Who Shall Judge?

In the high-ceilinged room where the French Consultative Assembly meets in Algiers, Franc,ois de Menthon, Commissioner of Justice, began a speech. He spoke of 288 Vichyites who had been accused of treason, collaboration and other crimes against France and Frenchmen, but had not yet been tried and punished. No sound came from the 80-odd Assemblymen.

De Menthon spoke on, pleading that the difficulties of General de Gaulle and the Liberation (administrative) Committee must be understood; that they could not act as rapidly and drastically as Frenchmen demanded. No sound, no gesture, came from the Frenchmen who heard him.

De Menthon faltered, spoke of all that the Liberation Committee had done: the accused had been arrested, a court of three military men and two civilians had been set up.

De Menthon's voice broke; he fell to the floor. Stricken by a heart attack, he was carried from the room. No sound, no gesture came from the assembly; in silence it adjourned.

Pain and Passion. The Commissioner had understood: a veteran of France's underground, he knew that silence was the Assembly's rebuke to him, to General de Gaulle, to all administrative committeemen who for any reason had postponed the trials of such Vichymen as Pierre Etienne Flandin, Pierre Boisson. Fighting Frenchmen approached this question with the pain and passion of their long agony; they resented the patent fact that the U.S. and British Governments had interceded for some of the arrested men.* They reacted as Frenchmen have always reacted: the parliamentarians in the Consultative Assembly turned upon the executors in the Liberation Committee. If it was "a split," it was also a sign that French democratic opinion is well and traditionally represented in Algiers.

Arms and the Purge. Frenchmen in Algiers pressed another case: the need of their comrades inside France for arms. The resistance movement in the homeland, they claimed, should be recognized as the vanguard of Allied invasion. In the ranks of 40,000 shock troops actively harrying the Germans, there was not more than one weapon for every 20 men. "The underground movement," said one resistance delegate, "is dying from exhaustion."

The delegates in the Assembly knew that for some time no arms had been delivered to French patriots from England. They rejected the Allied explanation that bad weather had prevented deliveries by air, charged both the Committee and the

Allies with disregarding the resistance movement's needs.

As head of the Committee, General Charles de Gaulle answered for its actions. "Some day," he said, "a Yellow Book--a sad book indeed--will be published about the talks that took place between our Committee and the Allied Governments. You will see then that we did all we could. . . . We must recognize that [the Allies] have done much to help. . . . If their help has not equaled the high level reached by the men in the resistance movement, I prefer not to talk about it."

Emmanuel d'Aster de la Vigerie, Interior Commissioner, spoke openly of U.S. and British fears that arming France would lead to uncontrollable revolution.

The Assembly unanimously asked the Allies to recognize the underground, give them arms.

*At Marrakech in French Morocco last week, General de Gaulle had an apparently cordial talk with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, just recovered from pneumonia (see p. 32).

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