"Professional Conscience"

Ce Soir, Paris Communist paper, was red with anger. In a luxurious villa at Pau in sight of the snow-bright Pyrenees, Sidi Mohamed Al Mounsaf was "lazily stretched out on a divan, his hands folded across his stomach." The "notorious collaborator"--exiled by the Allies for winking his pouchy eyes at the Axis (TIME, May 24, 1943)--enjoyed full liberty, was fawned upon by a score of wives, a large retinue including a court jester. To cap it all, he was campaigning for reinstatement as Bey of Tunis.

That was last July. A few weeks later, Ce Soir briskly backtracked: "The story was politically unjust . . . offensive to [a] high personality [living] in deportation and forced residence. The necessary remonstrances have been sent to our correspondent. Our rule on Ce Soir is professional conscience . . . respect for the truth." This routine Bolshevik backflip meant merely that Ce Soir's editors had been "officially informed" of what they should have known all along: Tunisia's Communist Party, culled from 110,000 French and 95,000 Italian residents, had rekindled among 2,300,000 Moslems and Bedouins the fires of independence fanned not so long ago by the Nazis.

Tunisia's nationalist Labor Federation was sabotaging the French "imperialist" commonwealth wherever possible, threatened to paralyze the Government's broadened colonial program with a three-day strike, fomented Arab demonstrations for the Bey's return.

Last week 52 nationalist agitators were jailed. Unjailed leaders announced that they were drafting a "white paper" to prove that the Bey had never collaborated that he had been illegally deposed: since he is a legitimate monarch, the Bey can be deposed "only by God."

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