A Nous la Liberte?

Last week in the Hotel de Ville in Algiers the French Provisional Consultative Assembly debated mightily over a mighty question: How free should the French press be when France itself is freed? At week's end the Assembly brought forth a law that was not one of press freedom but of Government control.

Like everyone else, the French legislators had found freedom of the press easier to extol than to define. Looking back into France's history for memories of that liberty, they could find examples of the best and the worst.

The worst was also the most recent: the sewerish venality of the press that had contributed its rat's share to the disruption of pre-1940 France. The freedom of the Third Republic's press had been largely interpreted as a license to prostitute itself--to foreign Governments as well as to French politicians.

But Frenchmen could also look farther back, to a time when France's name was synonymous with freedom of thought--the days of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Franc,ois Marie Arouet de Voltaire, who discovered for the people that "liberty of thought is the life of the soul."

From that great tradition, from the deep underground of France's past, came one stirring call in the Assembly's debate. Rene Ferriere, chairman of the Assembly's press committee, proposed that the base of a new press regime be built upon France's underground publications: "the first sincere press in France in many years."

But the Assemblymen, more intent on security than on freedom, voted down a guarantee of liberty of political expression. They did vote to prohibit press ownership to 1) industrialists; 2) administrative officials; 3) persons of large commercial or farm interests. Effect of this would be to: 1) abolish that part of the French press that has collaborated with Vichy (most French papers have); 2) revive the Vichy-suppressed papers and those which had ceased to publish rather than play the Nazi game.

Notably omitted in the adopted bill was any mention of the new cooperative (and monopolistic) French news agency. The French National Committee has so far had a dubious record of press freedom in its dealings with this agency, the merged France Afrique and L'Agence Franc,aise Independente. Its management lately resigned in protest against a government "general political manager" overseeing its news reports.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.