The Organizer

In Algiers 100,000 Gaullists poured into the streets to celebrate their triumph over Paris. There were searchlights making giant Vs for victory, flares shooting into the sky and bands playing. In the excitement, one man died of a heart attack, 40 fainted or were trampled under foot, and 100 children got lost. From the balcony of the Government General Building came incessant loudspeaker exhortations: "Let the torches through, please. . . . That's it . . . Bravo les torches."

Little noticed in the frenetic rejoicing--put on daily so that Algerians would not lose heart while Paris hesitated--was a tall, slim man with the cold, blue-grey eyes of Flanders. Yet of all the gaudy generals and pompous politicians who harangued the Algiers mob, none had so good a claim to speak for the insurrection as 39-year-old Leon Delbecque. Despite his modest title--vice president of the Committee of Public Safety--it was Delbecque who had provided the organizational brains of the Algiers revolt.

Moment of Revelation. A onetime factory hand born in the slums, Delbecque holds above all to one political tenet: the infallibility of General Charles de Gaulle. In 1946. when De Gaulle first called for constitutional reform, twice-wounded Resistance Fighter Delbecque rushed around northern France inveighing against the constitution of the Fourth Republic. "Actually," he recalled last week, "I had never even read the constitution. I was against it because De Gaulle said so."

In 1956, depressed over De Gaulle's political eclipse and the decline of the French empire. Delbecque volunteered for military service in Algeria. During a patrol with the famed "Black Commandos" he was struck, as if by revelation, with the solution to the Algerian War. Poking into a ramshackle hut during a search for concealed arms, he saw on the wall three photographs: one of the late Marshal Henri Philippe Petain, one of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, and one of De Gaulle. The Moslem owner of the hut, asked why he kept those particular pictures, replied: "Because they are chiefs." To Delbecque the deeper significance of this statement was obvious: bring De Gaulle back to power and the Algerian Moslems would rally to France again.

The Apparatus. Returning to Paris, Delbecque wangled an assignment on the staff of Defense Minister Jacques Chaban Delmas. Ostensibly, his job was psychological warfare in Algeria. In fact, his purpose was to establish a disciplined revolutionary apparatus in Algeria.

Delbecque's first task was to persuade the French civilians and military in Algiers to work in harness for De Gaulle's return. To sell the civilian colons, who had been overwhelmingly pro-Vichy during World War II, on De Gaulle, Delbecque organized what he called ateliers--small groups of professional men. merchants, students and trade unionists, all of whom were encouraged to organize new ateliers among their colleagues. Eventually, the ateliers won many powerful colons to the support of De Gaulle--some in earnest, some with the secret hope that the insurrection, when it came, would bypass De Gaulle and install a right-wing government in Paris under onetime Premier Georges Bidault. Among those who nursed such ambitions: Alain de Serigny, Neanderthal publisher of the powerful L'Echo D'Alger.

Delbecque's chief workers in the armed forces were junior officers--lieutenants, captains and majors, many of them, like Delbecque himself, of working class origin, and convinced that the Moslem masses must get some political and economic gains if a durable peace was to be won. "The army is prepared to defend the Europeans in Algeria," said one of Delbecque's military adherents last week. "But we will be damned if we will defend European privilege.''

By mid-April Delbecque had both civilians and military in hand, and when he finally threw his apparatus into action on May 13, it was so disciplined and determined that Generals Salan and Massu had no real choice but to go along.

Back to Selling. Last week, its mission accomplished, Delbecque's organization seemed on the verge of falling apart again. Fact was that no one in Algiers, including Delbecque himself, had any authority to speak or act for De Gaulle; and Delbecque's right-wing civilian recruits were beginning to discover that the army might mean all its balcony oratory about equality for the Moslems, who outnumber the Algerian French 9 to 1. But True Believer Delbecque remained confident that all problems would vanish with De Gaulle's return. "Now,"' he said, "I will go back to selling wool for a living."

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