FRANCE: Old Man, New Course

Old France, weighed down with history, endlessly vacillating from greatness to decline, but revived, century after century, by the genius of renewal!

Old man, exhausted by ordeal, feeling the approach of the eternal cold, but always watching in the shadows for the gleam of hope!

—War Memoirs of De Gaulle

Three weeks short of his 70th birthday, President de Gaulle went into four-day seclusion at his country retreat in the Champagne region of northeastern France. He tramped in his damp wooded fields (“I have walked them 15,000 times”), sat in the tower study he has added to the old stone farmhouse, working on his first radio-TV speech in five months.

Never since he returned to office nearly 2½ years ago had the necessity to speak rested so heavily upon him.

Only last January, after quelling a settlers’ revolt in Algiers and cracking down hard on its army backers, the President had seemed the unchallenged master of events, quite evidently on his way to ending the Algerian rebellion by applying his proclaimed principle of self-determination. Then, at Melun last summer, he laid down such exacting terms at the first peace parleys that the rebels turned away and flung themselves into the arms of Moscow and Peking, in search of military and diplomatic support.

Room for Maneuver. Within France itself, the pent-up hopes and fears of all the years burst out in an ugly backwash of bitterness. De Gaulle found himself caught between a left demanding that France negotiate peace and a right insisting that war be waged to the bitter end. In Paris last week, 200 cops manned the gates and roofs of the Palais de Justice as Pierre Lagaillarde, cocky right-wing leader of the January insurrection, went on trial with 19 others for insurrection against the state. In Algiers, police cordoned the squares to head off threatened protest riots and hustled a dozen “activists” to exile in France. Like a man seeking room to maneuver, wily General Raoul Salan, the ex-army commander whom De Gaulle forbade to return to Algeria, suddenly took off by train for a “vacation” in Spain, where he proclaimed: “If it should be that Algeria does not remain French, I would go to fight anywhere that was necessary.”

In this atmosphere of disintegration and defiance, De Gaulle delivered a short, powerful broadcast. He proclaimed a new course in Algeria: “This course no longer leads to an Algeria governed by Metropolitan France, but to an Algerian Algeria— an Algeria that will have its own government, its institutions, and its laws.” If the new Algeria chose to break with France, “we would certainly not persist in remaining by force alongside people who would reject us.”

There was no longer any mention of the possibility that Algeria would choose union with France. To the open threats of some army officers that they will revolt if Algeria is lost, De Gaulle replied that he would call a popular referendum, if necessary, to put through his Algerian decision. More than that, he threatened to dissolve Parliament and, as a last resort, take up the dictatorial powers open to him under his constitution’s Article 16 if extremists stand in his way.

Easing up on his old insistence on war till the Algerians “check their knives in the cloakroom.” De Gaulle said that the military situation has “improved.” hinted that it might be possible for France unilaterally to break off military operations in Algeria, “except in legitimate self-defense.” Then he made his major concession. Retreating from his Melun stand that only cease-fire terms could be discussed with the rebels, he called for “general negotiations” including the F.L.N.. and thereby opened the possibility of talks on the whole political future of Algeria.

Visible Evidence. In Algiers. Europeans were stunned. They could only murmur over and over: “He referred to an Algerian republic.” One activist growled: “On est foutu [We’ve had it]. It’s up to the army to assume its responsibilities.” But the army was sobered by De Gaulle’s threat to go to the country for approval, and some officers openly spoke up in grudging admiration (“There’s fight in the old man after all,” said a major in Algiers). “It’s a big step forward,” said an Algerian Moslem.

Once again, President de Gaulle had renewed the gleam of hope in France. Question was whether it was too late. Early in the week, the F.L.N.’s “Premier” Ferhat Abbas celebrated the sixth anniversary of the rebellion’s start at a monster rally in Tunis, and in his speeches he displayed a new truculence. Said he: “We took up arms as the last resort, when all peaceful means had failed. We will not surrender them now on some vague self-determination promise that would be implemented by an army, an administration, and a police force that are opposed to the very principle of self-determination.” The reason for his intransigence was plainly visible behind him, where Russian and Chinese dignitaries sat and beamed like the welcome allies they were.