Symptom

F.F.I. Colonel Rol-Tanguy is a lean, hard-bitten Parisian who, in the days when he used to be a boilermaker, was known simply as Tanguy. He became Rol when he headed the French section of the International Brigade in Spain. As Colonel Rol-Tanguy he headed the F.F.I, in the Ile-de-France region (Paris plus the Departments of Seine and Seine-et-Oise). Last August, during the battle of Paris, the Swedish Minister and a French military delegate negotiated an armistice with the German garrison. But Colonel Rol-Tanguy denounced it, ordered his Maquis to continue street fighting. It was this armistice upset which compelled the Allies to come to the aid of the besieged F.F.I. instead of sweeping around Paris.

Later Colonel Rol-Tanguy and his men took over the job of policing Paris, shaved the heads of collaboratrices, broke into homes of suspected collaborationists, made summary arrests, looted some shops, helped themselves here & there to cigarets, drinks and even an occasional bicycle.

Then the Gaullist administration moved to absorb the F.F.I, into the Regular Army, and General Joseph Pierre Koenig, Gaullist Commander in Chief of the F.F.I., ordered the Paris Maquis to give up their arms. The National Council of Resistance agreed that the F.F.I, should be under War Ministry control.

Colonel Rol-Tanguy did not agree. For a time his headquarters on the Rue St. Dominique were cut off from telephonic communication with the War Ministry in the same building. Government ministers and C.N.R. representatives argued the issue. Last week it was settled. Colonel Rol-Tanguy went out as F.F.I, chief for Ile-de-France. His successor: General Revers, ex-postal clerk and a veteran FFIer. Colonel Rol-Tanguy remained as General Revers' chief of staff.

In General de Gaulle's struggle to restore order in France, this little F.F.I, shake-up was symptomatic. It meant that the Paris Maquis, like F.F.I, units elsewhere, were deprived of their police duties. It was a blow to the leftist dream of a People's Army (more than a third of the F.F.I., some 100,000 men, are being absorbed by the French Army).

The Left does not like the trend. But the bulk of the F.F.I, still supports General de Gaulle, and Gaullist Regular Army men make a policy of appreciating F.F.I. services. Last week, while Colonel Rol-Tanguy was being whittled down, another F.F.I, colonel, Jacquot, received a medal and a Gallic kiss, for gallantry in action, from the French First Army's General Delattre de Tassigny. Nevertheless the F.F.I, remains wary. Last week they complained about lack of weapons for Maquis still fighting Germans in western France. Growled the Communist Humanite: "Is that fifth-column work in Paris?"

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