French Ferments
By DARSIE GILLIE PARIS GBOWLS in Algiers are increasingly angry. The half-dozen or more political organisations, who either joined in carrying out the coup of last May (with military complicity) or owe their origin to that event, even though unable to unite to put forward a joint list for municipal elections, for instance, might still succeed in blowing something up again, The Algerian deputies are evidently worried about the difficulty of maintaining con- tact with such very different temperatures as those of Algiers and Paris. They are considering some form of resolution on integration when the Assembly meets, which the General could not entirely overlook, as he has the motions passed by them in their committee room, or the acclamations of the Assembly last January for a resolution that should not have been before the House, since tech- nically it had ceased to sit five minutes before. This might well be more awkward for Prime Minister M. Debre than for the President, for just as the Algerian deputies spend their time between two exhaustingly different temperatures, so M. Debrd has to adjust himself to two exhaustingly different altitudes, and that with even less interval, rushing from the Boeotian plains of the Gaullist UNR to the heights of Olympus where the Presi- dent can be found in solitary cloud wielding and thundering majesty.
The possible consequences of the disappointed anger of Algiers depend on two, things. Is the General going to wait for the Algerian situation to evolve or make another attempt at a solution? Will important elements of the army again be in collusion with the Algiers European malcontents? There are those who, with ingenious exegesis, draw from the General's last press conference opposite conclusions to the negative ones of your correspondent and who think there is something in the wilid. They may be right, and it may be that these subtleties are apparent to the rebel leaders, Who after all are themselves faced with the obverse of the same problems. At least a meeting between President de Gaulle and his Companion (of the Order of Liberation) King Mohammed V of Morocco is accepted in principle though not yet arranged. Just as the President has refused to use any words that would finally eliminate the hope of Political negotiations in Algeria, so he has refused to accept the logical demonstration by French nationalists that President Bourguiba and King Mohammed V are France's enemies. This is not easy, since Tunisia and Morocco have recognised the Algerian 'Government' and give it all help short of war, while at the same time, employing thousands of Frenchmen for everything from schoolteaching to engineering. But the King cultivates the same Olympian manners as his French opposite number, which makes things easier. At all events, as long as there are friendly personal relations between the head of the French State and the heads of the Moroccan and Tunisian States no doors are finally closed between France and the rebels, though this provides no guarantee that anyone will go through them.
The possibility of trouble with the French army is probably very much smaller than it was a year ago. Not that the army is altogether satisfied. `Integration' as a policy was largely the army's choice, since it rejected altogether the Europeans' antiquated preference for the privilege of a separate electoral roll. The army continues to fight its lazy, slow, unpleasant battle against the rebels without a clear objective. Its immediate compensa- tion is its status in Algeria, where young officers are somebody, have often an interesting and in- tensely preoccupying function, and where they feel they have done more to remake the country in two or three years than civilian administrators had done within twenty or thirty years. To lose all this for a solution in which they did not believe might well have explosive results. But the army has already once risked its unity, and its relations with the Paris government. It has emerged un- scathed, but at least its senior members are not likely to accept the same risk easily again. The high command in Algiers has at all events been skilfully broken up. General Salan is now com- fortably installed in vast apartments at the In- valides as Governor of Paris—a military post of more splendour than importance. General Allard, the senior infantry general in Algiers and an active man last May, has left this week to command the French forces in Germany, and is not apparently to be replaced, so that an air officer, General Challes, remains C-in-C, unassisted by an army man. The three regional commands have been reinforced as against the centre, and of the three the Algiers command is in the hands of General Massu. This officer fulfils a very important function, since he combines great popularity with the Algiers European population, as the man who crushed terrorism two years ago, with the reputa- tion of keen personal loyalty to President de Gaulle. Whether that loyalty makes him an easy subordinate for M. Paul Delouvrier, the civilian Delegate-General appointed by President de Gaulle while still Prime Minister, and nominally at least in control of the army as well as the civil administration, is perhaps another question, but two of the twelve departments are now under civilian administration in theory at least.
Even with reduced inclination and opportunity for political action by the army, the state of mili- tary opinion is necessarily a serious problem. The French army is a large one and has been mainly engaged in colonial wars on a big scale for twelve years. The young officers have been faced with political, technical and moral difficulties for which they had little guidance, and on which they had themselves to provide guidance for their men. The whole problem is now summed up in the words 'psychological warfare.' The mysteries of the 'Second Bureau' (i.e., intelligence) are now re- placed by the Fifth. Psychological warfare in- cludes everything from the work of an education officer lecturing the French troops on current affairs, to indoctrination of prisoners by methods that shock the Catholic hierarchy. It also includes a great deal of self-indoctrination. The French army, and especially its younger members, has discovered that an ideological rebellion needs an answer. There is great activity in discussion groups in cadet schools as well as in Algeria and the ferment stirs with its own autonomy from below as well as from above. It is a matter difficult to probe for a foreigner and certainly not without its positive aspects. But it must be said that in no field is the bankruptcy of Fourth Republicanism more evident than in its incapacity to provide the army with democratic republican ideas capable of interesting it. Quite apart from the grim methods that have been used, at least until recently, in Algeria to repress the rebels, there is an influx of authoritarian ideas, inspired often by the example of Chinese Communists, whose methods it is hoped to use for non-Communist purposes. This new form of the Communist danger was specifi- cally denounced in his Lenten pastoral letter by Archbishop Duval of Algiers. It is also worth noticing that the French army was slower to adopt Communist methods for non-Communist purposes than were the rebels.
That for good or evil there is a political ferment in the army seems to be paralleled by another fer- ment, in the younger administration. It is curious to note that in a France where political enthusiasm and vigour seem to have run slack in the general body of the nation, these seem strong in the two corporations which, in constitutional theory, should be primarily instruments. The Fourth Republic gave and the Fifth Republic has not taken away full political rights to serving officers, and to civil servants it added trade union rights with only slight limitations. These rights were naturally intended for the defence of private in- terests and attitudes, but it is precisely the public function that stirs the imagination and creates the problems. The ferment amongst young civil ser- vants seems to be of quite a different character from that in the army, rather a Left-wing republi- canism. Both have roots in experience in Algeria. The questionings of younger officials are also per- haps a necessary complement to the outlet for ability and talent that higher officials have so far found more satisfactorily in the Fifth than in the Fourth Republic. So far the Fifth Republic has more obviously possessed a helm than a means of propulsion. For good or for evil these ferments will surely prove important.
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