Era Ending

The old soldier saved France again.

Under the first impact of the mutiny of the generals in Algiers, even Charles de Gaulle's iron composure seemed momentarily to waver. But in four perilous days, the 70-year-old De Gaulle re-established his imposing authority. France was left badly shaken, but with a sense that long-lived rancors had been purged. Stubborn and proud, De Gaulle once again proved himself the greatest Frenchman of modern times.

The issue was one that France had been half avoiding for years, and it involved nothing less than the end of empire. The soldiers who forced the battle had bled and lost in Indo-China. had evacuated Tunisia and Morocco, blaming it all on the "politicians." They had toppled the Fourth Republic in May 1958 to install De Gaulle--who was now telling them only three years later that they had to give up Algeria, the last and bloodiest possession of all. But the soldiers, in their bitter years abroad, had lost all touch with the new sentiments of Metropolitan France--the contentment with prosperity, the weariness with trying to impose authority on those who did not want it. It was the Metropole. rallied by Charles de Gaulle, that last week defeated an audacious army revolt in Algeria and, with it, outmoded dreams of empire.

What's Up? Premier Michel Debre was the first in Paris to learn that the rebellion was on. Calling the delegate general to Algeria, Jean Morin, to check on rumors of impending trouble, Debre snapped, "What's up?" Over his bedroom telephone. Morin answered: "I'm not free. These gentlemen are in my room. I can't say any more except that we're well." Debre at once aroused De Gaulle, who had spent the evening at the thea ter with Senegal's Poet-President Leopold Senghor.

The Algerian conspirators well knew that they could not succeed unless they won mainland France, and Debre took to television in a near state of panic. "Aircraft are ready to drop or land paratroops at various airdromes to prepare a seizure of power,'' he warned. "As soon as the sirens sound, go there by foot or by car to convince the misled soldiers of their profound error." Later, in an evening that Parisians already refer to as La Nuit Folle (Mad Night), Minister of Culture Andre (Man's Fate) Malraux delivered a stirring address to an unlikely crowd of Resistance veterans, movie starlets, beatniks and the sports-car set up from St.-Tropez. They all struggled into ill-fitting boots and khaki uniforms as members of an impromptu militia.

Power Degraded. De Gaulle took stock of the situation and found it alarming. Apart from the danger of actual invasion, he faced the likely possibility of defections among the two French NATO divisions in West Germany and the garrisons in France--for the past year he had used the Continental army as a dumping ground for 3,000 officers transferred out of Algeria for their ultra sympathies. De Gaulle showed his lack of faith in the France-based troops by confining them all to barracks. For his real defense De Gaulle called on the police and police reserves, ringing Paris with 10,000 gendarmes "in tanks and half-tracks.

As all France awaited invasion, De Gaulle went on television to make a dramatic appeal. "The state is flouted, the nation defiled, our power degraded. Alas, alas, alas! Men and women of France, help me!" De Gaulle had already made a snap judgment, perhaps to be tempered later, as to the fate of the rebels. "We'll have to shoot some." he said.

The plot was concocted behind the drawn blinds of a seaside villa in the Algiers suburb of Tagarins. To avoid suspicion, the plotters in Algiers and France had been careful not to talk openly about their hatred for De Gaulle's policy of self-determination for Algeria. In their regiments, they stockpiled ammunition, gasoline, food. They called the plan Operation Greenlight.

Days before the appointed hour for Greenlight, the top leaders drifted in from France and rendezvoused at the suburban villa. There were three generals, headed by Maurice Challe, a tough air force officer who had led an extermination campaign against the F.L.N. for two years and then had quit the army in disgust.

These men held in common a doctrine called "revolutionary warfare"--the latest example of the French army's perennial attraction to right-wing ideas. They had developed it fighting guerrillas in Indo-China, and its main thesis is that to fight Communists, anti-Communists must use the Communists' own dirty tactics--secret societies, reprisals, torture and terror. They quote Mao Tse-tung's dictum that an army "must live among the people as a fish in water." It should teach anti-Communism when not fighting. French exponents of the doctrine are among the best, as well as the most calloused, soldiers in the world. They view all nationalist rebellions as Communist and all politicians who support them as Communist dupes. Challe declared the mutiny's object was "to safeguard the Metropole from the danger of Communism which threatens it" and to return "a pacified Algeria to France."

He had three professional paratroop regiments behind him. One was from the Foreign Legion, made up chiefly of Germans and Hungarians. They struck swiftly and efficiently, bloodlessly seizing Algiers before dawn (TIME, April 28). Constantine soon joined the revolt. The last of the top plotters, General Raoul Salan, one of the ringleaders in the 1958 revolt that brought De Gaulle to power, arrived from exile in Madrid.

Stalemate. General Challe's planned assault on the French mainland never got off the ground. At news of the revolt, 20 pilots flew their planes out of Algeria so that the rebels could not use them. Other pilots refused to fly for the rebels, leaving them with only six manned Nord transports prepared to carry Challe's paratroopers. He gave up the idea.

Nearly all the civilian administrators prudently disappeared or refused to cooperate. Challe dispatched a squad to capture Admiral Jean-Marie Querville, commander of the Mediterranean fleet. Querville hid behind a tree in his garden and escaped to the Algiers harbor. Soon he got a call from Challe inviting him to join. "If we don't do it this way, we'll have a Communist-backed government here in six months," said Challe. "If we do it this way," answered Querville, "the Communists will be here sooner than that." Querville left by destroyer for the big naval base at Mers-el-Kebir, outside Oran, took his fleet out a few miles to sea.

A majority of the senior officers in Algeria basically sympathized with Challe and his tortured patriots, but they knew that their own careers hinged on this one decision, and they sat on their hands.

What turned the tide was De Gaulle's unflinching courage and his overwhelming support in Metropolitan France. The mutineers had counted on De Gaulle's reluctance to order French soldiers to fire on French soldiers, but the old man did not hesitate, sternly told the loyal armed forces that their mission consisted "in stopping the insurrection, then in breaking it, finally in liquidating it by all necessary means, including the use of arms."

Most of the 500,000 soldiers in Algeria are not regulars but conscripts, and as they listened over their radios to De Gaulle's grim voice, to the news of the solidarity strike that saw 10 million workers halt work to demonstrate their backing for De Gaulle, they knew they wanted no part of the rebellion. Where their officers had gone over to Challe--as in Oran and Constantine--they started sabotage operations, misdirecting supplies, pouring water in truck gasoline tanks.

At some point during the afternoon of the fourth day, Challe knew that the jig was up. As a last, desperate measure, he started passing out arms to civilians in Algiers. But the ultras were not eager to fight. As police loyal to De Gaulle and a regiment of Zouaves (a mixed French and Moslem light infantry outfit) moved into Algiers at 11 p.m., the ultra announcer on Radio Algiers cried: "We are being betrayed! To the Forum!" At the Forum, a large square in front of Algiers' General Government Building, a crowd of 25,000 diehard Europeans milled about and watched the death of their dream.

Buttoning Up. Challe paced the lobby of the building, puffing furiously on his pipe. Salan shivered from the cold. His wife kissed Salan, tied a white silk scarf around his neck, helped him into a trench coat and buttoned him up like a child. The two men walked out to a convoy of the ist Foreign Legion Parachute Regiment, climbed into trucks with their troopers and drove off into the night.

Challe later surrendered and was flown off to Paris, a prisoner. Carrying his own suitcase, looking crumpled and insignificant in civilian clothes, he stumbled at the foot of the landing steps in Paris, fell heavily on his hands and knees. Charged with leading an armed insurrection, he faced a possible death sentence. A dragnet went out for the rest of the ringleaders, who had disappeared. Ultras in Algiers sheepishly turned up at police stations and handed back 10,000 weapons.

The much-decorated 1st Foreign Legion Parachute Regiment, which had spearheaded the revolt, obeyed orders to report to legion headquarters, Sidi bel Abbes, where the unit will be dissolved and the men reassigned. As they left the camp at Zeralda outside Algiers, the legionnaires defiantly blew up most of the buildings. The regiment's officers rode off under arrest to Algiers, singing Edith Piaf's melancholy ballad, Je me regrette rien (I regret nothing).

Condescension. The West could only cheer De Gaulle's victory, though it will not make him any easier to deal with. At the NATO Council talks in Oslo next week, bolstered both by the collapse of the revolt and the firing of its fourth atomic bomb in the Sahara during the middle of the crisis, France will press for De Gaulle's favorite idea of a U.S.British-French directorate for NATO--in which De Gaulle sees himself speaking for all of Europe. When De Gaulle meets Kennedy in Paris late this month, he may find it hard to avoid the slightly condescending tone of a man who has just won a battle talking to a man who has just lost one in Cuba.

The revolt's first effect abroad was not to raise French prestige but to lower it. An army that had wavered for four days before putting down open rebellion seemed hardly the kind De Gaulle needed to support his claims to grandeur. By the standards of stable democracies, France again looked alarmingly volatile, faction-ridden, subject to sudden upheavals.

But the mutiny in Algeria was the last gasp of empire, staged by the men who had fought for and gradually surrendered that empire around the world. Their cause and battle cry, Algerie Franc,aise, was dead, and the last obstacle had been cleared for peace talks with the Moslem rebel F.L.N. That the talks will end in independence is inevitable--and the revolt strengthened the F.L.N.'s hand, since France, disgusted at the white settler role in the revolt, is less willing than ever to fight a war for their cause. If Moslem Algeria should become a country where no Frenchman among the 1,000,000 now there could live in peace, the four-day mutineers, and the settlers who egged them on, would have their own important share of the blame.

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