FRANCE: Time for Decision

Algiers last week had its first—and perhaps its last—New Year’s diplomatic reception. In his tree-shaded villa. Les Oliviers, overlooking Algiers bay. General Charles de Gaulle served port and caviar to handshaking representatives of eleven nations which, in some form or other, have recognized the French Committee of National Liberation. By next January, the men of Algiers hoped, a reception could be held in liberated Paris.

Behind the Algiers Committee lay some seven months of painful, slow accomplishment; ahead, its hardest task. What the Committee wanted now, on the eve of invasion, was full recognition as the provisional government of France. It could defend the right to represent all France with better logic than most Allied-sponsored governments in exile. But, in official Allied opinion, it did not have their legitimacy.

The Change. The Algiers regime stood on its record, and on its plan for returning liberated France to constitutional democracy (TIME, Dec. 13). Admiral Jean François Darlan, the puppet and symbol of Allied expediency, was dead; General Henri Honoré Giraud, the later instrument of expediency, was in eclipse. Their alternative and countersymbol,General de Gaulle, was no longer the sole and dominant symbol of Fighting France. The Liberation Committee and its corollary advisory Consultative Assembly had to some extent overshadowed him. All responsible observers in Algiers, including some who had opposed De Gaulle, now recognized the fact that the Committee and the Assembly constituted the best attainable cross section of opinion from both inside and outside France. But London and Washington still hesitated: Was this best good enough?

The Spokesmen. The Algiers government functioned as a limited, interim democracy. The actual legislative body was the Committee. Original members were appointed by Generals Giraud and De Gaulle, later ones by majority vote. The Consultative Assembly acted as a parliament without direct powers. But the Assembly was now the deciding factor in Fighting French politics; sitting almost continuously, it could and did bring the power of homeland opinion to bear on De Gaulle and the Liberation Committee.

Designed for 102, the Assembly now has 60 members. Of these, 40 are the elected delegates of the French undergrounds, smuggled out under the Nazi nose. Collectively, they represent the only French opinion which has a full voice today. The Assembly has 20 former members of the 1940 French Chamber and Senate.

But the majority speaks for active resistance groups. The spokesman for resistance is a member called René Ferrière (who for security reasons cannot be photographed or described). Ferrière calls himself “le français du trottoir”—the Frenchman in the street. When he arrived in Algiers, he was as unaware as most Frenchmen of the confusion there. He had expected much: “After two days,” he said, “I was completely bewildered, cried all night and intended to return to France the next day.” He has stayed long enough to see the leading men of Vichy cleaned out of the administration, politics and the army by the Committee’s Purge Commission.*

The Alternatives. London and Washington seemed to have three choices: 1) recognition of the Algiers government now or soon after France is invaded; 2) support in one way or another of Marshal Henri Pétain; or 3) an attempt to postpone the whole issue, deal with France during the invasion interim as a military area. The overwhelming testimony of Frenchmen in France and out was that either alternative to recognition of Algiers would lead to bloody disaster: Frenchmen slaying Frenchmen, bitter hatred between Frenchmen and their “liberators.”

*Most notable recent arestees: Pierre Etienne Flandin, ex-Foreign Minster under Marshal Pétain; Marcel Peyrouton, ex-Ministerof the Interior under Pétain; Pierre Boisson, turncoat Governor General ofFrench West Africa, who fired on a joint British-Free French landingat Dakar in 1940.