The Barricades Trial

After two and a half years of almost unprecedented power, France's Charles de Gaulle was still struggling last week to bring peace to Algeria. Just what he was up against could be seen in Paris' ornate Palais de Justice where a nine-man military tribunal was trying 16 leaders of last January's European insurrection in Algiers in which 24 people died and 250 were wounded. As they reviewed the events leading up to the bloodshed, the defendants in the "barricades trial" unwittingly spotlighted the extent to which De Gaulle's hands have been tied by opposition to his policies in the French army and even within his own Cabinet.

May & January. The men on trial at the Palais de Justice ranged from students and teachers to bankers and roughnecks. Politically, all were fanatic right-wingers who had in common an injured belief that their treason had been blessed in advance by high figures in De Gaulle's administration.

First to make the charge was Colonel Jean Gardes, 46, formerly France's top psychological warrior in Algiers. Gardes, who took the stand in full uniform, wearing white gloves and an array of 24 medals and citations collected in World War II and the Indo-China war, had volunteered for duty in Algeria, believing that "there we lead the last struggle of free men." Soon after his arrival in Algiers, said Gardes, General Maurice Challe, De Gaulle's own appointee as commander in chief in Algeria, had assured him that the army was firmly behind a French Algeria; he was told not to take seriously De Gaulle's talk of "self-determination," since it was just "a maneuver to get past the United Nations debate on Algeria." As an intelligence officer, Gardes was in close touch with the leaders of the January uprising, and thought he was speaking the truth in promising them army backing.

Tall, handsome Pierre Lagaillarde added to the indictment. A 29-year-old doctor of law, Deputy in the National Assembly of the Fifth Republic and a demagogic crowd pleaser, Lagaillarde had been a passionate Gaullist in May 1958, when Algeria's Europeans set off the train of events that brought De Gaulle back to power by storming the 14-story Algiers Government General Building. Now, he demanded of his nine judges: "If in May 1958 I was not blamed for taking a public building by assault, why should they blame me for last January?" Derisively, he added: "A plot that succeeds is a return to legitimacy. But a protest that fails is transformed, as by a miracle, into an atrocious plot."

Quick Switch. In manning the barricades with his followers last January, Lagaillarde had thought he had the army and civil administration with him. How was it, he asked, that during the first days of the uprising "there were no police? One had the impression that there was incitement to demonstrate." He claimed that one morning, just before the insurrection, Paratroop General Jacques Massu, the city commander in Algiers, phoned three times to ask anxiously for an anti-Gaullist demonstration. Later Lagaillarde was summoned by two generals and a batch of colonels to a nearby barracks and told they were appointing him co-director of a Committee of National Safety. Army emissaries arrived from Paris to pledge their allegiance to Lagaillarde, and one of them, he testified, contemptuously dismissed De Gaulle as "an old man obsessed with death--there is absolutely nothing to be expected from him."

Then came his betrayal, Lagaillarde went on. When De Gaulle broadcast a demand that the insurrectionists surrender unconditionally, Lagaillarde's highly-placed army backers abruptly switched sides. A senior military officer said bluntly, "Your personal case is not important. We have to save the army." Weeping, Lagaillarde told the court: "If I had wanted to, I could have had with me numbers of soldiers and officers who were furious to see their chiefs not taking up their responsibilities." Instead, Lagaillarde meekly surrendered.

The Weeper. Last week was the turn of Alain de Serigny, 48, owner of the right-wing newspaper L'Echo d'Alger, who described himself more duped than Gardes and Lagaillarde. In 1958, he said, he had arranged a 10 million-franc loan for the same Gaullists who were now charging him with treason. He had two interviews with De Gaulle himself that so blighted his hopes for the preservation of "French Algeria" that, after the second, "I have to confess that, on leaving De Gaulle, I wept on the staircase of the Hotel Matignon."

But Jacques Soustelle, then a member of De Gaulle's Cabinet, convinced De Serigny that the President's words were window dressing and that De Gaulle's actions would support a French Algeria. De Serigny was further encouraged when Premier Michel Debre contributed a fire-eating article to his newspaper. And when the nervous publisher confided his anxiety to General Challe, he was again soothed. "Don't worry," said Challe. "The army is here for 15 years."

Running all through the testimony of the defendants in the barricades trial was the implicit charge that they had been deliberately provoked into rebellion by slippery-tongued members of De Gaulle's government. The presumable object of such a maneuver: to discredit as traitors and would-be instigators of civil war all partisans of "French Algeria."

But a simpler and more probable explanation was that the De Gaulle subordinates who had encouraged the insurrection had been sincere and had hoped thereby to force De Gaulle into accepting war to the finish in Algeria. And though a verdict in the barricades trial was still weeks away, the army had already used the trial to demonstrate pointedly that it was not above putting such pressures on De Gaulle again. Fortnight ago Pierre Lagaillarde, who had spent ten months in prison awaiting trial, was given "provisional liberty" by his military judges in open defiance of De Gaulle's known wishes. By last week all the other defendants were out on similar liberty.

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