PEACEMAKER IN THE SKI RESORT

BIGGEST share of the credit for France's settlement with the F.L.N. goes to Louis Joxe, 60, the witty, wily diplomat who is Charles de Gaulle's Minister of State for Algerian Affairs. In November 1960 when he was handed the thankless task of ending the war, Joxe based his strategy on the theory that negotiating with the embittered, intractable representatives of Algeria's provisional government was not so much a diplomatic assignment as "guerrilla warfare, transposed to the political plane."P:

In conference-table combat waged over the past nine months, Joxe consistently maintained a leisurely manner. Unlike many French diplomats, he believes in frankness, is fond of quoting Aristide Briand's axiom: "When circumstances are really important, one must say the same thing to everybody." He refused to give way on the key issues: continued French ownership of Sahara oil and stringent guarantees for Algeria's European minority. The first round of talks broke up last June after only three weeks; a second conference, in July, foundered after only eight days. When the Algerians cried that "the debate has become useless and aimless," Joxe declared: "Our nerves are steady."P:

THE real test of Louis Joxe's nerves came last fortnight when the Algerian government agreed to a last-ditch attempt to reach a settlement. Joxe was convinced that the Algerians would be able to resist pressure from their own anti-French extremists only if the negotiations were hermetically sealed off from newsmen. As a meeting place Joxe chose Les Rousses, a crowded but unfashionable French ski resort near the Swiss border. There the French team took over the government-owned Chalet du Yeti (the Cottage of the Abominable Snowman). The Algerians, quartered across the border at a lakeside resort, used different cars and routes each day to attend the sessions, driving straight into a garage that connected with the conference room. All the delegates disguised themselves as skiers in stretch pants and dark glasses, strapped two pairs of skis on every car they used. Scores of newsmen snooped throughout the area, but as one Algerian bragged: "We were indistinguishable from vacationers. Even our French opposite numbers had suntans."

For nine days, Frenchmen and Algerians coolly kept their distance, even ate in separate rooms. During the last 14-hour session, the two teams finally shared sandwiches at the conference table; when the guerrilla war was over at last, Louis Joxe and every member of his delegation shook hands with the Algerians. Then, with skis still strapped to their cars, each delegation drove off with copies of the 100-page agreement that spelled out Joxe's initial aim: "To enable the men and women of Algeria to build their future together."

JOXE, says a colleague, "is a politician by nature, which is much better than being one by training." Louis Joxe was a professor's son, and after graduation from the University of Paris, he became a history professor there himself. He turned from teaching to join France's Foreign Office in 1932, took a year out in 1937 to teach at Vermont's Middlebury College. When France fell in 1940, Joxe escaped to Algeria to carry on the resistance, helped plan the North African landings. Later, he was France's ambassador to Moscow (1952-55); as ambassador to Bonn in 1956, he helped negotiate the Saar treaty by which France and Germany took the first big leap toward economic integration. In 1959, after De Gaulle had returned to power, Joxe became Secretary of State to Premier Debre, presided over far-reaching government reforms. According to friends, Joxe was disappointed that he had not become De Gaulle's Foreign Minister, but he has performed so brilliantly in the Algerian negotiations that last week Frenchmen were already discussing him as a possible Premier.

Louis Joxe has plump, ruddy cheeks, a large nose, silver hair and silver-rimmed spectacles; he looks, cracked French Novelist Jules Roy, "like a Roman consul, or maybe a cardinal." De Gaulle has praised him as "a model of conscience, the tomb of discretion," but he is also noted for humor and informality. In 1960, he was assigned to escort Nikita Khrushchev on his tour of France, became one of the few contenders to top Khrushchev in a proverb-spouting contest. The old adage (quoted by Dromio of Syracuse in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors) that stopped Nikita: "He must have a long spoon that must eat with the devil."

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