Thunder on the Left

The conscience of France may sometimes have seemed quiet, but it has also been deeply troubled by the cankerous, six-year war in Algeria. French priests have denounced the atrocities and torture committed by the French army; conservative intellectuals like Author Francois Mauriac protested the French treatment of rebel prisoners and demanded an end to the war; reservists called to the ranks have on occasion staged sitdown strikes in railroad stations or engaged in brief mutinies. Last week murmurous dissent erupted in the most conspicuous display since Charles de Gaulle took power.

Beards & Basins. At the Cherche-Midi court in Paris, 25 defendants crowded the dock. Almost all were under 30, most of them wore the corduroy jackets, sandals, beards and basin hairdos familiar in the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter. They were members of the "Jeanson" organization, accused of much more than mere distaste for government policies and practices. They were charged with smuggling money out of France to buy arms and munitions for the F.L.N. columns fighting the French in Algeria. All but six of the 25 were French men and women--teachers, mathematicians, TV producers, actors--who had betrayed the government of France not for money but out of an idealistic fervor of their own. One of the defendants, pale, thin France Binard, had lost eight members of her family in Nazi concentration camps. She said grimly: "I answer fully for what I have done. Through my presence here before you, I continue my fight." Defendant Jean-Claude Paupert. an ex-soldier who served in Algeria, said what he had seen there made him a supporter of the F.L.N. "I have helped the Algerians." he announced. "I am proud of it. That's all."

Francis Jeanson, the leader of the group, is a former professor of philosophy and onetime secretary of France's literary angry man, Jean-Paul Sartre. Hollow-chested, tuberculous Jeanson escaped the police raid that caught his followers. Three weeks after the raid, Jeanson further mortified the police by holding a secret press conference in a Left Bank hideout, where he defended his organization on the grounds that Algerian independence is inevitable and, when it comes, F.L.N. leaders should know that not all French men opposed them.

Police Calls. While French sympathizers of the accused crowded the court, the De Gaulle regime received another blow. Someone (police are still vainly trying to discover who) collected the signatures of 121 left-wing intellectuals on a petition urging in effect that French soldiers mutiny or desert rather than "take arms against the Algerians." Among the signers: Jean-Paul Sartre and Author Simone (The Mandarins') de Beauvoir, who are currently junketing in Brazil and trying to rally Latin American intellectuals behind the F.L.N. rebels and against the French government. Cried Sartre in Rio de Janeiro' "De Gaulle's regime is a hoax--not morally but politically." Other signers were Vercors, World War II Resistance author of The Silence of the Sea; Andre Breton, founder of surrealism; Simone Signoret, who won Hollywood's 1959 Academy Award for her role in Room at the Top; Novelists Nathalie Sarraute and Alain Robbe-Grillet, and even Florence Malraux, the 27-year-old daughter of De Gaulle's Culture Minister Andre Malraux who, in his radical youth, would certainly have been a signer as well. The police hesitated to jail so large a covey of intellectuals, and could not call them all Communists, but each signer received a police visit last week, was asked to verify his signature and confirm that he had read the petition before signing it.

Nervously, the government launched a wave of minor repressions. The Swiss film Le Petit Soldat, which tells the story of a French deserter who becomes involved with the F.L.N., was banned, even though the scenario is skillfully tailored to fit inside the official French line. Paris' lively weekly L'Express was suppressed for printing an article on the subject of army desertion, even though the paper made clear its opposition to desertion. Also seized was an edition of the weekly France Observateur for publishing an interview with Rebel Leader Ferhat Abbas.

Strength to Strength. In France suppression does not yet mean silence. Influential Le Monde carried the gist of what the other two papers were suppressed for saying. There is a brisk under-the-counter sale of banned books such as Francis Jeanson's Our War and stories by army deserters such as Le Refus.

In his two years of power, President Charles de Gaulle has survived the initial assaults of the political right--the Algerian colons, the militarists, the diehards. The challenge from the intellectual left may be harder to overcome in a France impatient with and sick of the endless bloodletting and brutality on both sides in Algeria.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.