France: A Nation In Agony
Parisot, Paul
The French Left has finally returned to political action. On October 27, 1960, summoned by the National Union of French Students and joined by the independent unions—Force Ouvriere, the...
...He announced his intention to "have direct recourse to the country by means of a referendum...
...After his speech of November 4, 1960, one wondered whether de Gaulle, as he had so often done in the past, would be content with having spoken or whether he would act...
...The Comite Maurice Audin considers these two officers to be responsible for the death of the young mathematician...
...Ever since de Gaulle put forward this formula, the French Army's mission in Algeria has in effect been terminated...
...One hundred and twenty-one intellectuals asserted that they "respected and took to be justified: 1) the refusal to bear arms against the Algerians...
...If the Algerian War continues, the Left will have to fight to keep the Gaullist regime from taking on a more and more reactionary form...
...There is only one problem left: arranging a peace...
...De Gaulle has clearly formulated the objectives of his policy (self-determination, government of Algeria by Algerians...
...This demonstration of sympathy toward the accused in the Jeanson trial was the work of a small number of intellectuals...
...These issues are closely related...
...My student Maurice Audin was murdered in June 1957...
...The progressive whittling down of freedom...
...They hoped for the victory of the FLN, although not all of them accept the politics of the FLN...
...This view was formulated more than two years ago by those of the liberal Left who voted "no" to the installation of the Fifth Republic...
...then, realizing that they could not do so, boycotted the demonstration...
...On October 27, 1960, summoned by the National Union of French Students and joined by the independent unions—Force Ouvriere, the French Confederation of Christian Workers and the autonomous teachers unions20,000 to 25,000 Parisians demonstrated for Algerian peace and the defense of civil liberties...
...AT THIS POINT, it seems, de Gaulle committed an error of judgment...
...Let us note, for the record, that one of the ministers who signed these decrees, Andre Malraux, finds his own daughter, Florence Malraux, and his first wife, the novelist Clara Malraux, among the signers of the "manifesto of the 121...
...In his letter to the Minister of the Armed Forces, who had deprived him of his post at the Polytechnique (the highest French military school), he wrote: "If I have signed the Declaration of the 121, it is partly because, for several years now, I have seen torture go unpunished and torturers rewarded...
...for some mysterious reason those who had simply signed were no longer culpable...
...Reinstatements of teachers were also announced...
...Founded solely upon the General's person, it possesses no legitimate successor...
...The Communists tried to take over...
...No sooner were these repressions begun, than the government retreated...
...However, a completely novel event occurred in the Salle de la Mutualite at the edge of the Latin Quarter: for the first time the Gaullist government was forced to allow a leftist demonstration against its policies...
...Jean-Paul Sartre expressed this attitude in a letter addressed to the tribunal judging the "Jeanson network": "The Algerian War has corrupted the nation...
...he also disposes of constitutional means which the preceding governments lacked...
...An even more farcical decision: neither radio nor television may now mention the name of Sartre or the other heretics, unless it be in connection with reports of the trial...
...Outside, an immense crowd milled about peace ably...
...Algeria will end up independent, and that quite soon...
...And for that matter, the measures taken by the government against the signers of the manifesto also reflect a feeling that there is no way out of the Algerian impasse...
...They added, "The cause of the Algerian people, which contributes decisively to the ruin of the colonial system, is the cause of all free men...
...the disappearance of political life, the increasing spread of torture, the permanent insurrection of military power against civil rule, mark an evolution which can without exaggeration be termed fascist...
...The Gaullist regime appears incapable of carrying out its decisions without having recourse each time to that parody of democracy known as the referendum...
...At least three-fourths of those present were of the younger generation of French intellectuals...
...Thus the president of France reached exactly the same point that the leaders of the Fourth Republic had: a trial of strength with the civil and military supporters of "French Algeria...
...But is not this position an expression of political despair...
...Those of the "121" who have radio and television licenses (entirely under state control) had them revoked...
...It will serve only to intimidate the colons adventurers...
...He even threatened to make use of the dictatorial powers foreseen in the constitu...
...The speeches had little in common with traditional French rhetoric: no readymade formulas, no lyric flights, no pathos...
...Unfortunately, this reasoning takes no account of the experience of all those who have chosen to rebel, or even that of almost all the Algerian Moslems who hope that their country can be freed without the domination of the FLN...
...Translated by JAMES ATKINSON...
...And then, even Pierre Lazareff, director of the Association of Television Producers and head of France-Sair, France's largest newspaper, had to visit the Minister of Information to explain that it was impossible to present interesting programs and still comply with the government's actionsl Most important of all, however, the episode has awakened the intellectuals, the students and the liberal Left...
...In size it was not an imposing affair...
...The French Left has finally returned to political action...
...It was granted them...
...It decided to limit the accusations to the "authors" of the manifesto...
...IT WAS A SIGN OF PANIC when the government decided to accuse several of the best-known French intellectuals of "instigating military disobedience...
...tion in case of grave peril...
...No actor can play in a subsidized theater (and they are numerous) if he is among the new excommunicants...
...And Gaullism itself will run the risk of being overthrown by a military plot...
...An example of this last attitude is that of Professor Laurent Schwartz, a foremost French mathematician, professor at the tcole Polytechnique, and in a fair way to becoming in France what Robert Oppenheimer has become in America...
...For the first time he spoke of an "Algerian Republic...
...During November de Gaulle again tried to cope with the insoluble Algerian problem...
...At first, he probably believed that he need merely promise self-determination...
...A dryness, a purposefulness, an exactness which were a revelation to one who has long been active in French politics...
...The police began by banning the meeting and then, when the organizers threatened to hold it anyway, finally authorized a meeting in a hall seating scarcely 3,000 people...
...Up to November 4, 1960, de Gaulle offered three possibilities to the Algerians, promising that they could make their own choice...
...The internal French situation is decaying— the repression directed against the intellectuals is a sypmtom of this decay...
...For it is clear that even an FLN victory in Algeria provides no assurance of the health of French democracy...
...With others, there was a feeling that if certain repressive French agencies in Algeria could enjoy impunity for their terroristic crimes, then other Frenchmen should be free to refuse service in the war...
...All have had the experience of oppression: the daily experience of racist contempt, the experience of never having had free elections in Algeria...
...Secession: the FLN program, and in this case de Gaulle threatened the Algerians with the split of their country, with France continuing to hold a section of it...
...2) the conduct of those French who believe it their duty to aid and protect the oppressed Algerians in the name of the French people...
...But the difference between now and Spring 1958 is appreciable...
...There remains only a choice between association with France and secession...
...At present, de Gaulle deals with the Army as one power with another...
...The Government dropped the idea of striking the heretics' names off the rolls of the Order of the Legion of Honor, for then it would have been necessary to degrade certain men whose decorations had been earned by illustrious activity during the Resistance...
...No lasting solution is possible which does not receive the support of the bulk of the Moslem population of Algeria, Second reservation: if de Gaulle's new program for Algeria constitutes a step forward, the January referendum is nonetheless only a symbolic appeal to the people...
...Some punitive measures were soon taken...
...When all is said and done, that problem is not Algeria but France...
...Now and then he transfers army leaders who seem dangerous and replaces them with others who seem more obedient...
...But this was the first time since the existence of the Fifth Republic that the regime drew back before the Left...
...It now seems possible to revitalize the Left, on the basis of two fundamental issues: peace in Algeria and the defense of freedom at home...
...But at no point has he used the language of a commander-in-chief toward the Army—apparently because he knows this language will neither be understood nor obeyed...
...First, a referendum on a provisional statute will still not settle a thing in Algeria...
...Each Moslem believes that no matter what else happens, he will be tricked and persecuted if he must continue to deal with the civilian or military French...
...The first possibility, integration, has now been eliminated...
...First to ban, then to permit: that is typical of the Gaullist government which gives ground whenever it encounters a force determined to resist it...
...For de Gaulle, such a popular consultation serves to confirm the plebiscitary character of his regime...
...Association with France: that is, the "Algerian Algeria" solution supported by de Gaulle...
...He is doing his utmost to convince it to be loyal to him...
...If Algeria is given an autonomy fabricated in France, the leaders of de Gaulle's "Algerian Algeria" will out of necessity have to seek the support of the population and may end up with the very secession they want to avoid...
...The view of Sartre and his friends reflects a feeling of powerlessness in the French Left, especially as concerns the Algerian problem...
...That force is the FLN...
...But France runs the risk of losing its freedoms, and succumbing to a military dictatorship or an authoritarian regime based upon the army...
...This statement, cannot be understood unless one recalls' that it was drafted in September, just after the opening of the trial of a "network aiding the FLN," directed by Francis Jeanson, a disciple of JeanPaul Sartre and a refugee first in Switzerland, then in Italy, who was sentenced in absentia to ten years...
...Until it is made to understand and obey, France remains in peril...
...About ten professors have been suspended and dismissed...
...Were not the nationalists fighting to obtain this very right...
...From that day on, the war fought in the mountains by the guerrillas became in his view useless, illogical, senseless...
...Some French intellectuals have thus become convinced that, in Sartre's words, "the French who help the FLN . . . work for the restoration of true democracy in France...
...THIS NEW SITUATION was set off by a manifesto which by now would already have been forgotten if the government had not decided to prosecute its signers...
...The problem being posed in this way, there seems no solution for the liberal French Left other than to support de Gaulle, but with two reservations...
...He explicitly promised that Algeria will have "its own government, its E:T:a own institutions and its own laws...
...Integration: that is, the "French Algeria" solution proposed by the colons...
...DESPITE THESE RESERVATIONS, it is im possible to lose sight of the real problem...
...He has begun to act, although one cannot say whether the decisions taken will be negated by future hesitations...
...There is another issue in regard to this statement: the solidarity it expressed with Francis Jeanson and the few Frenchmen who have taken up the cause of the FLN...
...The hall was packed...
...And one reason is that de Gaulle has not followed up his victory over the mob in Algiers by forcing the Army to carry out his policy summed up in the slogan of "selfdetermination...
...The Left is powerless in the face of this evolution, and it will remain so if it does not decide to unite its efforts behind the sole force which truly struggles today against the common enemy of Algerian and French liberty...
...In the case of several signers there was a distinct bravado toward the government...
...its continuation could only be the act of some fanatics or agents of foreign powers...
...and it is you, sir, who signed the promotion of Captain Charbonnier to Officer of the Legion of Honor as an exceptional case, and that of Commandant Faulques to Commander of the Legion of Honor (I repeat: honor...
...It has been fully confirmed...
Vol. 8 • January 1961 • No. 1
