Atrocity

One of the grimmest picture sequences of 1955 showed a French gendarme shooting an unarmed Moslem to death during a period of rioting in Algeria (see cut). Filmed and widely shown by Fox Movie-tonews, the photos were also published in LIFE. Last week, in the heated French election campaign, the accusation was made that the cameraman had bribed the policeman to shoot down the Algerian to provide some exciting footage.

The charge came first from L'Express, the pro-Mendes-France daily, in an attempt to discredit the Algerian policy of Premier Edgar Faure. Then the government itself picked up the charge--arid played it back with an anti-American overtone in an obvious effort to divert at tention from the flop of its Algerian policy. A communique from the Ministry of the Interior (headed by Faure himself) said that the gendarme could be court-martialed and the cameraman charged with bribery. The communique did not mention the cameraman's nationality, described him only as "a representative of a foreign film company." The result was a torrent of anti-American editorials in French newspapers that did not bother to check the truth of the charge.

The cameraman turned out to be Georges Chassagne, 34, a French resident of Algeria. And when Movietonews ordered him up to Paris to face a press conference, Chassagne convincingly denied the whole tale. He told how he had gone to the scene of violence at the invitation of French military authorities and accompanied by five other newsmen. "I not only never talked to the gendarme," he said, "but I am almost sure that he never realized I was filming the incident." France-Soir ran a dispatch from its Algerian correspondent backing up Chas-sagne's story, and a testimonial from his colleagues, who agreed: "He has a horror of violence in any form. It is unthinkable that he might have asked a gendarme to execute a prisoner." In the face of all this, the government retracted its charge, admitted that "it does not seem to be corroborated" by the facts.

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