France

THIS autumn, as the Algerian war stretched on into its seventh year, amid a rising tide of violence on both sides of the Mediterranean, most Frenchmen began to wonder whether the Fifth Republic would survive. The humorous Paris weekly, Le Canard Enchaîné, summed up the prevailing mood when it noted toward the end of September: “The Fifth [Republic] is no longer altogether a regime; it is a nebula, but no one can tell just what star will emerge from it.”

The event which gave immediate rise to this wry comment was the sudden re-emergence of one of the Fourth Republic’s old stars, Pierre MendesFrance. In one of his rare press conferences, held on September 25 before several hundred journalists. the man who ended the Indochinese war and launched Tunisia on the rocky road to independence declared that the Gaullist regime was all but dead and buried, that the General had proved himself utterly incapable of ending the Algerian war, and that if the country was to be saved from civil strife, an emergency government would have to be formed to make peace with the Algerian rebels within two months.

Mendès-France then agreed to meet another of the Fourth Republic’s luminaries, former Premier Guy Mollet, with whom he had not been on speaking terms since he quit Mollet’s government in a huff in May of 1956,

The official reconciliation of these two old political adversaries, both well to the left of center in their views, aroused speculation that a new Front Populaire was in the offing. To be effectively revived, a Popular Front would have to include an alliance between France’s two socialist parties and the Communists, and, though neither Mendes-France nor Mollet feels any enthusiasm for such an alliance, they have now made it clear that they would accept this solution to save France from the threat of a right-wing coup d’état.

As increasingly unpopular as De Gaulle has become with many French politicians, all but a lunatic fringe of extremists secretly recognize the fact that the General is, more than ever, the lonely guardian of what order still reigns in the country, and that if he should disappear tomorrow, all would crumble into chaos.

The plot against De Gaulle

None knows it better than the right-wing fanatics who attempted his assassination on September 8. The full truth about this mysterious affair will probably not be known for years, if ever. But the failure was so spectacular and the arrest of several of the plotters followed so rapidly on the event that it led a number of observers to conclude that the French security police had had a hand in the business. They were confirmed in this suspicion by the extraordinary timing of the plot at a moment when the General’s prestige seemed distinctly on the wane — and by the strange coincidence that, on the very day of the attempt, three French generals were arrested, including General Paul Vanuxem, one of the most respected and dynamic officers in the French Army, whose incarceration under ordinary circumstances might have provoked an uproar.

De Gaulle’s reaction to the assassination attempt was typical of his imperturbability. He brushed it aside casually, and it was only after several of his Cabinet ministers had made repeated telephone calls from Paris to Colombey-les-DeuxEglises that he finally consented to have news of the event made public.

The Minister of the Interior, Roger Frey, thereupon look personal charge of the operations, holding two press conferences, one of them televised, to stress the dramatic enormity of the plot. It was not long before what had started out as four kilograms of plastic explosive intended to destroy the General’s speeding Citroen had mushroomed to a monstrous forty.

The plot was, of course, immediately imputed to the O.A.S., the die-hard Organisation Armée Secrete, which has undertaken to fight De Gaulle’s Algerian policy to the bitter end. The O.A.S. no less promptly denied the charge. In an open letter subsequently sent to Hubert BeuveMéry, the editor of France’s most influential newspaper, Le Monde, former General Raoul Salan declared that it was as unthinkable for French officers to sully their honor conspiring against the life of the French Chief of State as it would have been for the members of the wartime Resistance to try to kill Marshal Pétain. Salan was a wartime Pétainist who served at Dakar in 1942. His quarrel with De Gaulle, which has now taken a particularly bitter turn, does not date from yesterday.

The most laudatory titles bestowed on Salan in French Army mess halls are “Salan the Chinese” and “the Mandarin” — ironic references to the tortuous and hopelessly unsuccessful divide-and-rule policy he tried to implement when he was commanding general in Indochina. Indeed, certain local die-hards were so convinced that Salan’s penchant for Oriental intrigue would bring ruin to Algeria that they actually tried to assassinate him by firing a bazooka shell through his office window in January, 1957. Today, Salan is ardently disliked and distrusted by most French Army officers, and even by many of those who remain sentimentally attached to the romantic vision of a French Algeria.

Campaign of terror

Furthermore, the O.A.S., which he supposedly commands, has alienated a large number of potential Army sympathizers by the gangster tactics it has adopted in order to intimidate those lukewarm or hostile to its activities. French Algerians are compelled to contribute to its clandestine war chest or face the prospect of having their shops or apartments plastiqués — the French term now used to signify dynamiting by plastic explosive. This is, of course, an imitation of terrorist methods perfected by the Algerian rebels.

In metropolitan France, the O.A.S. terrorist campaign has been aimed at intimidating all those known for or suspected of harboring sympathies for the cause of Algerian independence. The targets have ranged all the way from Geoffroy Ghodron de Courcel, the head of De Gaulle’s presidential bureau, to author Frangoise Sagan, who was rash enough last year to sign the “Manifesto of the 121,” protesting against the continuing war in Algeria. Usually the plastic bombs, quickly attached to the outside of walls or doors, cause only material damage, but in some cases they have wounded or even killed people. Paris has consequently become one of the most heavily policed cities in the world, with gendarmes posted outside scores of apartment buildings and villas inhabited by ministers, newspapermen, and politicians known or thought to be included on the O.A.S. black list.

Though the O.A.S. has been able to score one or two spectacular coups, such as floating an O.A.S. Hag from one of the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral, the campaign of intimidation in France has had little more than nuisance value. In Algeria, on the other hand, the secret Army organization now controls most of the local French settlers in the big urban communities, like Algiers and Oran. Police investigators sent from Paris to track down its ringleaders have been assassinated, while the local administration, though controlled at the top by officials loyal to De Gaulle, is riddled with French Algerians who are willingly or forcibly obedient to its directives.

It is clear, indeed, that the strifetorn land of Algeria is slowly but surely drifting into a state of lawless anarchy disturbingly similar to that of Palestine in 1947. As the tension has mounted, the extremists on each side have gained in power. The O.A.S. terror campaign has thus been matched by a new wave of bombings and shootings, on the part of the rebel F.L.N., which by fall had begun to reach alarming proportions in metropolitan France as well as in Algeria.

During the summer negotiations at Evian and Lugrin, a relative lull descended on the F.L.N.’s terrorist activities, almost certainly owing to the personal influence of the provisional government’s Foreign Minister, Belkacem Krim, who has long been a stanch advocate of negotiations with the French. To impose his conciliatory views, he has often had to wage an uphill fight with certain of his fellow ministers, among them Lakhdar ben Tobbal, who controlled the F.L.N.’s “French Federation” until Krim had his wings clipped in the governmental shake-up which took place last August in Tripoli. The sudden resurgence of F.L.N. terrorism this autumn was, according to one theory, an expression of protest on the part of Algerian activists inside France against the abrupt ouster of their former boss.

The Sahara oil fields

This is not the only sign of internal dissension which has lately emerged from the F.L.N.’s privy councils, and it bodes no good for the future of any negotiations with France. The new President of the provisional Algerian government, Youssef ben Khedcla, is more left-wing in his inclinations than was his predecessor, the bourgeois Ferhat Abbas. He is also a personal friend of the Italian oil and gas magnate, Enrico Mattei, who would not particularly mind seeing the French quietly edged out of the oil riches of the Sahara if and when an independent Algerian government can be installed.

That Charles de Gaulle is well aware of this latent threat can hardly be doubted. It helps explain his surprisingly bland affirmation, during his press conference on September 5, that no Algerian government could conceivably renounce its claim to sovereignty over the Sahara.

This unexpected reversal of what was thought to have been an adamant French stand during the summer negotiations at Evian and Lugrin was interpreted at the time as one of those unpredictable concessions which De Gaulle is quite prepared to make when he is not under immediate duress. But it was also, and no less significantly, another rap on the knuckles for Habib Bourguiba, who was thus tartly reminded that he could not expect the French to defend Tunisia’s claim to the rich Edjele oil fields after the bloody boomerang of Bizerte.

Bourguiba, who, though highstrung and impetuous, is no fool, quickly caught the hint; and on returning to Tunis in early September, after the liquidation of his archenemy Salah ben Youssef (who was shot in a Frankfurt hotel in mid-August) and his public reconciliation with his former adversary, Colonel Nasser, at the Belgrade congress of uncommitted nations, he wisely chose to let bygones be bygones and to meet De Gaulle more than halfway on the thorny issue of Bizerte.

The recalcitrant Army

De Gaulle’s tough stand on Bizerte, however, has done little to reinforce his prestige with the disgruntled officer corps of the French Army. The French Army today has had its back broken; it has lost almost 2000 officers since last April’s coup, either through dismissals or resignations, and when General Jean Olie resigned his post of Army Chief of Staff last August, it was weeks before the government could find another general willing to take on this thankless job.

Though the Army in Algeria is now commanded by General Charles Ailleret, who is unquestionably loyal to De Gaulle, the old misgivings and resistance continue to manifest themselves at every echelon. Two dramatic proofs of it were given this autumn. One occurred when a Muslim general, Ahmed Rafa, the first Algerian to reach that grade in the French Army since 1856, was appointed Commander of the Infantry, with the specific task of heading a police force, 150,000 strong. This group will eventually be given the duty of protecting the new government headquarters at the Rocher Noir (twenty-five miles west of Algiers) and also will supervise any eventual referendum that it might be possible to arrange.

To have asked a French general to undertake this humiliating task was as unthinkable as it would be today to ask an American general to oversee the orderly take-over of South Korea by the Communists.

The other event was equally dramatic. It was the resignation from the French Army of General Jacques Paris de Bollardiere. This Free French hero, who elected to follow De Gaulle on his return from the ill-fated Norway campaign of 1940 and who was subsequently parachuted into the Ardennes to take charge of the French underground in 1944, was the youngest general in the French Army when he received his two stars in Algeria in 1956.

Shortly thereafter he became involved in a dispute with his immediate superior, General Massu, and with the then Resident Minister for Algeria, Robert Lacoste, over the instructions which they had issued calling for an “intensification of the police effort” — a euphemism for the employment of torture to extract information from prisoners and suspects.

De Bollardière denounced these methods as reprehensible, worthy only of totalitarian societies. For daring to take this forthright stand he was subsequently relieved of his command, sentenced to two months’ imprisonment, and banished to a distant command in the Cameroons.

When De Gaulle returned to power in 1958, De Bollardière let it be known that he wished to go back to Algeria. Two years went by without his request being granted. In September of last year he was finally accorded an interview with De Gaulle, at which time he agreed to accept a temporary command with the French Second Corps in Germany. He made it clear, however, that he still expected to be posted to Algeria; and after another year had gone by with an equally negative result, he formally resigned from the Army on October 1.

This resignation means just one thing: three and a half years after Charles de Gaulle took power, neither he nor his lackluster Defense Minister, Pierre Messmer, has been able to impose his will completely on a recalcitrant Army. Those of a liberal persuasion are still as suspect as ever in the upper echelons and the High Command. The French officer corps has been drastically purged, its will to fight sapped by an unnecessarily nebulous and olten Machiavellian policy which has baffled both friend and foe.

The Army has been demoralized rather than reformed, with the tragic result that today, when De Gaulle most needs it if he is to play the role of another Richelieu, which he would like to play in Europe, the French Army’s efficacy has been seriously weakened.