FRANCE: A Chance for Algeria

Vichy is the place where Frenchmen take the waters by day, and by night listen to speeches designed to soothe their pride as exponents of the glory of France and its civilizing mission. Many are colonists from North Africa, and last week they packed the Hall of Spectacles, confident of hearing a soothing speech from Marshal Alphonse Juin.

As postwar army chief of staff, Juin ordered the repression of the first big Algerian rebellion in 1945 with a ruthless vigor that the French colonists still remember with admiration and the Algerians with bitterness. As Governor General of Morocco, his remedy for unrest was to propose the exile of Sultan Mohammed V. “Colonies are not made by virgins” was his motto. For years he had been the most stubborn opponent of all concessions, the loudest champion of the colonists’ cherished contention that Algeria is a permanent part of France, the most violent critic of any suggestion of a separate status for Algeria.

New Euphemism. What Juin said was a stunning surprise. “I believe,” he said, “the solution lies in a federative status that would leave Algeria largely free of central control and would include a man aging government adapted to the country’s own personality.” The parent country, he added, should “only intervene in matters relating to the general economy, foreign relations and internal security.”

In current French debate, the phrase “federative status” is a new euphemism for an independent republic of Algeria attached to France only by the same kind of loose ties that hold the British Commonwealth together. The colonists in the Hall of Spectacles could scarcely believe their ears. The doctrine L’Algerie, c’est la France had lost its greatest exponent. And clearly, France’s top military man was admitting that the rebellion could not be put down and the old order restored by military repression.

Applying the Brakes. Juin gave his blessings to the plan of Socialist Guy Mollet’s government to set up “a constitutional and elective regime” that would provide for what Juin called “the necessary application of brakes” against any attempt by a Moslem-dominated regime to violate the “rights of the minority,” i.e., Frenchmen. Like other converts, Juin went further: “I hope that such a statute will be presented to the French-Moslem community without waiting for valid representatives to be designated by free elections.” The words free elections would make him laugh, he said, “if circumstances were not so painfully dramatic.”

Mollet has indeed developed a federative plan (TIME, June 18) but has hesitated to publicize it while the government position was still officially that pacification must come before negotiations. Juin’s switch made it possible for Mollet to take a stand which in other days Juin would have been the first to denounce as a surrender.

There would be outcries from the die hard colons, but Juin had taken the fight out of them. “If Juin drops us, the end is coming,” one confessed. But their loss was France’s opportunity, and Mollet seized it. He called a Cabinet meeting, laid his plan before it, and announced that he will fly to Algiers this week for a conference with Minister Resident

Robert Lacoste (who is hospitalized after an operation last week for the removal of a kidney). Undoubted topic of conversation: the drafting and presentation of a “federative status” for Algeria.