Up De Gaulle

To the Algiers Consultative Assembly, General Charles de Gaulle spoke confident, defiant words: "France need not worry about what is said beyond her frontiers. You need only to consider the nation's will . . . not sermons from outsiders."

The Algiers Liberation Committee swiftly:

P: Named General de Gaulle Chief of all French Armed Forces.

P: Abolished General Henri Giraud's post of Commander in Chief and gave him the lesser job of Inspector General of French Armed Forces.

P: Broadened the National Committee's base and upped its membership to 21 by including Communists Fernand Grenier and Francois Billoux, Moderate Paul Giaccobi.

P: Got set for D-day by shifting Socialist Andre Le Trocquer from the Committee's Commission for War and Air to a new Commission for Liberated Territories, which will establish headquarters in London, seek to administer France in the wake of Allied invasion.

The Committee acted before Cordell Hull, in a radio broadcast (see p. 23), promised the Committee "every opportunity to undertake civil administration" in liberated France (subject to General Eisenhower). By this promise Hull seemed to grant the Committee's most important demand. But General Giraud was still unhappy. The Allies' dethroned protege sulked and brooded over his "humiliation," threatened to quit Algiers. Stubborn General Giraud visited stubborn General de Gaulle; rumor said that their talk was disagreeable and "not so well."

Next day Commander in Chief de Gaulle sent a soothing letter to Inspector General Giraud: ". . . By making you its high military adviser . . . the Government gives expression to the trust it places in you and to its intention ... to make use of your outstanding military qualities. . . ." Replied Giraud: "I am not resigning."

A slick French newcomer last week joined the ranks of America's refugee publications. Title: Tricolor. Descent: from London's La France Libre, blitz-born champion of French resistance. Contents: literary appreciations of the French underground; elegant patter on a Paris midinette's chic triumph over her ersatz clothes; letters of Marcel Proust; essays on Vichy doubletalk, wartime Paris, Painter Pierre Bonnard. Editor: Andre Labarthe, brilliant ex-physicist, intellectual foe of Vichy, onetime friend of Charles de Gaulle, former Giraud minister, now an OWIer.

In his Vol. I No. 1 editorial Editor Labarthe, who now holds aloof from any French faction, wrote of resistance inside France: "We know that strong roots nourished by blood are growing, some day to break through to the light. . . . Four years of silence . . . have unconsciously changed people's approach to almost every problem." Added he, in a passage obviously aimed at Charles de Gaulle, among others: ". . . Men who have gone through the fire of defeat will feel differently from those who have escaped. . . . The men inside Europe will not show enthusiasm when those who lived in foreign lands try to judge and direct internal affairs."

Not once does the first Tricolor mention Charles de Gaulle by name.

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