Foursquare for France

In a fit of exasperation one day last month, French Premier Guy Mollet turned on Christian Pineau, his Foreign Minister, who was fretting about what the U.N. would do with the troublesome Algerian problem. "What matters to me," snapped Mollet, "is not the United Nations but the United States." To hard-headed Guy Mollet it seemed self-evident that the treatment given the two-year-old Algerian revolt in the glass palace on the East River would be largely determined along the banks of the Potomac.

What Premier Mollet wanted was U.S. support for the French argument that the U.N. has no right to interfere in the Algerian rebellion because Algeria is legally a part of France. To win this support France pulled out all the propaganda stops. From his remote hospital in French Equatorial Africa Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Nobel Peace Prizewinner for 1952, fired off a letter urging President Eisenhower to uphold the French position. In 31 U.S. newspapers there appeared a full-page ad, sponsored by nine European and Canadian newspapers, carrying the text of a Le Figaro article ominously warning the U.S. not to make France choose "between her African vocation and her American friendship."

Eurafrica. From the very beginning of the Algerian debate last week in the U.N. General Assembly's Political Committee, France showed that it was doing its best to link the vocation and the friendship. In contrast to 1955, when France boycotted a discussion of Algeria, its representative (largely to win U.S. backing) not only agreed to discuss the rebellion but even to inform the U.N. of France's plans for restoring peace in Algeria. In defensive tones, Christian Pineau outlined Mollet's Algerian program: first an unconditional ceasefire, next free elections and finally negotiation of Algeria's future status with whoever won the elections.

Above and beyond that, Pineau said France has vast and beneficent plans not only for Algeria but for all its African territories. Said he: "On the day when the [European] Common Market . . . has been created, [France] would like to promote the formation of a Eurafrican whole. Europe in. its entirety, bringing to Africa its capital and its techniques, should enable the immense African continent to become an essential factor in world politics."

Pineau's vision of Eurafrica did nothing to dampen the perfervid anticolonialism of the Arab-Asian countries. "The reputation of France at the present time," growled Syria's Delegate Farid Zeineddine, "is at its lowest ebb." Then, accusing the French of everything from cowardice to genocide, 18 Arab-Asian nations proposed just what France most dreaded: a resolution demanding that the people of Algeria be granted "their fundamental right of self-determination."

One Long Embarrassment. For the U.S., torn between its friendship for France and its post-Suez vocation of winning Arab-Asian friendship, the debate was one long embarrassment. But when the chips were down the U.S. lined up foursquare behind France. The U.S. delegation, announced Henry Cabot Lodge, would oppose not only the 18-power resolution but all other proposals "which we believe constitute intervention in matters essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of France."

By the time Lodge had finished, most U.N. politicos were ready to concede that the great Algerian debate was all over except for the shouting. This promised to be considerable since at week's end 24 nations were still waiting their turn to speak. But with both the U.S. and Britain supporting France, there was little chance that any resolution unacceptable to the French could win the necessary two-thirds majority in the Assembly.

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