"I Am Ready"

(See Cover)

As in Roman days, the revolt to bring down the regime began with the generals taking power in the provinces, and waiting for the capital to fall of its own weakness.

Insurrection broke out first in Algiers, when 30,000 French colons, fearful that a new French government might abandon Algeria, rioted in the streets, sacked the Government Building, and were calmed only when Paratroop General Jacques Massu announced that he had taken power in Algiers in defiance of Paris. That left it up to Paris: to the National Assembly to capitulate or fight back; to the mobs in the street to enlist for or against the battered, precarious Fourth Republic.

In the Paris streets loudspeakers rasped out the orders of tough Maurice Papon, recently brought from Algeria to become police prefect of Paris: "Use your clubs! Use your clubs!" His men complied. In the Place de la Concorde a mob of 6,000 right-wingers led by burly ex-Poujadist Jean-Marie Le Pen -sporting the tricolor sash of a Deputy and the green beret of his old paratroop regiment -came face to face with rifle-toting police drawn up in columns four deep. For a time the mob hesitated. Then, with cries of "Algeria is French!" and "Throw the Deputies into the Seine!", the rightists made a wild rush for the Concorde bridge leading to the National Assembly. In minutes, they reeled back in flight, blinded by gas grenades, battered by rifle butts, clubs and fists.

After this setback to the right, the left took its licks. In the hallowed "proletarian" section of Paris between the Bastille and the Place de la Republique, 2,000 Communists roamed the streets shouting, "Fascism shall not pass!" A woman stepped out from behind one of the Red commandos to jeer at the police: "Sa-lauds!" With a roar, a squadron of 30 flics charged. The plainclothesman leading them hit the jeering woman squarely in the mouth. The rest of the mob faded away.

The thwacking of Papon's night sticks and the defiance of the Algerian generals could not be heard in the sleepy (pop. 365) village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, 150 miles southeast of Paris. But these were expectant sounds that reverberated in the imagination of Colombey's first citizen, a towering man of 67 with an equine face and the stiff, awkward movements of a French career soldier. And they were sounds that drove him at last to pick up the telephone, an instrument he dislikes, and summon an aide from Paris to receive a typically laconic statement: "For twelve years France, at grips with problems too harsh for the regime of political parties, has pursued a disastrous course . . . Today, in the face of the troubles that again engulf the country, it should be known that I am ready to take over the powers of the republic."

The Politician of Catastrophe. In a tense situation, suddenly close to civil war, these proud, cryptic words stirred hopes, fears and questions throughout France. The government-run national radio network broke into a musical program to flash the message. A special edition of France Soir, the nation's largest evening paper, disappeared from the newsstands like birdseed scattered before a flock of starlings. In near panic, Speaker Andre Le Troquer of the National Assembly called upon all Deputies who were out of town to return to Paris at once.

The man whose words created such furor had held no political office since 1946, had expressed no public position on political issues since 1954. He had only a handful of avowed followers in Parliament and offered his countrymen only the most unspecific of programs. Yet no man in France last week cast so long a shadow or so completely embodied the crisis of the Fourth Republic as General Charles Andre Joseph Marie de Gaulle.

He had always made his terms clear. The idol of France at one of the crises in its life, he had served an ultimatum upon his countrymen: if they wanted him to take part again in the game of French politics, they must change the rules. Specifically, they must turn their backs on France's prewar system of parliamentary supremacy and accept a chief executive empowered to make policy without constant interference from the National Assembly. When, after World War II, a majority of Frenchmen opted for the old rules, De Gaulle retired to the sidelines and sat there for a decade, croaking, like Cassandra, of impending disaster. Last week his prophecies, like Cassandra's, were being borne out, and the kind of hour for which he was created was about to strike once again. For De Gaulle, as Historian Herbert Luethy noted, is essentially a "politician of catastrophe," and it was catastrophe that stalked France last week.

After the Coffee. The crisis was long abuilding, and a surprise to no one when it came: the only question was which of France's innumerable Cabinet crises would produce the crise de regime. France had been without a government since the fall of Felix Gaillard a month earlier; two would-be Premiers had tried to put together majorities and had failed. Now testy, white-haired Pierre Pflimlin of the

Catholic Popular Republican Party had submitted his prospective program to the Assembly, and the Deputies, wearied by a full afternoon of oratory, had adjourned for dinner in various excellent restaurants in the neighborhood. Shortly before 9 o'clock, while most were still lingering over their after-dinner coffee, news tickers pounded out word of the military insurrection in Algiers.

In Algiers, for nearly a week, the right-wing press had been working on the emotions of the city's French population by preaching against Pflimlin as an apostle of "abandonment," because he was known to favor negotiations with the rebel Algerian National Liberation Front. Then came the explosive word that Algerians had executed three French prisoners in reprisal for the execution of three rebels in Algiers' jail. Driven by uncontrollable fury, thousands of colons surged into the streets of Algiers shouting "The army to power!" and "Vive De Gaulle!" (see below). They were quieted only when General Massu placed himself at the head of a junta with the ominously evocative name of the Committee of Public Safety.*

In Paris, when the well-fed Deputies returned to the Assembly, the debate on

Pflimlin's doubtful candidacy resumed as if there had been no news at all. At last, unable to contain himself longer, Communist Floor Leader Waldeck Rochet leaped to his feet and shouted: "In Algiers General Massu has sent an ultimatum to the President of the Republic!" With a roar of rage, right-wingers began to shout "Budapest, Budapest" and "Algeria is French!" Hoarsely, Rochet persisted: "This is the creation of an illegal and insurrectionist government!"

White with anger. Speaker Le Troquer. a Socialist, pounded for order. Said Pflimlin: "It is true that grave events are taking place in Algiers, but it is not for the Communist Party to save the Republic and Algeria. I demand suspension of the session so that those who are responsible for the maintenance of Republican order can face up to the situation."

With that, tight-lipped Pierre Pflimlin hustled out of the Assembly to the Hotel Matignon, official residence of France's Premiers, for a four-hour series of conferences with a parade of ex-Premiers. By the time the Assembly reconvened at 1 :20 in the morning, it had gradually been borne in upon the contentious parliamentarians of France that they had better form a government fast. In dead silence the Deputies listened while Pflimlin, his voice trembling with emotion, declared: "You must realize that we are on the verge of a civil war." Then, with the 135 Communists abstaining and the right still stubbornly opposed, Pierre Pflimlin was invested as Premier of France by the unimpressive vote of 274 to 129.

Taking No Chances. At 4 a.m. the new Premier called his first Cabinet session. Already, while the Assembly was still passing on Pflimlin, Lame Duck Premier Felix Gaillard had moved to prevent any link-up between the insurgents in Algeria and their sympathizers in France. He shut down all but official communications with Algeria, and froze at their docks all ships loaded with supplies. By midnight police had already begun to round up 40 right-wing extremists throughout France. These precautions spoiled the plans of at least one Poujadist Deputy to join Massu, and delayed the arrival in Algeria of a far more potent threat to the government -Gaullist Deputy Jacques Soustelle, who somehow eluded a "protective" guard of eight policemen, and at week's end turned up in Algeria spouting fire.

The new Premier, taking no chances, summoned to the capital hard-bitten Garde Mobile units from the provinces and from West Germany. Then, in a shrewd attempt to force a quick decision on General Raoul Salan, the decision-avoiding Indo-China veteran who is nominally in command of all French forces in Algeria, Pflimlin got on the phone to Algiers and charged the wavering Salan with maintaining the Republic's authority there. And at dawn 76-year-old President Rene Coty, who sat in on the Cabinet meeting, made an unprecedented broadcast to the army: "General officers, officers, noncommissioned officers, corporals and soldiers serving in Algeria. I appeal to your patriotism and your good sense not to add division in the face of the enemy to the trials of the fatherland."

The Eleventh Hour. For a few hours it appeared that perhaps Pflimlin and Coty had turned the trick that easily. The first response to their appeals was hopeful: General Massu acknowledged General Salan's authority. But then, in a speech of masterful ambiguity, Salan acknowledged himself in authority but finished off with the rallying cry of the French colons in Algeria: "Vive De Gaulle!" On top of that came De Gaulle's "I am ready" statements from Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, neither endorsing nor disavowing Massu's coup -a fact sure to put new heart into the insurgents in Algiers, who were still refusing to submit to any authority save De Gaulle.

Now, at the eleventh hour, the "republicans" buried their ancient, obscure quarrels. Socialist Guy Mollet, who for a month had been proclaiming his party's unwillingness to participate in any conceivable government, hastily agreed to serve as Pflimlin's Vice Premier, and said he would even be willing to serve as Under Secretary of Beaux-Arts. In the Assembly, Pflimlin demanded emergency powers -the right to hold suspects without trial, to make searches at any hour, to deport citizens from troubled areas, to impose full censorship and to close movies, theaters and cafes. Working with unprecedented speed, the Deputies gave him the powers he wanted within the day -and did so by one of the biggest majorities (462 to 112) accorded any French Premier since World War II. Pflimlin brought in as Minister of the Interior 65-year-old Socialist Jules Moch, who won fame in an earlier cold war stint in the Interior Ministry as a merciless cop.

Without a Head. To listen to Pflimlin's new-found admirers -including the Communist Deputies who supported the emergency-powers bill -the issue before France was a matter of black and white; there existed, as Pflimlin said, "a plot against the republic," and anyone who believed in democracy must be ready "to take all necessary measures to maintain republican liberties." Unhappily, like most other attempts to reduce French political issues to black and white, this proposition was founded on a fallacy. In this case, the fallacy was the assumption that the existing French political system constitutes a working democracy.

The sad truth is that the republic which Pflimlin sought to preserve from civil war is in itself a kind of permanent, institutionalized civil war. Since the fall of Napoleon III in 1870, France has solved the political conflicts among its citizens by settling for a government without a head -a government in which no single group could ever acquire enough power and responsibility to carry out a consistent long-term national policy. The bourgeois and petty bourgeois "republicans," who believed that the supreme end of social life was the self-gratification of the individual citizen, were left free to evade their taxes and pursue their pleasures. Yearners after glory and national prestige -mostly nostalgic royalists -were left free to expand the French empire and carry out France's "civilizing mission" among the Annamese, Tonkinese, Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans, Togolanders and Tahitians. But neither of these groups -nor any other -was allowed to impose its vision of the good society on France as a whole.

The system worked for a time and after a fashion. But with World War II and the unmistakable decline of France and Western Europe to a secondary role in world affairs, it ceased to work at all. Dazzled by the powerful light from the Red star over Moscow, millions of Frenchmen -and one-quarter of France's Parliament -gave their primary allegiance to a foreign power. Refusing to recognize the force of the passion for independence that has seized the peoples of Asia and Africa, millions of other Frenchmen -and another quarter of the nation's Parliament -became obsessed with a blind and bloody determination to hang on to France's imperial possessions. French moderates, bickering among themselves and haggling for office, were able to do no more than fight desperate rearguard actions in defense of a crumbling status quo.

"The Big Asparagus." The political impotence that was ultimately to afflict France was already clearly foreseeable when Charles de Gaulle was born in the dreary northern factory town of Lille in November 1890. From his father, a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War who taught philosophy and literature at a Jesuit school. De Gaulle, by his own account, early acquired a vision of France as "the princess in fairy stories or the Madonna in the frescoes . . . dedicated to an exalted and exceptional destiny." But by the time he was in his teens, earnest, awkward Charles was already "saddened at seeing so many gifts wasted in political confusion and national disunity." Already, too, he had acquired the conviction that "France would have to go through gigantic trials, that the interest of life consisted in one day rendering her some signal service, and that I would have the occasion to do so."

When he graduated from St. Cyr (where his fellow cadets nicknamed him "the big asparagus"), Honor Student de Gaulle, privileged to choose the regiment with which he would serve, selected the 33rd Infantry Regiment commanded by Colonel Henri Philippe Petain. Regarding Petain with something close to idolatry, De Gaulle earned in return the patronage of the future marshal of France and Vichy chief of state. After World War I, in which De Gaulle suffered three wounds and won the Croix de guerre, Petain consented to stand godfather to his protege's son -who was duly christened Philippe. Shortly later, the marshal wrote of De Gaulle: "One day a grateful France will call on him."

In the years between the two world wars, Major de Gaulle became increasingly convinced that France must have a relatively small professional army built around mechanized units. This forward-looking strategic concept won him immediate fame in Germany, where his book The Army of the Future was carefully studied by the men who later organized Hitler's Panzer divisions, but was regarded as heresy by French senior officers.

The Burden of France. In France's brief day of fighting in World War II, De Gaulle, with a hastily scraped-up mechanized division, inflicted upon the Germans two of the rare local defeats they suffered in invading France. Then, when the bemedaled marshals bowed to Hitler, the hulking, self-conscious brigadier general, whose very name was unknown to most of his countrymen, solemnly concluded that "at this moment, the worst in her history, it was for me to assume the burden of France." Fleeing to England, De Gaulle arrived "stripped of everything, like a man standing on the shores of an ocean proposing to swim across." Undaunted even by his own metaphor, he beamed toward his homeland a war cry that Frenchmen will never forget: "France has lost a battle. But France has not lost the war."

In the five years that followed, indomitable Charles de Gaulle built the Free French movement from his private dream into a 500,000-man force that served the Allied cause gallantly and effectively on battlefields from Bir Hacheim to Germany itself. By so doing he should have won the gratitude, if not the affection, of his allies. But because of his preoccupation with French prestige and the safeguarding of French national interests, De Gaulle won himself the name of an intransigent troublemaker. Franklin Roosevelt, reporting on the Casablanca Conference in a letter to his son John, wrote: "The day [De Gaulle] arrived he thought he was Joan of Arc and the following day he insisted he was Georges Clemenceau." A series of equally bitter arguments over British policy in Syria and Madagascar led Winston Churchill to complain: "Of all the crosses I have borne since 1940 none is so heavy as the Cross of Lorraine."

New Facade, Old Faces. But when, at last, De Gaulle entered Paris in triumph in August 1944, he was the symbol of liberated France. Styling himself Provisional President, De Gaulle was unanimously confirmed in that office by the reconstituted National Assembly. Fortified by his conviction that "France, betrayed by her elite and her privileged groups, will never be the same as the prewar France," he set out to establish the strong executive that the Third Republic had so desperately lacked.

But it was soon the same old France. As wartime memories faded, the reviving political parties showed increasing hostility to De Gaulle's proposed constitution, eventually succeeded in persuading the French electorate to reject it. Finally, one Sunday in January 1946, Charles de Gaulle, unable to stomach further "the intrigues, combinations, upsets, recoveries and illusions" inherent in French party politics, abruptly resigned office.

If, as seems possible, he calculated that the French people would be shocked into calling him back on his own terms, he was grievously mistaken. In the October 1947 municipal elections his newly formed Rally of the French People won 40% of the popular vote, and for a few brief weeks it seemed that the National Assembly might have no choice but to submit to "le grand Charlie" and his parliamentary reforms. But with the aid of anti-Gaullist President Vincent Auriol, the politicians headed De Gaulle off. In 1954, disgusted and disillusioned, De Gaulle publicly severed all ties with his parliamentary followers, withdrew from direct competition for power in "this republic which I picked up out of the mud."

The Cardplayer. Since then De Gaulle has lived in self-imposed retreat in a towered stone house at Colombey. Thickening at the waist and beset by eye trouble -he had a cataract operation a year ago and still wears heavy glasses -he has until recently devoted most of his time to writing his memoirs, in the afternoons striding rapidly through the nearby Foret Gauloise, where Vercingetorix played hide-and-seek with Caesar's army 2,000 years ago. A fervid bridge player in his army days, the general is a devotee of a French form of solitaire called reussite, plays as many as 18 games a day and keeps careful statistics on how the cards come up, to guide him in future play.

"Conditions, Monsieur?" Once a week, in his six-year-old Citroen, he is driven to the shabby Left Bank office building at 5 Rue de Solferino that houses the Paris headquarters of the Rally of the French People. There, in a sparsely furnished office, De Gaulle receives representatives of almost every current of political opinion, French and foreign. (Among his past callers: U.S. Ambassador to France Amory Houghton, Soviet Ambassador Sergei Vinogradov, French Communist Boss Jacques Duclos, Right-Wing Rabble-Rouser Pierre Poujade.) Somehow De Gaulle's visitors come away with the realization that he has learned more from the conversation than they have. A few months ago crafty Independent Leader Roger Duchet, feeling that the time might be ripe for a deal, went to 5 Rue de Solferino with a pointed question: If the conservative Independents agreed to throw their support behind a drive to have De Gaulle recalled to power, what would be the general's conditions? "Conditions. Monsieur?" boomed De Gaulle. "There can be no conditions for saving France!"

Rhetoric & Practice. Judging by such oracular pronouncements and De Gaulle's obviously unshaken belief that his day is not done, many Frenchmen ,see the aging De Gaulle as a pompous and amusing figure deluded by grandeur. But his memoirs -which French literary critics have compared to the works of Thucydides. Julius Caesar and Sir Winston Churchill -reveal him as a profoundly sophisticated man with a far-ranging mind, a shrewd insight into people and an ironic sense of humor. ("I am fed up with all generals, including myself," he once said.) Behind the accusations of egomania, argue his admirers, lies a failure to recognize that De Gaulle is a dedicated man whose entire strength, passion and intelligence have been devoted to his conception of France as a nation that "is not really herself unless in the front rank."

Others were convinced he was a would-be dictator (or fascist, as the cheaper.cry had it). His career belies the charge. Once, in conversation with Novelist Andre Malraux, his wartime propaganda chief, De Gaulle declared: "One usually ascribes to me one quality: intelligence. Then how can one suppose that I am so unintelligent as to want to make a coup d'etat? . . . The era of the coup d'etat is past. It is an anachronism which does not at all correspond to my temperament." During the war, stubborn as he was with allies, he freely allowed himself to be overruled by Free France's Liberation Committee. And in the immediate postwar years, when France was in his hands and absolute power might have been his for the seizing, he accepted political extinction rather than violate "republican legality."

But, if he is no fascist, De Gaulle is beyond question an authoritarian prepared to demand vast emergency powers as Franklin Roosevelt once did. He has insisted that he would never again accept a ''temporary magistrature." Before he would consent to return to power, the National Assembly would have to agree to send itself on "permanent vacation," give De Gaulle a free hand until a new French constitution could be written. Under the new constitution, as De Gaulle envisages it, France would no longer be ruled by a single house of Parliament. (The French Senate is as meaningless as Britain's House of Lords.) Instead, the nation would have two coequal chambers dividing legislative power somewhat as the U.S. House and Senate do. For the executive, i.e., himself, De Gaulle would insist on power comparable to that wielded by the U.S. President.

In Strength, Generosity. The thought that France might now give De Gaulle such power disconcerted official Washington and official London. They recall the alliance that De Gaulle bilaterally negotiated with Russia in 1944 -unilaterally denounced by Russia in 1955 -and wondered whether De Gaulle would attempt to deal bilaterally with Moscow once again. And though France is treaty-bound to NATO for the next eleven years. Washington remembers that De Gaulle once described NATO as "an American protectorate without even the benefit of efficient protection." Still suspicious of Germany, he is less of a European than France's recent Premiers. He would make France a difficult ally.

But on second Washington and Whitehall thought, a difficult but stable government (if De Gaulle could bring it off) might contribute more to the defenses of the West than all the lip service paid to "Western unity" by all the weak Premiers of France in the past decade. It would be worth some dissension to have a French government capable of halting the steady diminution of Western prestige in Asia and Africa caused by the Algerian war.

Despite the fact that he draws much of his loudest support from the chauvinists who shout "Algeria is French," most of the men closest to De Gaulle are convinced that he would give independence to Algeria in one form or another. This is why Moslem leaders like Tunisia's President Habib Bourguiba also call for De Gaulle's return. Paradoxically, even some of the noisiest proponents of a tough line in Algeria, such as Jacques Soustelle, believe that a France revitalized by De Gaulle could give Algeria some form of self-government inside a North African Federation related to France. "The strong." argues one ardent Gaullist, "can afford to be generous."

Though right-wingers make the most clamor for De Gaulle, it is significant that his appeal has always cut across party lines (except among the Communists). When France's allies consider what direction France might now take, they would prefer most the continued existence of the present regime, if roused by the common peril it resolved its differences. Otherwise London and Washington would prefer a De Gaulle who took power constitutionally* to 1) a popular front in which the Communists took part or 2) a military rule responding to mob appeal.

The Tactic of Silence. As the supreme crisis of the Fourth Republic edged into its second week, almost everybody involved in the maneuvering seemed to be playing a dangerous forcing role with a skillful caution that left room for retreat. Premier Pflimlin. gaining time with each day in office, was unflinching but not unyielding; he might have denounced the Algiers military junta for sedition, but he chose instead to remind it of its duty. The junta itself preserved a careful ambiguity about the source of its authority. Unpredictable Zealot Jacques Soustelle. greeted by fervent admirers in Algiers, nonetheless cried ou; "Long live the Republic!" and denied that he was preparing a coup d'etat.

Of them all. none was more practiced than Charles de Gaulle in la tactique du silence. "Why speak," he had often confided, "if only to pronounce words without a tomorrow?"

For the moment, with emergency powers, Premier Pflimlin appeared to have the majority of Deputies behind him, and there seemed little chance of the Assembly's calling De Gaulle on his own terms. But how stood the rest of France? The armed forces still stationed in metropolitan France were a question mark. Late in the week two air force generals serving on France's joint chiefs of staff were placed under house arrest, and next day France's No. i soldier. General Paul Ely, chief of the joint chiefs, resigned in protest. The nation's 280.000 hardbitten police, who constitute a virtual army in themselves, still seemed loyal to the Fourth Republic. Paris, ringed by its famed "Red belt" of industrial suburbs, was as apt to be dominated by leftist mobs, if it came to that, as by the rightist mobs that rioted in Algiers.

Unless the insurgents of Algiers were prepared to invade the mainland -which was unlikely -Pflimlin's physical control of France itself still seemed assured. But if the army continued to be a law unto itself in Algeria, with the manifest approval of the population there, the situation might well spell the downfall of the republican regime. Keenly aware of this, Pierre Pflimlin late last week sought to jog De Gaulle into disavowing the Algiers insurgents. He sent a personal envoy to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises to ask the trenchant questions originally posed in the Assembly by Socialist Guy Mollet:

"Do you, De Gaulle, recognize the present government as the only legal one? Do you disavow the promoters of the Committee of Public Safety in Algiers? Are you ready, if called upon to form a government, to present your program to the National Assembly and, if not accepted, to withdraw?"

But when he got to the quiet house at Colombey -which had long since been placed under the polite surveillance of a platoon of gendarmes -Pflimlin's envoy had to content himself with assurances that the general would have another statement to make this week. The prudent housekeeper of Paris began to stock up on sugar, tinned milk and olive oil, ready for whatever might come.

* The original Committee of Public Safety, dominated by Robespierre, was the effective government of France during the French Revolutionary Terror, when some 2,500 people, including Marie Antoinette, were guillotined in the Place de la Concorde. * Only custom, not the constitution, requires President Coty to send for an elected Deputy to form a government.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.