FRANCE: The Visionary

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It was a scene to gladden even the most jaded cruise director. The open-air movie was filled to capacity with a bronzed, relaxed audience. In the swimming pool near by, energetic types were splashing away at water polo. From the “Bikini” bar came the clink of glasses and the hum of bar babble, and in the soft glow cast by indirect neon lighting, palm leaves fluttered.

Only one thing marred the luxury-liner atmosphere that hung last week over the self-contained little world called Hassi Messaoud (Blessed Well): the waves that billowed around it were of sand, not of water. Hassi Messaoud, the Dawson City of the great French oil rush of 1959, lies deep in the barren wastes of the Sahara, 400 miles (or three days by truck) south of Algiers.

Four years ago Hassi Messaoud was simply an abandoned water hole, a navigational reference point for voyagers across the vast sea of sand and stone that the Romans called leonum arida nutrix— the arid nurse of lions. Today it has 5,000 inhabitants, sprawls over nearly 60 square miles of desert. Hassi Messaoud still has no women, no children, no church, no mosque. But it does have three hotels (650 rooms in air-conditioned cottages), two movie theaters, two swimming pools, an airport big enough to handle Caravelle jets, and 124 private firms, including an automatic laundry and a lemonade factory. Between the buildings green lawns grow in topsoil trucked in from Algiers. In its three staff dining rooms white-jacketed waiters serve meals worthy of a three-star Paris restaurant, from pate to four kinds of cheese.

To create this 20th century oasis has cost France dear; between them, two French oil firms—one 80% government-owned, the other 30% government-owned —have spent an estimated $300 million on Hassi Messaoud and its 40 producing oil wells. Similar sums are being spent at the Sahara’s other major field—Edjelé —and 900 miles of Saharan pipeline will cost at least another $60 million.

So far the payoff has been slight: a scant 480,000 tons of oil last year (compared to Kuwait’s 70 million tons). But the promise is enough to give some substance to Charles de Gaulle’s dreams of the grandeur of France. For if the Sahara’s already proven oil reserves—conservatively estimated at 700 million tons—can be successfully tapped and marketed, France will no longer have to lay out some $300 million a year in hard-won foreign exchange to pay for the oil needed to keep French industry and transport running. More important yet, France will no longer be so dependent on the whims of Arab rulers in the Middle East.

“Our California.” The Sahara has captured the imagination of all France. At least a million French families have invested in Saharan oil stocks, and every month thousands of young Frenchmen apply for jobs in the Sahara fields. French newspapers refer to the Sahara as “our California,” and the man most responsible for the Sahara agrees. Says France’s Minister Delegate Jacques Soustelle: “This desert should come to mean to France what the Far West meant at a certain period to the American states on the Atlantic coast.”

To men who have experienced the Sahara’s killing climate and awesome aridity —temperatures around the year range from below freezing up to more than 130°F. ; in some areas the normal interval between rains is five years or more—comparison with any part of California except Death Valley seems ridiculous. The political comparison is not so farfetched. The hope that De Gaulle has held out to war-weary Algeria in his “Constantine Plan” (TIME, Oct. 13) depends on his assurances to the poor Moslem population that they have a prosperous future to share in economic and political equality with Metropolitan Frenchmen. Without the wealth of the Sahara—and the power it could furnish Algeria—the Constantine Plan would be an intolerable financial burden on France, and an unredeemable promise. Says Jacques Soustelle: “It is here in this desert region that the destiny of the French Republic will be settled.”

Just Like Chicago. Officially, Soustelle is Minister Delegate to the Premier, with four responsibilities—the Sahara, atomic energy (“but not the bomb”), overseas territories and overseas departments—but he prefers to be known by his unofficial title, Minister of the Sahara. A solidly built, wavy-haired man with blandly skeptical eyes half-hidden behind owlish glasses, Soustelle calls himself “a typical Frenchman,” and in some respects looks the part. But at various times in his meteoric career this tough, confident and shrewd man has been described as “the Molotov of Gaullism,” “Jacques the Wrecker,” “the Big Alley Cat,” “a born secret policeman,” and “the most dangerous man in France.” However unfair some of these epithets may be, dynamic Jacques Soustelle today at 47 has more political potential than any other Frenchman save Charles de Gaulle. It is a potential respectfully conceded even by many who fear it.

Soustelle is still the living symbol of the French rightists’ “No surrender” policy in Algeria, and as such he stands at the top of the Algerian rebels’ “elimination list.” Lightly wounded in an assassination attempt last fall (TIME, Sept. 29), he lives under the constantly watchful eye of bodyguards. When he leaves his office on Paris’ Rue Oudinot, his movements are signaled ahead by a succession of handclaps; at the ministry entrance and on surrounding street corners, men armed with submachine guns spring to the alert. “Just like a Chicago gangster, eh?” he grinned to a visitor last week, pointing to his armored Citroen with its bulletproof windows. “You won’t mind if someone takes a potshot at you?”

The Competition Animal. Ever since his birth in the Cevennes Mountains of southern France, Jacques Soustelle has been what the French call “a competition animal.” Born with a double handicap—his family was poor and of France’s Protestant minority—Soustelle early decided that “I had to succeed, and quick.” With the encouragement of his mother (who at 70 recently retired from work) and his mechanic stepfather, he won a lycee scholarship at eight, relentlessly mastered Greek, Latin, English and mathematics, at 20 placed first in philosophy among 250 candidates for France’s highest scholastic competition, the Agrègation. In 1932, with his gifted bride of a year, Tunis-born Anthropologist Georgette Fagot,* he set off for Mexico, there spent most of the next seven years in anthropological study of the Mexican Indians. By 1939 he had won a doctorate, the nickname “Jacques the Aztec,” and a reputation as one of France’s top experts on Mexico.

“Bonjour, Commissar.” Along the way, Soustelle came to share Latin American outcries about Yankee imperialism (“Even that which Americans do with good intention becomes tainted because there is such a difference in psychology”), and developed so strong a left-wing slant that when he joined the Free French in 1940, a right-wing Gaullist received him with the sour greeting: “Bonjour, Commissar.” Like most other French leftists, Soustelle supported Socialist Leon Blum’s prewar Popular Front with the Communists. In Mexico one of his great friends was Communist Painter Diego Rivera, who was at that time, Soustelle recalls, “in an anti-Stalinist phase and carried a large pistol.”

Today Soustelle insists that he is not anti-American. “I am one of France’s few public men who know the U.S., who speak English, who read the books and magazines. But I am pro-French! Excuse me, but I ami” He is outspokenly resentful of the U.S. refusal to support France in Algeria. “The Americans.” he declared early last year, “treat their friends as enemies and their enemies as friends.”

As to his present position in the political spectrum, even Soustelle himself cannot define it. “In social matters,” he said last week, “I could today be classified as a complete man of the left. But I do not admit that to be a good republican one must deny one’s national feelings.” The issues that once separated right from left in France no longer seem of primary importance to Jacques Soustelle. What is of primary importance to him, as to

Charles de Gaulle, is the survival of France as a world power.

“What a Man!” When the news of the fall of France reached Soustelle in Mexico in 1940. he thought of joining the British or Canadians. The British consul told him that a French general had turned up in London. “I didn’t know anything about him. He could have been, well, any kind of general.” But Soustelle wired his support to Charles de Gaulle, and was summoned to London. There the young competition animal (he was then 28) recognized a man he regarded as fit to be his master. Years afterward an old Marxist friend, cornering Soustelle at an art exhibition, reproachfully demanded: “Jacques, how could you have left us for a man?” “Ah,” said Soustelle, his face lighting up, “but what a man!”

De Gaulle, in turn, divined untapped organizing ability in the young scholar, soon named him chief of the Free French intelligence service—a job that gave Soustelle his first taste of intrigue and a graduate education in Communist political techniques. Soustelle’s war was spent in battling for the Gaullist cause not only against the Germans but also against Allied intelligence services, including rival French units backed by Britain and the U.S. When he returned to liberated Paris in 1944, he recalls, “I did not expect to be praised, but at least to be noticed.” In a way he was: he was summoned before France’s National Committee of Liberation and denounced by its Communist chairman as a traitor and a Fascist who had betrayed the Resistance and obstructed liberation. Says Soustelle: “It was like a Moscow trial. I realized that if the Communists came to power, they would shoot us all.”

“I Will Return.” In the first postwar years. Soustelle’s political fortunes were inseparable from De Gaulle’s. He became first his Chief of Information, then his Minister of Colonies. And when De Gaulle, disgusted with partisan bickering, dramatically retired to the rural peace of Colombey-les-Deux Eglises, Soustelle followed him into the wilderness, became chief of the Gaullist opposition forces in Parliament.

Soustelle’s first taste of independent political power did not come until 1955, when ex-Premier Pierre Mendès-France named him Governor General of Algeria. It was a fateful appointment for Soustelle and for France. Soustelle went to Algeria a “liberal,” and he vastly annoyed Algeria’s European settlers by trying to head off the simmering Moslem revolt with agrarian reform and more government jobs for Moslems. But after August 1955, when a band of Algerian rebels murdered and mutilated scores of French civilians in the mining town of El Alia, Soustelle turned implacably hostile toward negotiations with the rebel F.L.N., called for all-out military suppression. So congenial did the settlers find his new attitude that when Socialist Premier Guy Mollet yanked Soustelle from his job as Governor General, he was carried shoulder-high through Algiers by French colons in one of the wildest demonstrations in the city’s history. Soustelle promised the crowd: “This is not farewell. I will return when Algeria needs me.”

The Architect. With Algeria’s troubles as his theme, Soustelle mounted a parliamentary assault that toppled two of the last three governments of the Fourth Republic. Outside Parliament he began, with practical organizing skill, to pull together the network of Gaullist and wealthy Algerian settlers who on May 13, 1958 touched off the military revolt in Algiers. Today he indignantly insists that “there was no plot, or that sort of stupid stuff.” But a moment later he pulls out a copy of a book spelling out the details of the Algiers plot and, with a chuckle, points to the author’s inscription: “To Jacques Soustelle, the principal architect of the miraculous days in Algiers.”

When these miraculous, necessary days came, the Fourth Republic’s disintegrating government slapped a 24-hour-a-day police guard on Soustelle. Grinning as he displays his knowledge of underworld argot, Soustelle recalls: “I decided to take a powder.” With the professional expertise of the old spy master, Soustelle slipped out of his Paris apartment hidden under a pile of luggage in a neighbor’s car and crossed the border to Switzerland (“Of course, I had a false identity”). Two days later he was in Algiers, whipping up the crowd with shouts of “Vive De Gaulle!” and working behind the scenes to ensure that the insurrection did not grow into more than he intended it to be: a threatening gesture that would frighten France’s reluctant party politicians into accepting De Gaulle on the general’s own terms.

Biding Time. No man save De Gaulle himself had done more to change the course of postwar French history than Jacques Soustelle. The payoff was scarcely what Soustelle must have hoped for. “No one else has ever praised me for my role in Algiers,” said he last week, “so I am obliged to praise myself.”

Soustelle, whose very name had come to suggest conspiracy and revolt against legitimate authority, was somewhat of an embarrassment to De Gaulle, and in the first months of De Gaulle’s reign, relations between the two grew increasingly formal. Even after the Union for the New Republic—the self-proclaimed Gaullist party organized by Soustelle—swept to an overwhelming majority in the Assembly of the Fifth Republic, De Gaulle continued to regard Soustelle as too controversial to have conspicuous power. The premiership went to Gaullist Lawyer Michel Debré, a relative unknown; for Soustelle there was an agglomeration of odd jobs—including the Sahara. Mockingly, some Frenchmen dubbed Soustelle “the Minister of the Future,” and when in last March’s municipal elections he failed to win the mayoralty of Lyon—which would have given him a local political power base—many pundits concluded that his star was setting.

But quick-tempered as he often seems, Soustelle is a man who bides his time. As De Gaulle almost surely did, he too saw in the Sahara job great long-range political and economic potential. If, as he believed, the Sahara could provide both France and Algeria with unprecedented prosperity, the Minister of the Sahara would be a man to reckon with in the France of a decade hence.

The Waterbibber. With this vision to inspire him, Soustelle has brought to his new job all the fierce energy he once devoted to political maneuvers. His appointments (ten a day) begin soon after breakfast, among fine Aztec and Mayan treasures in his book-lined apartment on Paris’ elegant Avenue Henri-Martin. By 10 o’clock he is in the office, and he often lunches there, washing his meals down with water. (“You see in me,” he chuckles, “one of the rare Frenchmen who do not like wine.”) Dinner, too, and often evenings are apt to be business affairs, after which, “Every night I read for hours. The academic addiction.”

One week in five, Soustelle flies off to the Sahara, where he functions as a kind of one-man Cabinet. As the top political authority in France’s two Saharan departments (Saoura and Oases), Soustelle supervises the affairs of 93 municipal governments that he has established in the desert, bears responsibility for the security of Reggan, France’s atomic test area in the Sahara. And as chief of O.C.R.S. (Common Organization for the Saharan Regions), he is empowered to negotiate pacts with the four newly independent African members of the French Community who share the western and southern Sahara with France.

Lunar Landscapes. Soustelle’s empire is only a part of the world’s largest desert; by usual geographers’ reckoning, the Sahara runs from the Atlas Mountains south to the Niger and from Africa’s Atlantic Coast east to the Red Sea. But even the French Community’s half of the Sahara is awesome in size (1,600,000 sq. mi. v. 213,000 for France) and bewildering in its diversity. Barely a seventh of it is the movie desert of The Sheik—the vast expanses of sand wind-blown into golden dunes. The rest is mostly rock: gravelly plains, dry river beds, lunar landscapes whose peaks soar to 11,000 feet above sea level and depressions of 50 to 100 feet below sea level.

France took on this unpromising territory largely by happenstance. When Britain in 1890 agreed to concede France a free hand in the Sahara, Lord Salisbury commented: “Let the Gallic cock sharpen his spurs in the desert sand.” But for nearly half a century virtually the only Frenchmen to show much interest in the desert sands were adventurers and eccentrics. Tindouf, now one of the French army’s most important Sahara outposts, was not occupied until 1934, and the last of the marauding desert bands was not brought under control until 1935.

The first man to see potential wealth in the Sahara was a brilliant but unstable French geologist named Conrad Kilian. In 1927, after three harrowing years in the central Sahara—on one expedition he was obliged to remove his own tonsils without anesthetic—Kilian returned to Paris proclaiming that the Sahara was a huge depository of oil and natural gas. Geologists scoffed. “There is no more oil in the Sahara than there are trees in the Atlantic,” cracked one. In 1950, worn out by repeated bouts of mental illness and years of rebuffs from French authorities, Kilian hanged himself.

Within months of his death the first official geological research parties set out for the Sahara; within five years the first Sahara oil was discovered at the ocher-red waste, of Edjelé.

“Never Again.” With the first Edjelé strike, the rush was on. In July 1956 came a first producing well at Hassi Messaoud, in a field now estimated at 800 sq. mi. Two more promising oilfields have been discovered within a 50-mile radius of Edjelé, and one of the world’s largest natural gas deposits (estimated reserves: 28 trillion cu. ft.) has been discovered at Hassi R’Mel, only 80 miles below the Algerian border.

The climate was all but unbearable. At Hassi Messaoud the first oil drilling teams labored in 120° to 130° temperatures and through sandstorms, often came off an eight-hour shift near collapse. At Edjelé, welders putting together oil storage tanks learned that simply to touch the metal of the tanks meant a bad burn. The combination of Saharan sand and heat wears out mechanical equipment with startling rapidity; at Edjelé the average life of a Dodge truck engine is 7,500 miles.

Biggest difficulty of all lies in supplies, of which Hassi Messaoud alone consumes 2,400 tons a week. Almost everything but water (which is mercifully plentiful underground) has to be flown or trucked into the camps from Algiers. A truck driver on the Algiers-Edjelé run, accustomed to six or seven blowouts per trip, and to having his truck frequently immobilized by sandstorms for days on end, says: “Every time I reach Edjelé, I collapse more or less where I stand, and swear I will never make the run again.”

Using local labor wherever possible, the oil camps have given employment to 20,000 Saharans—and thereby increased sales of radios, motor scooters and bicycles in the neighboring oases by 1,000%. Some Moslem employees have even risen to skilled jobs as truckers or members of oil rig crews, but for the bulk of their skilled labor the oil companies are obliged to look to France. To lure and keep the kind of men they need, the companies rely not on high salaries—top wages for an engineer are $700 a month—but on the pioneer spirit, a generous leave policy (up to one week in four in Algiers) and high living standards. Says a Hassi Messaoud executive: “Provided the mail is regular and the food is good, you can get Frenchmen to accomplish the impossible.”

Gas Out of the Ears. As French government and industry poured capital into the Sahara, at the current rate of more than $200 million a year, foreign oilmen at first looked on with skepticism. They questioned French estimates of reserves; they observed that the Sahara’s sweet crude (more than 40 degree gravity) yields far more gasoline than Kuwait crude—but less than half as much heavy fuel oil. France most needs heavy fuel oil for its industry, said Petroleum Week, warning of the danger that “France would soon have gasoline running out its ears.”

But most of all, foreign oil companies were doubtful that oil could be got out through war-torn Algeria. The F.L.N. rebels, insisting that the French Sahara is an inseparable part of Algeria (although most Algerian Moslems fear the Sahara and have traditionally avoided it), swore to destroy any oil the French tried to move out of the desert, proclaimed that the rebel government would automatically consider void any Sahara concessions that foreign oil companies negotiated with the French government.

People Are Necessary. But since the first burst of skepticism, foreign oil companies, ranging from Royal Dutch Shell to Esso, have bought exploratory concessions in the Sahara—always, by French government insistence, in partnership with French capital. Sophisticated economic pressure from France helped bring about their change of heart. The French government served notice that all oil companies with refineries in France—which includes Esso, Socony, Caltex, Shell and British Petroleum—would be obliged to accept substantial quantities of Saharan crude for the next few years. Foreign refiners thus had a solid economic incentive to develop their own sources of Sahara oil. This bargain had another effect. To meet the heavy fuel-oil demands of the French market, foreign oil companies operating in France will have little choice but to ship part of the light Sahara oil to the U.S. or Canada and to replace it in their French refineries with heavier crude from their Middle Eastern fields.

Along with this economic pressure has gone a convincing demonstration of France’s determination and ability to move .oil out of the Sahara despite the F.L.N. Early in 1958 the French began to ship oil from Hassi Messaoud through a six-inch “baby” pipeline to Touggourt (see map) and thence by railroad tanker to Algeria’s Mediterranean coast. In the Sahara itself this presented no difficulty; most of the desert’s 500,000 widely scattered Moslem inhabitants are still pro-French. (“Besides,” says a desert patrol officer, “in order to have incidents, one must first have people.”) But even in Algeria proper, along the narrow-gauge track out of Touggourt, the rebels only once succeeded in derailing an oil train. Of 480,000 tons shipped from Hassi Messaoud, all but 500 got to France.

Four Feet Down. The psychologically useful—but prohibitively expensive—train shipments will soon be unnecessary. By last week French and Moslem workers had laid all but the last 18 miles of a 24-inch, 415-mile pipeline from Hassi Messaoud to the Algerian port of Bougie; they should finish the job in a month. As a protection against sabotage, the new pipeline has been buried under almost four feet of earth along most of its route. Three weeks ago General Maurice Challe, French commander in chief in Algeria, deployed 20,000 troops in an all-out drive to clear the Algerian end of the line of rebels.

By next January, oil from Hassi Messaoud should be flowing into Bougie at the rate of 4,500,000 tons a year; by the end of 1960, construction of another floating dock and additional storage reservoirs at Bougie will allow the flow to be stepped up to 14 million tons a year. Before then another 24-inch pipeline from the Edjelé area to La Skhira on the coast of Tunisia is to be finished. Barring a change of heart by Tunisia’s President Habib Bourguiba (who abandoned his customary solidarity with the F.L.N. in approving the project), the builders of the Edjelé pipeline expect to be shipping oil through it at the rate of 10 million tons a year within twelve months.

What all this will mean to the French economy was spelled out not long ago by Jacques Soustelle. Said he: “Metropolitan France now consumes more than 20 million tons of oil a year. This was the basic factor that for years brought our trade balance into the red. When in five or six years consumption reaches the 36 million-ton level, we will be able to pump between 30 and 50 million tons out of the Sahara.”

A Matter of Definition. Soustelle wants to do more than wipe out France’s dollar deficit. He hopes to make France a major oil supplier to the entire 168 million people in Western Europe’s new Common Market nations, feeding oil by tanker into the southern end of a projected 36-inch pipeline from Marseille to Karlsruhe. Sahara’s natural gas might be transported to Europe either by tankers specially built to carry it in liquid form or by a trans-Mediterranean pipeline through Spain. And Algeria itself will benefit from a feeder line to carry gas from Hassi R’Mel to the steel plant which by De Gaulle’s decree is to be built near Bône.

The Sahara’s wealth is not confined to oil: southeast of Tindouf lies what may prove one of the world’s largest iron deposits (an estimated 2 billion tons of better-than-50% ore), and below the coalmining center of Colomb-Béchar geologists have found a lode of manganese capable of yielding 50,000 tons a year. Today the great cost of transporting them out of the Sahara excludes exploitation of these heavy ores. But Soustelle, firmly if vaguely, continues to talk of the day when “we shall see materialize in the Sahara in a new way the modern activities of a big part of our industry.” With more immediacy, he talks of building a power plant (to run on local deposits of natural gas) at the oasis of In Salah and of building a full-fledged town at Hassi Messaoud.

Sahara oilmen dismissed as impractical even Soustelle’s more modest plans to bring their wives and families to the desert. And many hardheaded French businessmen and bureaucrats, noting that it will probably take the oil companies 30 years to amortize the investments they have already made in the Sahara, pooh-pooh Soustelle’s industrialized Sahara as visionary.

“Visionary?” says Jacques Soustelle. “The word has two meanings. You can say that a man is visionary and mean that he is a fool. But if in saying that a man is visionary you mean that he sees ahead and plans for the future—yes, then I am a visionary.”

*Who got her doctorate at the Sorbonne last May.