The Blue Helmet

In a high-ceilinged office in the Elysee Palace early last week, a pair of elderly men who have been friends since their military student days at St. Cyr 50 years ago dispassionately discussed their opposing views on Algeria. Sympathetically, brisk, beefy Alphonse Juin, the only living marshal of France, told Charles de Gaulle that he looked tired. Answered De Gaulle: "I am old. Death waits for me, I know." Then, wearily, he added: "But I have never been so resolved." '

De Gaulle had every reason for weariness and despair. News of the insurrection in Algiers first reached him on Sunday at his country home in Colombey-les-deux-Eglises. When his black Citroen reached the capital shortly before midnight, De Gaulle was greeted by the proffered resignation of Premier Michel Debre, long privately opposed to De Gaulle's offer of self-determination to Algeria. Imperiously, De Gaulle refused Debre's resignation and fired off orders to General Maurice Challe, French commander in chief in Algeria. The orders: finish off the settlers' uprising "during this night."

Then, in the small hours of the morning, De Gaulle recorded an appeal to be broadcast at dawn to the rebellious Europeans of Algeria. "This is a bad blow struck at France, in the heart of France," he began. "I have taken leadership of the state to lift up our country . . . I tell you plainly and in all simplicity that if I should fail in my task, the unity, the prestige, the fate of France will be compromised." The broadcast finished, he turned to an aide and asked: "What do you think of it?" Unhappily, the aide replied with a question of his own: "Will you be heeded, mon general?"

The Furtive Visitor. The immediate, shocking answer was no. General Challe, who only three days earlier had also tried to quit his job, took no direct action against the armed ultras holed up in the heart of Algiers; while he hesitated, the insurgents strengthened their barricaded positions (see below), and echoes of the uprising spread to other Algerian cities. By the time the Cabinet assembled in Paris next afternoon, even De Gaulle seemed hesitant. Uncommunicatively, he listened while one group of ministers headed by Novelist Andre (Man's Fate) Malraux called for "launching fire'' against the insurgents, and another led by Minister for the Sahara Jacques Soustelle urged negotiations. In the end, all that was decided was to send Debre to Algiers to scout out the situation. Said De Gaulle fatalistically: "This is either the best thing to do or the worst."

It came close to being the worst. Debre arrived at Challe's headquarters with the brusque announcement: "General de Gaulle expects every general to do his duty." With icy defiance, a cabal of five generals and eleven field officers told him flatly that 1) the army would not fire on Frenchmen, 2) De Gaulle had no choice but to renounce his offer of self-determination and proclaim unequivocally that he would keep Algeria French. Grey-faced, Debre returned to Paris unnerved; worse yet, the furtiveness of his trip--his arrival in Algiers was not made public until after he had left--made it plain that De Gaulle's government doubted its ability to suppress the uprising.

Giving Ground. With that, things began to fall apart. Once again Debre offered to resign, urged De Gaulle to replace him as Premier with Soustelle, one of the leaders of the 1958 uprising in Algiers. Soustelle himself, War Minister Pierre Guillaumat, Veterans Minister Raymond Triboulet and Communications Minister Bernard Cornut-Gentille. all submitted their resignations later in the day.

Turning them all down, De Gaulle kept his ministers in line with the cold statement that he "demanded of each a mission of sacrifice." But in Algiers, beyond De Gaulle's reach, General Challe and the civil governor of Algeria, Paul Delouvrier, were steadily giving ground. Three days after the insurrection began, Delouvrier broadcast an appeal to the insurgents assuring them that "if order returns, all may yet be won." Lest anyone miss the implied promise. General Challe followed up with the statement that "the French army is fighting so that Algeria will remain French once and for all."

When even that failed to buy the insurgents off, Delouvrier caved in emotionally. He had had only seven hours' sleep in five days. In a speech that was sometimes eloquent but more often rang like a wild cry of panic in the night ("I myself have been struck by paralysis, by anguish and by torment like all of you"), Delouvrier announced that, General de Gaulle having taught him how to decide, he and Challe had decided to leave Algiers and go to a command post in the country. He called upon Algeria's 9,000,000 Moslems ("I beg you, I beseech you") to come out into the streets demonstrating for De Gaulle--an appeal which, had it been heeded, might easily have set off the worst blood bath in Algerian history.

In Paris, where no one had known in advance what Delouvrier planned to say, a De Gaulle aide angrily called the speech "delirious," which was a fair description of it. And at the insistence of De Gaulle himself, the government hastily put out a communique repudiating Delouvrier's implicit offer of amnesty to the insurgent leaders beyond "the barricades across which men long to embrace one another while they fear to kill one another."

Dirty Hands. Partly because of the army censorship in Algiers, partly out of a surfeit of crises, plain Frenchmen did not at first recognize the deadliness of the situation. Only gradually did it become clear that not just a few barricades had to be taken, but half of Algiers, half of Constantine. Not until the fourth day of the uprising did French newspaper readers learn that the insurgents had freed fellow insurgents from jail, permitted shops to be opened or ordered them to close, shut down Algiers municipal services and were in control of the city with the army's tacit approval.

As the depth of the crisis became clearer, Parisians began to gather gravely at the newsstands in the winter sunshine. But there was no trouble. Deputy Jean-Marie Le Pen, onetime paratrooper and Poujadist tough boy, called upon Paris students to strike in support of the insurgents, but he was ignored by the students and picked up by the police.

Gradually, De Gaulle, buoyed up by his sense of mission, shook off his first fatalism and began to fight back. At the week's second Cabinet meeting, he curtly told his ministers that if they compromised, the insurgents would demand "more in 15 days, still more in a month," and France would really learn what dictatorship was like. The rioters, he said, were guilty of an attempt against the security of the state and must be routed out.

Ambitious Jacques Soustelle, wartime chief of Free French intelligence, objected that this would mean massacre in Algiers and a deadly split in France. With clear reference to the World War II African and Middle Eastern battles in which Free Frenchmen fought and killed Vichy Frenchmen. De Gaulle coldly retorted: "Soustelle. when we made Free France, we had to dirty our hands."

"That I Will Not Do." In this mood, late in the week. De Gaulle appeared on television clad in his brigadier general's O.D. uniform decorated with the insignia of Free France and the Free French armed forces. "If I have put on my uniform to address you," he began, "it is to remind you that it is General de Gaulle who speaks as well as the head of state."

His voice a hard, penetrating rasp, his forefinger stabbing imperiously, De Gaulle went on, "I have taken in the name of France this decision: the Algerians shall have free choice of their destiny . . . There are two categories of people who do not want any part of this free choice:

"First, the [Moslem] rebel organization, which maintains that it will cease fire only if I negotiate with it beforehand, by special prerogative, on the political destiny of Algeria . . . That I will not do.

"On the other hand, some persons of French descent demand that I renounce the ideal of self-determination, that I say that everything has been done and that the fate of the Algerians has been decided. That I will not do either . . . It will be the Algerians who will say what they want to be. This will not be dictated to them. For if their response were not really their response, then, while for a time there might well be military victory, basically nothing would be settled . . . In short, self-determination is the only policy that is worthy of France."

Then, having refused to sound retreat, De Gaulle went on the offensive. "Frenchmen of Algeria," he said, "how can you fail to see that in rising up against the state and against the nation, you are surely heading toward ruin and at the same time running the risk of causing France to lose Algeria at the very moment when the decline of the rebellion is becoming evident? . . . How can you listen to the liars and the conspirators? . . .

"Next I speak to the army . . . As you know, I have the supreme responsibility. It is I who bear the country's destiny. I must, therefore, be obeyed by every French soldier . . . No soldier under penalty of being guilty of serious fault, may associate himself even passively with the insurrection. In the last analysis, law and order must be reestablished. The methods employed to make law and order prevail may be of various sorts. But it is your duty to bring this about. I have given and am giving this order."

Finally, said De Gaulle, "I speak to France. Well, my dear old country, here we are together once again, facing a harsh test. . . While the guilty ones, who dream of being usurpers, take as a pretext the decision I have made concerning Algeria, let it be known everywhere, let it be clearly understood, that I do not intend to go back on that decision. To yield on this point and under these conditions . . . would be to make the state bow before the outrage that is being inflicted on it . . . Thus France would become but a poor broken toy adrift on a sea of hazard."

The Missing Harbingers. With this clear call to his countrymen, De Gaulle's semi-mystical communion with France's man in the street once again began to work its magic. Would his command of language and ideas also mean command of events? In Metropolitan France the answer soon came clear. In the single day following De Gaulle's speech, 17,000 letters and telegrams, all but a dozen endorsing the general's stand, poured into the Elysee Palace. Over the radio a seemingly endless procession of notables pledged their loyalty. "We approve entirely," said ex-Premier Guy Mollet, promising the support of the powerful Socialist Party. "The French army," snapped Novelist Francois (Desert of Love) Mauriac, "needs to be reinvented."

For the first time since the uprising began, the voices of De Gaulle's adherents took on a militant tone. France's major trade unions--Communist, Catholic, Socialist alike--ordered their members to observe an "hour of silence'' to demonstrate support for De Gaulle. And C.F.T.C., the Catholic union, warned that it would meet "any attempt at a coup in France" with a general strike. Across Paris hundreds of men and women, in a spreading symbolism that began in some bistro, defiantly adorned their lapels with a small blue paper helmet--a symbol of the French Republic which they had cut from the back of their Gauloises bleues cigarette packs. So confident was De Gaulle of his hold over his countrymen that at week's end the streets of Paris were for once mercifully free of police "salad" wagons, the blue-uniformed Republican Guards and the tough, steel-helmeted riot police, whose appearance is the invariable harbinger of crisis in France.

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