Algiers Speaking

Four hours after his plane reached Algeria, France's new Premier Guy Mollet was a shaken, ashen-faced man.

From the airport, Mollet's route lay through the French part of the city. It was grimly silent. Shops were closed, balconies draped with black "for mourning"; French men and women stonily turned their backs as his car swept by. A crowd was waiting for him at the war memorial in the city's center. At sight of the Premier, it broke into an angry roar. "Mollet to the lamppost!" rose the shout, and the crowd became a mob.

Plants were uprooted from flowerbeds and flung at France's Premier. Oranges, banana peels, tomatoes, even the droppings from the uniformed Spahis' rearing horses showered about him. Pale but resolute, Mollet went up the steps through the barrage to the war memorial, and laid there a wreath honoring Algiers' war veterans. Even as the Spahis cleared a path for him back to his car, the demonstrators swarmed upon the monument, tore his wreath to shreds.

Three hours later, while furious Frenchmen circled his refuge in the Palais d'Ete, honking their horns, Mollet admitted shakily to newsmen: "I saw in their faces the look of total miscomprehension and hatred." His hands trembled, and his voice was little more than a whisper. His first retreat was to accept the resignation of 79-year-old General Georges Catroux, whom he had appointed Minister for Algeria (TIME, Feb. 13). Catroux' appointment had been a political blunder in the first place. To Algerian French, Catroux was "the liquidator'' of France's presence in Syria and Lebanon, the man who had presided over the return of Morocco's Sultan ben Youssef from exile --and they had reacted fiercely and predictably. The blunder was compounded by Mollet's hurried abandonment of Catroux in the face of mob threats.

Arrogant with Success. Moslem moderates were in despair. The Committee of 61, a group of moderate Moslem legislators who have been trying to negotiate a compromise solution with the French, announced that they were giving up, and disbanded the committee. Said Ben Salem, a quiet, middle-aged doctor and one of the committee's leaders: "We have been passed over. The French must negotiate with the chiefs of the resistance. The people no longer have faith in us."

Meanwhile, the French rioters grew more arrogant with success. They called an organization meeting to merge war veterans, Poujadists and students into a Committee for Public Safety. Veteran leaders who had consulted Mollet were shouted down. "Why talk to Mollet?" the crowd yelled. Up sprang a little man with bulging eyes. Jean Baptiste Biaggi, a Corsican lawyer from Paris, had flown in, a week earlier, with the avowed purpose of whipping up a new French Revolution. "Victory is yours now! Don't drop it!" bellowed Biaggi. "Mollet's surrender was unconditional. Throw out his policy just as you did Catroux."

The crowd roared approval, and before the evening was over, Biaggi was in control of the Committee for Public Safety. Next day Biaggi took his oratory and obscenities to the meeting of local mayors, talked them into issuing a manifesto demanding that all convicted Algerian terrorists now in jail be hanged out of hand.

"Here in Algeria a new France is awakening!" cried Biaggi. He complained bitterly of U.S. criticism. "By what right do the killers of redskins cast slurs on us?" he roared, and demanded a demonstration outside the U.S. consulate.

"A Fine Speech." Desperately playing for time, Mollet holed up in his palace under the protection of 3,000 security police flown in from France (no one was sure that the local police could be depended on), and for four days interviewed local French and Moslem leaders. Calling Paris, he persuaded stocky Socialist Robert Lacoste, his Minister of Finance, to take the job of Minister Residing in Algeria. Lacoste, as General de Gaulle's Minister of Industrial Production, had nationalized the French electricity and gas industries. His best asset: he has had nothing to do with Algeria.

That night Mollet took to the radio to make a moving plea. To the Moslems he said: "I know of your immense distress. I recognize your material misery, but I know that you suffer still more from injustice. You suffer in your dignity as men, because you have had the impression of second-class citizenship. I guarantee you the fierce will of the government to accord you justice and full equality before the law."

To the French he said: "You have believed France was going to abandon you. I have understood your despair. That is why I say to you serenely that even if I suffered by them, the dolorous demonstrations of Monday had a healthy aspect. They were, for a great many, the means of affirming their attachment to France, and their anguish at being abandoned by France. France will fight to remain in Algeria, and she will remain here." Said one listener: "A fine speech--if it had only been made five years ago."

At week's end Mollet wearily went back to Paris to face threats of demonstrations and a growing mutter of criticism. Rumbled Novelist-Columnist Franc,ois Mauriac: "Mollet hasn't got the thunder. There is no hope to be placed in this impassive teacher who, facing a roaring class, bows to papier-mache balls."

In Algeria, Lacoste confronted a seething city alone. "The French, unfortunately, taught the Moslems a lesson in what mob violence can accomplish," said Algiers' Mayor Jacques Chevallier. Said one Moslem moderate, glumly: "After what we have seen, it's not expectable that we shall become more moderate ourselves. Fateful days are not far off."

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