disguising the fact that although he retained enough interest in Egypt and in Nasser to be able to produce the first comprehensive biography of Nasser to appear after the latter's death, from 1956 onwards this was no longer based on impressions gained at first hand. It is also the case that some of the liveliest paragraphs both in the 1971 biography and in the new portrait refer to the interviews with Nasser that Lacouture conducted in the mid 1950s and to his first- hand testimony of major events, such as Nasser's speech in Alexandria in July 1956 in which he announced the nationalisation of the company running the Suez Canal. Whatever the case may be, it is worth comparing Lacouture's conclusions in 2005 with his earlier impressions and the judgments he made in 1971 on Nasser and on the outcome of his career. Though not an original work of research, Lacouture's 1971 biography shows a tenacious effort to read everything written, chiefly in French, on its subject and to reproduce it in accurate, summary form. Along the way, he offers fascinating vignettes from Nasser's early life, tracking down a 1934 article by Nasser in his school magazine on Voltaire, for example, signaling an early interest in intellectual dissent Lacouture says, as well as noting that Nasser, aged 16, played Caesar in a school production of Julius Caesar in 1935, a performance apparently witnessed by the then minister of education Naguib el-Hilali. Much of this detail comes from the ingenious research of the Swiss journalist and long-term Cairo resident Georges Vauchon, whose two-volume Gamal Abdel-Nasser et son équipe (Nasser and his Team) was published in 1959/60. Vauchon had even managed to unearth Nasser's reading lists at school and military college by collaring the librarian, revealing that Nasser would "plunge into reading books in English on subjects that he was passionate about, first the biographies of famous men, such as Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, Garibaldi, Bismarck, Mustapha Kamel, Hindenburg, Churchill and Marshall Foch, and then books about the Middle East, the Sudan, the problems of the Mediterranean and military history." Work by the distinguished French orientalist Jacques Berque Lacouture uses to sketch the social structure in which Nasser grew up and which he was later determined to overturn, English rule in Egypt, Berque says, having led to a situation of such "subjection that it demoralised the people and did not only affect the distribution of wealth and the organisation of production and consumption". The interpretation of Nasserism offered by Mahmoud Hussein, pseudonym of Adel Rifaat and Bahgat Elnadi, is also referred to throughout, their La Lutte des classes en Egypte (Class Struggle in Egypt, 1969) developing the thought that the Nasser regime is best understood as an attempt to organise the "transition to capitalism by harnessing state forces at the expense of those of feudalism, while holding popular energies in check" Moreover, early foreign confusion regarding Nasser and the July regime is made good use of, Lacouture noting that in France Le Monde received the news of the 1952 coup d'état with equanimity ("if the authority of the king has been questioned, his personal position has not been threatened. The choice of Ali Maher [as prime minister], a personal friend of Farouk, shows that the army is seeking to limit the consequences of its indiscipline," the paper commented), and that Time magazine identified Anwar el-Sadat and Rachid Mehanna as the "real leaders" of the coup for the benefit of American and international readers. For the authors of the 1952 edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in Moscow, on the other hand, "during the night of 23 July 1952 a group of reactionary army officers led by General Mohamed Naguib and in close contact with the United States seized power," a judgment echoing early left-wing views ("a petit- bourgeois grouping serving, consciously or unconsciously, the interests of the Americans.") All of this sets the scene for the transformations to come, though Lacouture's judgment of Nasser's career in 1971 was not substantially different from that offered in 2005. In 1971, as in 2005, Lacouture considered that 1955 had been a kind of turning point, at least as far as foreign policy was considered, though, if anything, the seeds of Nasser's later attitudes were detectable even earlier. Noting Mohamed Naguib's early popularity, for example, and the authority this gave him in politics, Nasser began to manipulate the crowds to his own advantage during the struggle with Naguib in 1954, Lacouture argues, following the dismantling of the political structures of the ancien régime. Standing in the streets of Cairo in March, Lacouture noted the crowds of people carrying "Nasserist banners proclaiming the merits of the Revolutionary Council" and noting, too, "the demonstrators shouting 'down with freedom', while a bunch of thugs (of their own volition?) went off to attack Abdel-Razzaq al-Sunhuri, the president of the Conseil d'état, Egypt's greatest jurist and one of Naguib's closest advisors." Reading Nasser's Philosophy of the Revolution in the same year, Lacouture is struck by the "naïveté and grandstanding of these 90 pages," and he particularly dislikes Nasser's account of the period immediately following the July coup. "We needed union, and discord was all around us," Nasser wrote there. "We needed enthusiasm and energy, but found only laziness and inertia in the masses." Not surprising, says Lacouture, when these same "masses" had just been confronted by a " fait accompli managed by a secret conspiracy, which, once in power, remained enveloped in mystery." Finally, Lacouture's conclusion is that, for better or worse, "the immensity of his power [and] the minute control that he tried to exercise over the whole apparatus of the state" meant that Nasser was "the one really responsible for what happened in Egypt between April 1954 and September 1970." Like de Gaulle, "he had no relationships outside of politics," but unlike de Gaulle he had "extreme difficulty in distinguishing, both in his own words and in those of others, what was true and what was imagination." He had an enormous capacity for work, and "a sonorous voice that was resounding in public and ingratiating in private", which was a great part of his charm, together with "a way of looking at you that was imperious, almost cruel, but more often than not was charged with a sort of Egyptian languor." Of the "four or five friends that he had had, one of them he led to suicide [Abdel-Hakim Amer], while two others were exiled." The effects of Nasser's personal austerity and the results of his policies both at home and abroad had, Lacouture felt in 1971, blighted the country he had tried to save, causing what he describes as the "beauty of Egypt, the grace of Egypt" to flee the country, "having been forced into exile or chased out." Compared to Lacouture's judgment of Nasser in his 1971 biography, his conclusions in 2005 might almost be seen as charitable ones. By David Tresilian
