Hesitant Insurrection

The tinder in Algeria had been lying there for years, ready to be lighted.

Once before, when the Frenchmen of Algiers were convinced that a government in Paris was ready to sell them out, they had put on such an ugly demonstration that a shaken Socialist Premier, Guy Mollet, pelted by tomatoes, had given up all plans for a liberal deal with Algeria's Moslems. Now, the Algerian colons reasoned, another new French government threatened to be "soft" in Algeria and needed a scare. Some among the crowds that gathered in the streets of Algiers were not content to leave it at that.

First, as a kind of warmup, on rabble-rousers' charges that the U.S. was plotting to turn Algeria over to the rebel F.L.N.,* crowds broke down the doors of the USIA offices on Rue Michelet and scattered books and periodicals in the street. Then, their ranks grown to 30,000, they jammed the main square for a ceremonial wreath-laying at the war memorial. General Raoul Salan, once commander in Indo-China and now commander in chief of the 500,000 French troops in Algeria, and tall, leathery General Jacques Massu, the paratroop commander, drove up to the war memorial. Shouting "We want Massu!" and "The army to power!", the crowd crushed around the generals' car, hemmed in the guard of honor and the band. Trucks with loudspeakers appeared at the edges of the square, and even during the solemn silence of the last post, magnified voices cried out: "Go to the Government General building and demonstrate your anger there!"

Mysterious Withdrawal. At the ceremony's end the crowd swept up the steps of the huge courtyard before the nine-story, glass-fronted Government General building, to be met by a charge of security police who, with clubs and tear gas, twice drove the crowd back. Only the students from the lycees, the young toughs in tight blue jeans and sweatshirts, a few ex-paratroopers still wearing their red, green or blue berets, seemed ready for another clash with police.

But suddenly the script was changed, and the security police mysteriously withdrew. In a mood both exuberant and ugly, the young crowd swept forward again, seized an auto and used it as a battering ram to smash down the iron gates that barred their way. They went tumbling into the halls and corridors, raced up the stairs and rampaged through the 500 government offices. Armfuls of official papers fluttered down from smashed windows. A fully armed company of paratroopers stood idly by, joking with the rioters, accepting beer and sandwiches from ecstatic girls. All at once, there was a martial stir on a second-floor balcony draped with the French Tricolor. A loudspeaker proclaimed: "Silence! An important message from General Massu!"

"The Only Means." Massu's deep voice boomed across the crowded square, reading a message he had just wired to President Coty and to General de Gaulle:* "We inform you that we have set up a Committee of Public Safety under the presidency of General Massu, owing to the seriousness of the situation and the need to maintain order and avoid bloodshed. The committee awaits with vigilance the formation of a Government of Public Safety -the only means of keeping Algeria an integral part of French territory."

By next day safety committees were in control of Constantine and Oran as well as

Algiers, but in Oran the civilian prefect had to be pitched bodily from his office. Yet Paris, and the new government of Premier Pierre Pflimlin, had not capitulated at the sound of General Massu's voice, and the paratrooper seemed uncertain what to do next. For one thing, Gaullist Strategist Jacques Soustelle had not arrived during the night, as expected by the thousands gathered at the airport. Sounding as if he feared that he might have gone too far, General Massu, a better fighter than politician, called a press conference to crawl back in off the limb. "The people on the balcony -who were perfect strangers to me," had told Massu that the crowd would turn nasty unless a committee of public safety was formed with him as head. "I thought for about 40 seconds and decided to accept. It seemed at the time that the only way of controlling the committee was to become a part of it." General Salan, who had officially approved the committee "as a link between the population and the army command, which will issue orders," appeared relieved to hear that Premier Pflimlin considered that "he was only doing his duty" in taking over power in Algeria.

Much the same note was struck by the civilian members of the committees of safety. Leon Delbecque, a shadowy lieutenant of the absent Soustelle, described the "three glorious days" of the military take-over as "the starting point of the renaissance of France, the restoration of her greatness." How, he demanded, could these actions be called a plot against the republic? "That is ridiculous. We are saving the republic!"

On the Balcony. Then Jacques Soustelle, onetime Governor General of Algeria, roared into Algiers aboard a Swiss-chartered Viking, after being smuggled out of Paris by hiding under valises in the back seat of a Simca and changing cars three times on his way to the Swiss border. The temper of Algiers changed notably. Once again the wide square before the battered Government General building filled up with screaming thousands, and loudspeakers blared the Marseillaise. Soustelle, burly, broad-shouldered, appeared on the balcony to a thunderous ovation that ceased only when he flung his hands high. In the dead silence that followed, Soustelle cried: "I choose freedom and fatherland all at once. I have no other ambition than to rebuild national unity on both shores of the Mediterranean. Long live Algeria! Long live France! Long live De Gaulle!" In a roaring answer that woke echoes of other cheering crowds, other balconies, the crowd chanted: "Soustelle! Soustelle! Soustelle!"

At week's end France and Algeria were separated by far more than the Mediterranean. Each moved with hesitant steps to dominate the other; leaders on both sides spoke in oblique and Aesopian language that could not be pinned down as either war, peace or compromise. Events were moving, and men moved with them, but not yet with clarity and vision. The republic could not put up with an Algeria that did not accept its authority. One or the other had to give.

* The U.S. is damned just as strongly by the Algerian rebel leaders on the grounds that it has furnished financial and military aid to France, knowing it would be used to fight the Algerians. * Who read about it in the papers and said, "Now the system stops my mail. They have arrived at this. Oh, la, la!"

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