Prophet in Exile

...Soustelle feels no compulsion, however, to apologize for admitted OAS violence against individual Moslem terrorists and Gaullist agents...

...It was Soustelle who organized the first harki detachments under the French flag in 1955...

...their own government, he charges, sold them out, Christians and Jews, rich and poor alike, not only failing to protect them but actually allying itself with their "murderers...

...After doing the handspring above in Soustelle's praise, I must add that I regret his latest book...

...But he dismisses as a greater libel the accusation-"through a massive orchestration of press and radio"that the OAS fighters were racist assassins...

...Citing the French proverb, "Tell me who praises you and I shall tell you what you are," Soustelle notes that de Gaulle is acclaimed most by Pravda, Cairo, Indonesia, the Vietcong radio, Castro, the New China Agency and the French Communist party...

...there are more political prisoners today in France than in Franco's Spain...

...Those like himself who hailed de Gaulle's commitment to a French Algeria envisioned also a new French African Commonwealth with a pioneer spirit, "adapting what had been best in the revolutionary dynamism of Mexico, the Israeli kibbutzim, the epics of the great spaces of the Americas...

...Thus if you tell Soustelle that his effort to keep Algeria French in a world bursting out of colonialism was foolishly contrary to the wave or "wind of history," he asks what kind of wind this is which blows angrily on integration of Frenchspeaking Arabs and Berbers into a French Republic but benignly on the Americanization of Spanishspeaking Puerto Rico or the incorporation of Oriental Hawaii into the United States...

...Not only as a matter of decency, or even because Soustelle remains more pro-American-robustly and intestinally in the face of the beating our opinion-makers have given him-than any other Frenchman of his capacity we can expect to find for many seasons ahead...

...I suppose I gag more than most on the enormities committed against Soustelle's reputation because I have known the man since 1943...

...Among other things, as is apparent in this book, he has been inquiring how France's body and spirit might be repaired after the General quits the scene...

...His vocabulary is pure Gallic ("obnubilated," "proned," "anachronic," "censitory...

...The European community, "face to face with genocide and exile, massed together for survival...

...Other encounters during the late 40s and early 50s found him laboring inside Parliament and out on behalf of an outof-power, brooding de Gaulle and for progressive Constitutional reforms...

...liberation of television and radio from their present subservience to the State...

...Still, a limited distribution of the author's own text, in his clear and efficient French, would have had larger effect in the long run than Benjamin Protter's Frenglish...

...Now he recalls six Algerian solutions which could have served, ranging from complete socio-economic union of the Algerian d?©partements with mainland France, on the Hawaiian model, to partition into two associated states, on the 1947 Palestine model...

...creation of a Supreme Court to defend the Constitution against erosion by law and edict...

...It will be hard to keep on pretending that Soustelle is what he is not, once he comes up into the light after the Pr?©sident-Soleil has set...

...Soustelle's reliance on the literary skills of his oldest and closest American friend, while admirable for its manifest personal loyalty, is ruinous for his communications...

...Not the original French, but this American version...

...They are anti-French because France (and Europe on which France depends) cannot remain immune from direct Soviet onslaught without the Atlantic Alliance...

...Never mind, one may finally exclaim, the conscience of the free world had to demand Algerian independence, whatever the price...

...I have watched him at close range during major, revealing moments of his career...

...The best reason why we should start preparing our apologies is that, provided he continues to elude the French kidnapper-squads and outlives the fading General, Soustelle (who is now barely 54) is likely to emerge not long thereafter as a top contender for highest rank in post-Gaullist France...

...Protter's text explains these mysteries little, late or not at all...

...He cites documents bearing "irrefutable proof" that the Secret Army's commanders denounced and disavowed indiscriminate anti-Moslem violence...

...But that was before he broke with Charles de Gaulle, over Algeria...

...Included in the indictment are de Gaulle's internal policies, notably his dissipation of French resources on "follies" like Algeria and the Bomb...

...The truth about Soustelle needs as much exposure in this country as feasible...

...But in the United States Soustelle's character has been so systematically assassinated by his old patron's, poison penmen that he is, for now anyway, politically dead here...

...after the Algiers insurrection, in 1959 as de Gaulle's Minister for the Sahara, Nuclear Energy and Overseas Territories, in 1960 following his departure from the Cabinet but before his flight some months later from France for the duration of de Gaulle's rule...

...The last time we met, it was a two-week stretch of intermittent conversation in various Italian hiding-places where we would turn up after making elaborate false tracks to evade his certain pursuers and my uncertain ones...

...some 150 unarmed French men, women and children died in an Algiers street when French troops machinegunned them at point-blank range...

...inclusion of human rights as articles in the Constitution, where they can be enforced, rather than as pieties in the Preamble, where they can be (and he says are now) ignored...

...Yes, how about it, Soustelle responds, in a "pseudo-State" where torture and terror are standard operations of government, manipulated not just by a single party ("a little band of Arab sub-Hitlers") but by one faction of that party which has jailed, exiled or executed the rest...

...14 per cent of the nation's dwellings were built before the first Napoleon...

...It is a disaster of nonediting and non-translation...

...the inference for Americans who do not know what de Gaulle is doing is that he "must be doing something wrong...

...Barry Goldwater's running mate...

...Further, according to Soustelle, de Gaulle is crippling France's defenses against the real threatconquest through subversion-by breaking the Army's back, shrinking the conventional arsenal, and betting everything on "a national atomic force" which, at most, can barely amount to one-tenth of Soviet nuclear power...

...Reviewed by HAL LEHRMAN Foreign Correspondent who reports frequently on North Africa Jacques Soustelle once was a mover and a shaker even on this side of the Atlantic, the kind of visiting foreign statesman who is faced by Face the Nation and gets on the cover of Newsweek and the New York Times Magazine...

...As its Governor General he was writing and promoting a whole library of enlightened legislation in favor of the Moslem populations, but was unable to prevail against an omnipotent and ineffably mindless colonial lobby in Paris-which we have since learned he must have been fronting for all the time...

...That's different, you counter, weren't the European colons milking the Algerian masses dry...

...Soustelle was writing before Boumedienne caused Ben Bella to vanish, an act of forceful magic which only sharpens his point...

...I saw him at length both times, and heard him, a founder of the France-Israel Society (of which he is still President in absentia, as well as President of the anti-discrimination Action Committee for Democratic Defense), address enthusiastic Zionist and synagogue audiences in New York-again, very exotic behavior for an alleged totalitarian...

...European sections of Algiers were strafed by French airplanes...

...I suggest he should be revived...

...The first time we met, at a wartime Resistance conclave in North Africa, Soustelle was chief coordinator of Free French anti-Nazi underground operations-an odd way for him to have been indulging his fascist instincts...

...how about freedom...

...He vehemently rejects the Gaullist charge-which has been almost universally believed in the U.S.-that he was a member of, or implicated in, the notorious Secret Army Organization (OAS) of the European Algerians...

...He predicted the Algerian debacle when ample time remained to deflect the "wind of history...

...In France, despite the Gaullist establishment's relentless surgery on his image, there have been enough disbelievers to make under-thecounter best sellers out of two Soustelle manuscripts smuggled from "somewhere in Europe" into Paris, one of them "Sur une Route Nouvelle," published in 1964 as the original French version of this updated American edition...

...Numerous allusions familiar to French readers (like Hassi-Messaoud, Prince de Broglie, Bab-el-Oued or hexagon) will mean nothing to most Americans (just as casual references to Casey Stengel, Empire State or Dixie would probably baffle most Frenchmen...

...If Soustelle's name rings any bell at all, it sounds the notes of political villainy: fascist, diehard foe of African independence...

...He urges a Presidential regime with checks and balances among Executive, Legislature and Judiciary...

...He comes up with thoughtful and sweeping reform projects...

...Lately I have visited with him in his exile...

...de Gaulle chose a seventh, "disastrous and irrational," which denied "the existence of one of the two peoples of Algeria" and compelled them to become "an oppressed minority or go into exile...

...The price the free world is paying, Soustelle sadly notes, is a belligerent, dictatorial, racist Algeria which gives daily comfort to Nasser, Castro, Moscow, Peking and Hanoi...

...He lines up all the arguments advanced to justify de Gaulle's Algerian breakaway...

...I found this so even at the well-tempered and subtle New Leader, when we talked about reviewing this book...

...Soustelle made two trips to the U.S...

...Soustelle has not changed spiritually, I believe, from the day in 1940 when, at 28 already a Sorbonne professor of Aztec civilization and deputy director of the Mus?©e de l'Homme, he rushed to London from a mission in Mexico upon hearing an obscure brigadier general's historic summons for defense of a free France...

...It was this grave commitment which de Gaulle now wears a halo for having cynically betrayed, while Soustelle has been condemned by de Gaulle's convenient courts as a traitor for demurring against the betrayal...

...and protection of the individual against slander by the press...

...If the item-by-item exposure of de Gaulle's "betrayal" is merciless, it is not from personal spleen but out of conviction that the General's abandonment of 10 million Moslem, Jewish and French Algerians "to a terrorist faction" constituted "the most gigantic failure, the greatest crime" in French history "and the most stupid one...

...Luxurious palaces, splendid cars, costly trips, such are the main uses of the money taken from the French taxpayer...

...Changing the tune, you may remind him that de Gaulle had to cut loose because the Algerian costs were milking France dry...

...So Soustelle recalls France's undeniably impressive transformation of an anarchic, primitive, Turkish-dominated Algeria...

...Nevertheless, for readers who persevere, Soustelle's meaning will come through...

...Hunted, homeless, a bounty on his head, Soustelle was without weapons except his wits and his contempt for ex-colleagues who had pawned their principles to become ornamented footstools in the General's tent...

...equality of educational opportunity, with large government aid in the improvement of educational and cultural standards...

...Then he offers refutations difficult to reject...

...Today he is about as hot an item of news as Bill Miller...

...This man who had been de Gaulle's lieutenant and best advocate for two decades in danger and adversity, this onetime Vice Premier of France and many times Minister who had rescued de Gaulle from impotent retirement and personally restored him to supreme command because he considered him honest and honorable as well as great, this harried refugee with whom I was sitting over thin vino and indifferent pasta was actually being denounced right then by the wise, wide world as a power-mad schemer when he had given up office, emolument, public acclaim and private ease rather than confirm like a lackey that a visibly bare-bottomed monarch was imperially clothed, that the intolerable antics of a lost leader were sagacious government and not megalomania...

...One could sense this already, though his name was rarely spoken, in the recent French elections...

...As for democracy in de Gaulle's France, it is instructive that only two persons were condemned under a law against "offending the President" during the 73 years of the Third and Fourth Republics, while in the first five years of de Gaulle's Presidency over 150 persons have been so condemned...

...With pardonable irony, Soustelle suggests that this should not be too hard now for Americans to grasp, since every major aspect of de Gaulle's self-proclaimed "great foreign policy"-break-up of NATO, nuclear independence, ban on British entry into the Common Market, suprermacy in a "thirdforce" Europe practicing "nositive neutralism," flirtations with Latin America and Eastern Europe, malicious meddling in Asia-all are precise and calculated anti-American moves whose motives are at last being perceived in Washington...

...The surrender was especially unspeakable, he grieves, because it left to bloody extirpation the harkis and their families, those tens of thousands of Moslems who fought against the terrorist-led rebellion, trusted de Gaulle's promise that France would stand fast, but in the end "were disarmed [by the French] and given over to the torturers' knives-a spectacle to sicken anyone...

...The moves are also anti-French, Soustelle affirms and, 1 think, demonstrates...

...Characteristically, he locks horns first over the issue, Algeria, on which one is likely to disagree with him most...

...Such is the transit of gloria mundi...

...So is his spelling: Ponce Pilate, Agrippe, Pic de la Mirandole, as if he had never heard of these before meeting them in Soustelle's pages...

...Such, too, is the awesome capacity for public befuddlement and mischief when official propaganda perfumes its product with an odor of moral rectitude, and the customers are too remote to know the basic facts, and the fibs are big enough and repeated often enough, and the target of the libels-exiled and literally running for his lifehas little breath to answer back...

...In his exile Soustelle has done more than merely ruminate on Gaullist abuses...

...he analyzes in detail the undeniable relapse of agriculture, commerce, industry, employment and the personal economy of all Algerians (except the leadership) as the present native "regime of plunder and parasitism" has progressed from one blunder to the next under the banner of an "Arab Socialism" which is as socialist as a Tartar raid...

...Protter, I happen to know, is an experienced businessman who can and does do certain things usefully in his distinguished French friend's interest, but these do not include the construction of a competent English sentence...

...The degree of his persuasiveness will depend as much on you as on him...

...The record proves, incidentally, that Soustelle is not being wise after the fact...

...It is an open secret," he says, "that the Algerian fellah and the black peasant do not see a red cent of these Presidential gifts...

...Much of American disbelief that de Gaulle could have been a monster who brutally violated his public promise, his own 1958 Constitution and the sacred 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, is based on the formidable question: Why...

...Meanwhile, even in the Paris area, 66 per cent of all houses and apartments lack bathtub or shower...

...Soustelle contends that the answer can no longer be a mystery: De Gaulle scuttled Algeria simply because he wanted a free hand for his grandiose European designs...

...regional autonomy in regional affairs...

...The voices were Mitterand's, Lecanuet's, Tixier-Vignancour's...

...If France leads Europe, Soustelle observes, it is only in the high cost of living, while it is 11th among 14 countries in new housing, and last in new highways...

...May and June 1958, again in Algiers, I saw him-sheerly by his lucidity and prestige-induce an Army-supported Franco-Moslem popular uprising to opt for de Gaulle, dissolve the sterile Fourth French Republic and raise up a Fifth headed by the General, who pledged himself earnestly and believably to integrate Algeria into France...

...Evidently this was dust in liberal eyes to conceal his reactionary views...

...His syntax may be his own: "an increase in their standards of living which has been rising...

...protection of the press against governmental prosecution...

...but his English phrasing has an impeccable French intonation: "Neither did it understand that this people was insurging above all to obtain that its voice should be heard " It gets as funny (or catastrophic) as the Pinglish on some Japanese handbills and Chinese laundry tickets...

...Soustelle-though "I did not own a square foot of soil [there] nor a stalk of vine"-associates himself firmly in the lost fight of Algeria's million Europeans to save what was their homeland too...

...The brigadier has dwindled since, not the professor...

...But the arguments, which rocked de Gaulle's pedestal much more than the Presidential 55.2 per cent majority in the final run-off would indicate, the arguments about the harm done to the West and to France by Le Guide's postures on European unity, NATO, the Common Market, nuclear bombs, all the aberrations of a grandeur gone quite battythese arguments were Soustelle's, marshalled by him, documented by him, and proclaimed by him long before the candidates of the moment perceived them or dared to utter them...

...Then, in 1955, I came across Soustelle often in Algeria...

...Well, one replies, bread isn't everything...

...De Gaulle's obsession with "greatness" sends billions of francs to underdeveloped Algeria and former black African possessions like Gabon but, Soustelle points out, France has her own "underdeveloped" areas-villages without water, farms without electricity...

...Leaving aside the drastic slump in French trade since the Algerian market's disappearance (Marseilles is a dying port), and also not counting the continuing high costs of maintenance for French troop and naval bases on Algerian soil, Soustelle offers the startling but correct reckoning that French subsidies today, open and concealed, amount to almost 90 per cent of the Algerian budget and exceed the pre-independence cost-with the further consolation that this new money is largely being wasted by mismanagement...

...Instead, de Gaulle gave them a "balkanized" Africa with 15 governments and thousands of high functionaries drawing big salaries "while the masses sink into the morass of hopeless poverty...