FRANCE'S TROUBLED NORTH AFRICA

French North Africa is divided into three parts. In each.

Frenchman and Arab, Christian cross and Islam crescent meet in uneasy union, but with differing degrees of hostility and hope. Besides Morocco, the French holdings:

Algeria (pop. 9,000,000 est.), which as a nation is strictly a French creation. Before the French landed in 1830, to chastise the Dey of Algiers for slapping their consul's face with a fly-whisk, the place had been a granary for Rome, a causeway to Western conquest for the Arabs, a nest for Barbary pirates--but never a state or nation.

Three times the size of Texas, Algeria takes in a swatch of the Sahara, two broad seams of the Atlas Mountains, and a 100-mile-wide ribbon of fertile Mediterranean littoral where most of its largely Moslem population lives. Pacified, colonized, civilized through 125 years, Northern Algeria is officially a part of metropolitan France, and sends its Deputies to the Paris Parliament. Its approximately one million European settlers produce enormous quantities of the same wine and wheat that Frenchmen already produce in surfeit at home. Result: it must be subsidized from home, to the tune of some $50 million a year.

In 1947 the French set up an Algerian Parliament to deal with local affairs. The Arabs' Nationalist Party withdrew from elections, maintaining (correctly) that the seating was rigged in favor of the French colons. Extremists organized a bloody rising in the eastern mountains last year. Moderate Nationalists might have worked for compromise, but the French outlawed the entire party and declared that because "Algeria is France," revolt on the soil of Algeria is treason. When Morocco's "Fateful Day" arrived a fortnight ago, the

Nationalists in the Algerian hills started up trouble at the same hour. The result was almost as bloody as in Morocco.

Tunisia (pop. 3,700,000), which is the smallest, happiest and quietest of the three French possessions, and the most advanced toward independence. Besides Algeria's inhospitable plateaus, this is a broad stretch of country sloping down through grain fields, vineyards and great olive groves to the sea. It is the classic Ifriqiyeh, which gave its name to the whole continent. From Hannibal and Scipio to Rommel and Patton, soldiers have grappled for its strategical coasts, but the present Bey of Tunis, Sidi Mohammed el Amin, 74, belongs to a dynasty that has reigned for 250 years.

After 74 years of French rule, its European colony numbers only 230.000, about half of whom are Sicilian, Maltese or Spanish. Its French are mainly Corsicans, who have populated every office building, down to the last post office, bank and tax counter, with fellow islanders, and are demanding that under home rule not only they but their children must be guaranteed government jobs. The Arabs of Tunisia maintain the highest indigenous standard of living in North Africa, with a substantial middle class, a peasantry, and the only real trade-union organization in the Moslem world (which sent a fraternal delegate to last year's C.I.O. convention).

When Mendes-France offered home rule last year after a long series of strikes and counterdemonstrations, Habib Bourguiba, 52, a Paris-trained lawyer and probably the ablest and most farsighted North African political leader, emerged from some ten years of French exile and imprisonment to accept. Tunisia was significantly quiet during the Moroccan eruption.

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