Paris Letter: With Each New Crisis

...As long as the left was in office, the Stock Exchange registered vivid, irrestible slumps...

...At that moment the language of our socialists became a lie...

...Trying as it did to serve Moscow and win the people, this party represented a frustrating double intent and structure...

...They did not budge...

...Not entirely true...

...Colonial reconquest would naturally give them another chance, and there the French would be on their own...

...Meanwhile I had again joined the Socialist party...

...Anyone who has witnessed an election in Algeria knows that unless the future proves very different from the past, selfdetermination for the Algerian Moslems need not mean much more than the vote for Negroes in Alabama...

...And the French working class, like the workers in other countries, was not immune to the poisons of racialism...

...Integration of the individual into the community has never been a strong trait among the French, and what there was of it I have seen dwindle in my time...

...The Vietnamese war started with a characteristic incident: the deliberate bombing of Haiphong by the French navy...

...It made sure that all the important permanent civil servants belonged to the upper bourgeoisie and were of a rightist complexion...

...Mendes-France's plans for strict financial austerity were the true means of restoring republican virtue and spirit, but the chance for this lasted only a few months...

...the lower middle class was still worse...

...The self-liberation of Paris became a myth within the larger myth of the Insurrection Nationale, cultivated mainly by the Communists, while the Gaullists magnified the share in the Allied victory of a brave but very small army...

...Each country had its share of the phenomenon, but in France it seemed worse than elsewhere, perhaps because here self-awareness is particularly keen...

...And De Gaulle, both because he genuinely wanted peace and also that through peace France would regain importance in world affairs, decided to give a perceptible bias to his double-speak: hence his proclamation on September 16, 1959, of self-determination for Algeria after the war...

...It shows how far we have come since May 13, 1958 [the date of the Gaullist coup] and indeed since long before then...

...It was a direct challenge...

...The formula, "From Dunkerque to Amanrasset" meant for some safe tenure of their Algeria latifundia, for other that there would be no arguments as to who owned Saharan oil...

...Neither party felt strong enough to clear the muddle, until General Massu's notorious interview forced the issue...

...French military leadership was criminally inefficient, and a country with less than forty million inhabitants lost a million and a half dead...

...I have joined and left many things in my lifetime...

...And it was to this government that we had to look for resistance—resistance of a kind that our republican regime had been unable or unwilling to summon...

...What did De Gaulle mean when he said he would never negotiate the future of Algeria with a so-called "provisional" rebel government which falsely claimed to represent all of Moslem Algeria...

...In the spring of 1958 I, in common with other Frenchmen, had been invited to take De Gaulle or to face fascism, and had been told that De Gaulle alone could be trusted to bring peace in Algeria...

...If France were truly a parliamentary democracy, the prospect of 129 Moslem deputies wielding a balance of power at crucial points (say, on the relation of church to state) might be difficult to face...

...And the European population of Algeria was still more attracted to the Petainist "National Revolution," for they had particular reasons to favor authoritarian patterns...

...Or at least it would have been tempting if De Gaulle had not also reasserted that the army would remain in Algeria and see to it that future elections were honest—presumably as it had seen to the honesty of the last election which had sent to the National Assembly the most grotesque crowd of yes-men ever mustered together...

...I use the passive form feelingly...

...Primarily responsible for this, it should be remembered, was Admiral Thierry d'Argenn lieu, De Gaulles's henchman...

...A comic outcome was the double-speak that De Gaulle's agile mind invented so that he could publicly persuade the AlgerieFrancaise people and the peace party that he was with them...

...So again the Algerian mob moved into action, setting up barricades and killing 14 of the gendarmes who hardly dared shoot back and who were hastily replaced...

...Their share in carrying on the next war—the war in Algeria—is sufficiently indicated when one mentions the name of the pro-consul and SP leader, Robert Lacoste...

...De Gaulle, a very brave man, took the risk of sacking Massu, idol of the paratroopers and the colons...

...Their solution was the "integration" of Algeria into France...

...The Moslems are in the majority, ten to one...

...The Socialists, if anything, were worse...

...But the Algerians had been so noisy since 1954, they compelled the world to listen...

...Even civilian educators, to say nothing of religious misisonaries, have been known to enjoy the intoxication of wielding power over minds at their disposal...

...Some of the officers were mere sadists, some mere slaughters of Arabs...

...Indeed, under De Gaulle, the Fourth ,Republic started on a series of costly and anachronistic campaigns, thereby denying itself the possibility of a quick financial recovery...

...But whoever undertakes to wash brains believes or makes himself believe that he is doing it for the good of the washed as well as the washer, and that he is replacing an unhealthy brain-contest with a healthy one...

...And now, twenty months later, by a grotesque turn of events, it was the government born of the May riots, when the forces of democracy had lain paralyzed, that found itself facing the next outburst...

...In May 1958, Frenchmen—our government, deputies, trade unions, parties of the left—might have decided to make a stand against the army and Algiers...

...It was in Vietnam that the most intelligent and politically-minded of the officer corps, reaping not new glory but new humiliation, began to meditate on the methods of the Chinese and Vietnamese Communists for systematically "remolding" the minds of a population...

...The French Army had reacted against the intolerable humiliation of being made to fight a sordid and costly war without knowing what it was all leading to...

...First it seems horrifying...

...I say, again, as one might speak of restoring the Golden Age, for to me French democracy was like a childhood legend...

...Yet the fact remains that our action, like that of the Communists in their way, had to take Do Gaulle as intermediary and executor, which for many of us was a form of recognition we had never yet willingly given...

...Later we learned of the part that had been taken in some of these plots by the men who for at least two years had been conspiring for a Gaullist takeover in which De Gaulle himself was regarded more as a means than an end...

...a good many, however, were pseudo-thinkers who invented their own methods for welding Algeria to France...

...by paratroopers with whom there was no question of shooting either way...

...He restated the self-determination policy for Algeria, as well as his decision not to negotiate with the fellagha (laborers and peasants) . But one soon made the startling discovery that even now there was room for doublespeak...

...But only if France were so silly as to be a parliamentary democracy . . . For the Army and the ultras "integration" meant that 45 million people would swallow 10 million, instead of letling a million French settlers in Algeria confront an increasingly aggressive ten million Moslems...

...We might decide that since parliamentary democracy was dead anyway, De Gaulle, like Louis-Philippe, was the best of Republicans and therefore side with him...

...At the same, time I was amazed to hear that in Algiers the rioters and their "Committee of Public Safety" were also clamoring for De Gaulle...

...LET US "TURN to the moment when De Gaulle took power...

...To some of us it had not been clear for a good many years how France could again become a working democracy...

...General Challe, supreme military commander in Algeria, added that the army was in Algeria and meant to stay there...

...To me at least it was an obvious corollary , that the colonial system was played out...

...There followed, in any case, a sharpening of the critical sense and an awareness of the duplicity that pervaded all statements of values...

...Repeatedly Frenchmen found that between the two wars they voted into office left wing governments and that in a few months these governments were perceptibly altered by reshufflings, after which they would be replaced without any new election by a center-right coalition...

...As soon as the trend is seen to be a dominant one, there is less and less inclination to resist it...

...Obviously, another "will" was at work, unconnected with the naive game of universal suffrage...

...It took me three years to realize that few of the attitudes and fewer of the decisions of this party rested on a determination to stimulate the liberation of the exploited classes or countries...

...For the army and the colons De Gaulle's proposal, its vagueness notwithstanding, had obvious dangers...

...It had discovered in the Communist techniques a way of both waging war and endowing it with an acceptable meaning...

...De Gaulle's speech, when it came, was a remarkable performance...

...I ESCAPED FROM FRANCE late in 1943 and became a Resistance delegate to the Algiers Consultative Assembly which met again in Paris after the liberation...

...Only the Communists, for their own reasons, opposed the Vietnamese war...

...The terrifying game had started again...

...Did he mean that he might negotiate with the heads of the military rebellion and underground, not the future political status of Algeria nor yet a mere cease-fire, but what was most important: the conditions for the resumption of political life in Algeria which would have to precede a free and honest referendum in that country...

...Still, one never knows...

...they spoke a firm Marxist language, yet all their actions were colored by the fact that their following came increasingly from the mean and greedy lower middle class, whose energies were devoted to climbing up the ladder of the party hierarchy...

...Those of us connected with the small but lively left wing groups decided that if we tendered our specific help for any strong measures against the Algiers movements, as one might help anybody put out a fire, we should be careful not to pledge lasting allegiance to one man's self-chosen policies...

...The Socialists seemed to find it impossible to let go even of the principle of colonialism...

...When peace came the Italians were relieved of their colonial problem, the British felt victorious enough to be sensible and start in India on the road to de-colonization, but the French under General De Gaulle showed unhealthy signs of an inferiority complex...

...When De Gaulle, in his Brazzaville speech at the beginning of 1944, gave an outline of his projected "French Community," this was another disappointment, for it was obvious that "Community" was but a new name for old colonialism...

...By the time he withdrew from power everything in the ensuing process had become fatal: the seeds of decay pervaded the "system...

...I am sure that the most doughty of them felt elated by the prospect of the war in Indo China...

...Passivity, weariness and skepticism— engendered in the working class partly by too many bends in the Communist line an dtoo many glib rationalizations for those bends—remain the enemies of any effort to bring democratic life back to France...

...One of our earliest clashes with the General in Algiers had been over Lebanon, then struggling for its independence against France...

...They—the military activists and civilian ultras—saw things otherwise, and held that the sovereignity was really theirs, though formally deposited in De Gaulle...

...and finally resistance is regarded as an obvious manifestation of wrongheadedness...

...Well aware of this deficiency and despite my decision not to make a career of politics, I suffered the bad conscience of an intellectual who feels he should not leave politics in the hands of unscrupulous politicians...

...With stupid amazement, like a sleeper who wants to react to the presence of danger but cannot stir his limbs, we watched from afar...

...Here lies the virtue of the play, for in the France of 1960 nonconforming heroism cannot be praised too much...

...The Fall had taken place, to my reflective sense, in 1914 when the French Socialist Party decided to share responsibility for the war against Germany—I need hardly add that the corresponding decision of the German Social Democrats was equally fatal with regard to German democracy...

...The tenor of all propaganda was summed up for the average Frenchman in one fatal phrase: bourrage de crdne, brain stuffing, the true predecessor of brain washing...

...The leaders of the mob were a new deputy and former leader of the Algiers students, Pierre Lagaillarde, and the racketeering Poujardist pub-keeper Ortiz...

...For men of the independent left, it was a difficult moment...

...It made sure that the army officer corps was overwhelmingly reactionary...

...Here De Gaulle seemed to be giving Challe and Massu precisely the assurance they had demanded: that the army should see the peace settlement in and not that the peace settlement should see the army out...

...The working class was not much more stirred by the collapse of the Fourth Republic than a century earlier by the slaughter of the Second...

...then it becomes accepted...

...The play tells of how a strange phenomenon— epidemic or mutation—suddenly begins to spread in the body social: one by one its members turn into rhinoceroses...

...De Gaulle, in rejecting it, chose loose finance and large gestures...

...The Resistance, in which we had staked everything, had had its political Charter and had mapped a social democracy which we had pledged ourselves to help bring into being...

...Many fatal habits were added between 1940 and 1944 to an already full collection: fraud, double-dealing, conspiracy, civil and military disobedience became virtues, while the law-abiding unpoliticals were trapped into adhesion to a near-fascist state...

...Putting lust for power before contempt for plotters De Gaulle had allowed them to distance...

...Lagaillarde, leader of the Algerian mob, recently said: "The Fourth Republic died in Algeria...

...On the contrary we should take the opportunity for reasserting our belief in peace in Algeria through negotiations...

...What made possible the pursuit of one of the ugliest and most cruel of all colonial wars in Algeria, was precisely the lack of a determined popular opposition...

...They are fast maturing from an incredible—not primitivism—but degradation...

...This was a tempting interpretation...

...The loss of values was terrific, yet less than proportional to the loss of blood...

...Ionesco, the most robust of our symbolist playwrights, has just given in his latest play The Rhinoceros a message of brave individualism...

...it died of a lethal germ caught in Vietnam...

...In this precarious situation he showed every sign of firmness...

...Nor did this hidden will regulate only matters of finance...

...It was clear that every local measure solemnly announced against the insurgents was actually taken both by them and the army together...

...It was a divided nation which suffered the occupation...

...Soustelle, Blocqu-Mascart, Debre—now prime minister—had consorted more or less as fellow-conspirators with killers and counterterrorists: Debre has not yet even tried to deny his past connections with the authors of the "bazooka murder" of Commandant Rodier, Swift or Voltaire could hardly have invented a more bizarre situation than has existed since De Gaulle under army pressure was called to power, and acclaimed as the man who would both bring peace to Algeria and keep Algeria French...

...And there, at the moment I write, things stand...

...A more hopeful note is struck in the area of culture...

...Separated from the nation by more than space, these officers found in the Communist fusion of military discipline with extensive brainwashing, a model for their own conduct: they would set up a counter-revolutionary equivalent of these "revolutionary methods...

...This army, led by a corps of officer-adventurers often involved with the reseaux of right wing resistance and the secret services, emerged from the war feeling more frustrated than fulfilled...

...Despite some signs of activity from the workers and the political left—a token general strike, a strong stand by the teachers union—the popular response was apathetic...

...I BELIEVE IT MORE IMPORTANT to see De Gaulle's situation clearly than to practice exegesis on his cryptic utterances...

...So thought the Socialists...

...THE TREMENDOUS STRAINS of world politics between the two wars were felt with a peculiar intensity in France...

...We might watch in unconcern, as opponents of the regime...

...The British were fortunate to get the kind of war that elicited their capacity for restraint and self-discipline, while the French got a war that turned their besetting sin of indiscipline into a national virtue...

...I have sometimes thought that the sheer spilling of blood must have induced a collective trauma from which, in the absence of a great new imaginative purpose, the nation could not hope to recover...

...Frustrations accumulated...

...And since it was the absurd Vietnamese war which ruined the hopes of the Fourth Republic, it is only right to recall the responsibility of the Gaullists...

...Yet there is one who does resist...

...For comparatively simple minds, accustomed to the rough logic of military life, there must have been something fascinating in this discovery of a new basis of authority...

...The Communist Party rose and thrived on them, becoming the dominant force within the working class...

...It was the divided army of a divided country that was so easily defeated by the Germans: in 1940...

...In earlier years I had joined and left the Socialist party...

...That is why when General Massu gave his interview to the German journalist Kempski, he made it clear that he disliked De Gaulle's equivocation and that he believed in Algerie Francaise, as well as in the solidarity of the army and the French settlers...

...as soon as the left was removed, astonishing recoveries took place...