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Defeated in Asia, France was not willing to give up Africa, but many of its soldiers fighting the Vietnamese were Algerians. Algeria, French since 1830, was part of Metropolitan France; a million French settlers, the pieds-noirs or colons, lived there, but in 1945, in Sétif, Algerians demonstrated for rights, and French troops and colons fired into the crowds. Revenge attacks on the colons provoked the French to murder thousands of Algerians. On 1 November 1954, the Algerian FLN – Front de Libération Nationale – murdered Frenchmen across Algeria. The French army and the colon militias responded with brutality in a war that would rebound to threaten the very existence of French democracy.

While France struggled, Khrushchev and Mao were prevailing on all fronts. But now the Soviet leader almost destroyed his own empire.

AN ISRAELI IN PARIS

On 25 February 1956, Khrushchev defined his own supremacy by denouncing Stalin’s crimes to the Central Committee, a ‘secret speech’ that provoked first Polish unrest then, on 23 October, a Hungarian revolution against Soviet rule. Barely sleeping for weeks, facing the loss of Stalin’s empire, Khrushchev threatened to invade Poland, restrained himself, but then, nervously consulting Mao and even Tito, prepared to invade Hungary. Its revolution thrilled America: Stalin’s empire was tottering. Yet, the very next day, three powers met secretly in Paris to collude in a plan that let Khrushchev off the hook.

On 24 October, in a villa in Sèvres, the representatives of the old world – the declining empires Britain and France – and the new world – the energetic, tiny Israel – cooperated to humble another new force, Nasser, who had signed a massive arms deal with the Soviet Union and nationalized the Suez Canal. His troops were increasingly clashing with the Israelis – and he was backing Algerian rebels against France.

The British, French and Israelis shared the same enemy. An Israeli, Shimon Peres, protégé of Ben-Gurion, born Szymon Perski in Poland before arriving in Palestine in 1934, a master negotiator with a poetical streak, was already buying French weapons. ‘I was seduced by the French, nation of seduction,’ he told this author. ‘To me, a rough kibbutznik, Paris was the most beautiful city of dreams and literature.’ The US had refused to sell arms to Israel; France supplied them.

Now in Sèvres, Ben-Gurion, accompanied by his one-eyed chief of staff Moshe Dayan and Peres, secretly agreed with the French premier Guy Mollet and the British foreign secretary Selwyn Lloyd to kill several birds with one stone: in an operation appropriately codenamed Musketeer, Israel would attack Egypt, whereupon France and Britain would intervene to impose peace. Within the secret Sèvres negotiations lurked a deeper secret. Peres explained that Israel was a tiny new state taking a risk: ‘We need a force of deterrence,’ he said. ‘France can give us this deterrent.’ France agreed. A country eight years old was getting the Bomb, developed at Dimona in the Negev. Peres never admitted that Israel had the Bomb. ‘War and peace are always a dance of the mysteries,’ he told this author, but it changed the balance of power in west Asia.

On 29 October, Ben-Gurion sent his army racing across Sinai; Anglo-French paratroopers seized the Canal; Nasser and his commander Abdel Hakim Amer bickered about the imminent downfall of Egypt. But the plan fell apart: Eden had not consulted Eisenhower, who, fearing that the Arabs would rally to the Soviets, demanded an Anglo-French withdrawal, sparking a run on the pound and the resignation of Eden. Ironically, Khrushchev also demanded their withdrawal, threatening nuclear war if they did not. Suez helped doom the Hungarians and save Khrushchev.

THE MINER AND THE SWIMMER: KHRUSHCHEV AND MAO

On 4 November, Khrushchev ordered Soviet forces to invade Hungary: they killed 10,000 rebels and restored Soviet rule before the capitalists could intervene. Yet his political bungling and drunken jabbering had alarmed his Stalinist comrades, who tried to overthrow him. Khrushchev was rescued by Marshal Zhukov, who flew in regional leaders to back him. But Zhukov was too popular, and Khrushchev soon denounced him for ‘Bonapartism’. Initially self-deprecating, Khrushchev, now both Party secretary and premier, changed into a swaggering autocrat who never stopped talking and believed himself expert on all matters, from literature to science. Now he was ready to break the impasse with the west. ‘Like it or not, history is on our side,’ he told ambassadors after the crushing of Budapest. ‘We will bury you!’ His nuclear threats during Suez had worked: ‘The winner has the strongest nerves.’