Beggars in Neckties

One of the many dislocations caused by the Algerian war is the flight of European refugees across the Mediterranean to France. An estimated 80,000 have already arrived. Hundreds more line up daily in Oran and Algiers to be carried to safety in French air force planes. To leave means defying the terrorists of the Secret Army Organization, who have decreed death for Europeans departing without an S.A.O. "visa." In a desperate effort to keep the 1,000,000 European population from dwindling further, the S.A.O.last week blew up the control tower at Algiers' airport.

Wartime Climate. Yet for those refugees who do arrive, France is proving a cheerless asylum. A year ago. Jean Clement, 62, owned a 600-acre farm in Algeria. Today he is a grocer in Montpellier on the verge of bankruptcy. Complaining that his store is boycotted because he is a pied-noir (European of Algeria), Clement says angrily: "My father was killed at Verdun. I helped liberate France in 1944. I'm as good a Frenchman as anyone in Montpellier, but the animosity of the local population is terrible."

Rightly or wrongly, the transplanted whites from Algeria are identified with the plastic bombings and brutal murders of the S.A.O. The average Frenchman also dislikes them on personal grounds. The Algerian accent, which combines a throaty Arab intonation with a nasal drawl, falls unpleasantly on French ears. The pieds-noirs are considered pushy, noisy, boastful and vulgar. A Nice restaurateur says: "You cannot spend ten minutes with them before the subject of their sexual prowess comes up. Their language and gestures are so raw that it's not surprising that no one, from high society to workers, invites pieds-noirs to their homes." About the only group to escape the widespread condemnation are young pied-noir girls, because 1) they are uncommonly good-looking; 2) being women, they are appreciably less crude and rude than the refugee men; and 3) the wartime climate of Algeria has made them eager for amour.

Lucky Ticket Taker. Even in labor-short France, the emigres have difficulty finding jobs. An automobile mechanic insists he had employment until it was discovered that he was born in Algeria; then the company suddenly discovered that the job was already filled. A skilled accountant, who left Algiers after four of his family died in terror attacks, has been unemployed for ten months except for odd jobs at 45-c- an hour. Raphael Coudray, 37, a French army veteran who served as a volunteer in Korea, was wounded by a grenade in a terrorist attack in Algiers. In France he has been lucky enough to get a job collecting tickets in a cinema owned by another Algerian white. He says matter-of-factly: "Of course, I don't go around telling people I'm from Algeria; that would risk getting my block knocked off."

Cried one pied-noir: "We're foreigners in France. We're beggars in neckties." A penniless truck driver from Algiers, who sleeps in a Roman Catholic mission and exists on one meal a day, warns: "Things will explode if the government doesn't do something for us fast."

Sun & Sea. The government complains that three-quarters of the refugees settle in southern France because of their Algerian passion for sun, sea and light. But the south is already crowded by previous waves of refugees from Morocco, Indo-China and Tunisia. "The Algerians will have to spread out," says an official. "They simply can't all live in three or four agreeable southern cities." Extra bonuses are paid to pieds-noirs who will go north. One who did promptly fled the smoke and cold of industrial Dijon, describing it as "a city where one waits for death." Another, recoiling at the sight of the textile center of Lille, said: "One might as well live in Iceland."

President Charles de Gaulle last year decreed a series of aid measures for the emigres. Each family and its personal effects are moved to France free of charge. The head of the family gets a departure bonus of $100, plus $40 for his wife and each child. A living allowance of $900 to $1,500 "is granted for a maximum of a year to a family that cannot support itself. Vocational training is offered workers, and loans promised to businessmen.

The pieds-noirs want more. Algerian-born Lawyer Raphael Gaillardo cites the billions spent by West Germany on its refugees from the East, and argues: "Why should not France do as well for her citizens who were obliged by circumstances beyond their control to abandon homes, businesses, jobs, farms and family tombs to settle in France?" Exasperated French bureaucrats call the pieds-noirs "ink bottles" because they write so many pleading and demanding letters to government offices.

Local French residents, especially in the crowded south, are convinced the newcomers need no help. "Their pockets are full," say the French cynically, convinced that the refugees liquidated their Algerian holdings at a profit. "Our pockets are empty!" cry the pieds-noirs, lamenting the forced sale of their homes and businesses. Beziers, a southern French city of 75,000, expects an influx of 15,000 more arrivals from Algeria within the coming year. An even greater avalanche of refugees will swarm onto the Riviera, enough perhaps to change the political complexion of the region and endanger the seats of Gaullist Deputies. Predicted a local official: "If the government just stands by and makes no plans, there'll be trouble and violence between the southerners and the pieds-noirs."

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