FRANCE: A Handful of Guns

In Paris one day last week, at a luncheon meeting designed to promote Franco-American friendship, suave, well-tailored U.S. Ambassador Amory Houghton was greeted by a glaring Frenchman with the wild outcry: “We hate America!”

A few hours earlier, in the predawn darkness, two R.A.F. Hastings transports had put down at a heavily guarded airport near Tunis and disgorged 350 Sterling submachine guns, 70 Bren guns and 42,000 rounds of ammunition. The British planes were followed by two U.S. Air Force transports carrying 500 M-1 rifles and 50,000 rounds of ammunition. Overriding anguished French protests, the U.S. and Britain had decided to deliver arms to tiny Tunisia (pop. 3,780,000) in the hope of forestalling acceptance of a promised shipment of 2,000 rifles from Egypt.

To the French this was an act of open hostility, for most Frenchmen firmly believe that Tunisia’s dynamic President Habib Bourguiba turns over to the Algerian rebels every gun he can lay hands on. At the NATO Parliamentarians’ Conference in Paris, French Deputy Pierre Schneiter, white with anger, declared that “the pursuit of Atlantic unity has no further purpose,” and stalked out, followed by the rest of the French delegation. France’s harried young Premier Felix Gaillard, who had called Ambassador Houghton in at 1:30 a.m. to protest the U.S.British arms shipments, implied that France would boycott next month’s critical NATO summit meeting.

The bitterest French complaint was that the United States and Britain had acted without consulting France. But the plain fact was that for two months the U.S. had been warning France that something would have to be done about arms for Tunisia.

The Alternatives. Ever since Tunisia won its independence from France in 1956, President Bourguiba has been trying to get the French to equip his fledgling army. His 6,000 men had only 3,000 rifles and less than three rounds of ammunition per man. Successive French governments, arguing that Bourguiba was giving aid and comfort to the Algerian rebels, stalled the Tunisians off. Last September, after French forces in Algeria invoked “the right of hot pursuit” and began to follow fleeing Algerian rebels into Tunisian territory, Bourguiba publicly appealed to the U.S. for arms.

Scarcely had Bourguiba opened his mouth when Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser—bent, as ever, on bolstering his claim to leadership of the Arab world —stepped in and offered Tunisia a shipload of guns. So did Communist Czechoslovakia. (The Western guess was that the arms offered by Nasser would come from Czechoslovakia, too.) Bourguiba accepted the Egyptian offer, but continued to make it clear that he would rather be supplied by the West. Bourguiba is one of the West’s staunchest friends in the Arab world. To the U.S. State Department the alternatives seemed clear: either the West must furnish Bourguiba with the guns he wanted, or run the risk of letting strategic Tunisia fall under Egyptian and perhaps, eventually, under Soviet influence. Hastily, the U.S. promised to help Bourguiba get Western arms, and late in September the Italian government an nounced that a small quantity of “very light” Italian weapons would soon be shipped to Tunis.

The Crackdown. In France, this Italian-American double play aroused so much anger that it contributed heavily to the downfall of Premier Maurice Bourges-Maunoury (TIME, Oct. 14). Unnerved by the vigor of the French reaction, the Italians quickly backed out. The U.S. began to pressure France to take the face-saving way out and furnish Bourguiba with French weapons. The French, who had joined Britain in the attack on Suez largely because Nasser was helping the Algerian rebels, were dismayed to find that the British were now determined to maintain Anglo-American solidarity at all costs, and stood with the U.S.

For five weeks while France wallowed in crisis, vainly seeking a government, the U.S. held its hand. But after energetic Felix Gaillard won his vote of investiture as Premier, the U.S. felt that it could wait no longer. Bluntly, Gaillard was told that unless French weapons were on their way to Tunisia by Nov. 12, Britain and the U.S. would start making deliveries themselves. Last week, having won two more days’ delay, French Ambassador to Tunisia Georges Gorse made a desperate last-minute offer to Bourguiba: France would supply the arms if, in addition to accepting the conditions imposed by Britain and the U.S. (a pledge that the arms would be used only for self-defense and would not be transferred to the Algerians), Bourguiba would agree to reject the weapons that the Egyptians had all ready to ship. Bourguiba refused (“I cannot allow the security of my country to depend on the whim of the French government”)—and U.S. and British delivery plans automatically went into effect.

Saving the Remains. The violence with which Frenchmen reacted was all out of proportion to the handful of guns involved. The French Senate promptly scheduled a debate on the desirability of withdrawing from NATO. But Felix Gaillard was plainly aware that such a threat, though useful for domestic political effect, was militarily unthinkable. France, he told the National Assembly glumly, would not destroy “whatever remains of the Atlantic alliance.” When L’Aurore, Paris’ biggest morning paper, prepared an eight-column banner headline, FRANCE MUST QUIT NATO, the government quietly put pressure on the publisher, succeeded in getting the headline toned down.

But the policy of bloody drift in Algeria has driven the French close to national bankruptcy, jeopardized the West’s friendships in North Africa, weakened the defense of Europe by drawing off all but a fraction of the troops France is pledged to keep at NATO’s disposal. What Britain and the U.S. had done was to administer to France a teaspoonful of medicine that she desperately needs, but will not take voluntarily.