Liberty, Equality . . .

Among the toughest and most loyal of France's hard-boiled professional soldiers are the Kabyle tribesmen, the original Zouaves, whose homeland is an arid region in Algeria's remote Djurdjura Mountains. The Kabyles were conquered by the Arabs in the 7th century, and although they became Sunnite Moslems, they have preserved many characteristics of their Berber origin: they are stockier than the Arabs, often have fair skin, ruddy complexion, blue eyes, and they are not afraid of work.

The poverty of their mountain country has driven them to seek employment far afield, not only as soldiers, but as farm laborers, peddlers and small-time traders. Since 1947, when the Republic extended French nationality to all Algerians, they have been coming to the French mainland. Of the 300,000 Algerians now in metropolitan France, 90% of them are from the Kabyle country.

Pockets in Paris. By buying a fourth-class ($3) ticket to Marseille, the Algerian is free to find work as a farm laborer, grape picker, or to join France's pick-and-shovel road-building gangs. But mostly he drifts towards Paris, where a third of all the Algerians in France form 2% of the city's population. Few Algerians can afford to bring their families with them: in all France there are only 5,500 Algerian women and 15,000 Algerian children. But the men keep up village and family ties, crowd together in dense pockets--one such community in the Gare du Nord district numbers 10,000--and gather in a thousand tiny Cafes Maures, which are purely Moslem (serving only minted tea, coffee, soft drinks). There, 850 miles from home, the Algerians hold their Djemmas, or council meetings. Only one in eight is a skilled worker; their average earnings are probably less than 20,000 francs ($57) a month, but in 1953 they managed to send home an amazing 35 billion francs ($100 million).

The latest and poorest of France's migratory populations, the Algerians get the worst of France's bad housing (TIME, Jan. 10). Some 50,000 have barely livable quarters, while another 50,000 live in hovels when they sleep indoors at all. In cold weather they are exploited by slum landlords who may sleep 30 men a night, ten at a time in a hotbed rotation system, in an airless cellar. Misery breeds crime, and Algerians today dominate Paris' narcotic and prostitution rackets. A recent outbreak of bag-snatching, knifing and mob assaults by Algerians moved the right-wing L'Aurore to complain last week: "Certain quarters of Paris have ceased to be safe. It is imprudent to venture out even in broad daylight, and that is intolerable . . . We don't have the right to say that there's nothing we can do about it."

Abandoned Hovels. What offends Parisians as much as the crime are the Algerian shanty towns which disfigure certain quarters of the City of Light. Last week, with Paris undergoing a spell of freezing weather, police descended on a Left Bank shanty town built in the concrete-lined ditches of old air-raid shelters in the rue de Vaugirard near the Gare Montparnasse, carried off in their "salad wagons" more than a hundred inhabitants. After a brief TB test the Algerians were bedded down in the disused Rennes Metro station.

Mattresses were laid in rows on the concrete floors; big tarpaulins were hung at the foot of stairwells at each end of the room, cutting off draft from train platforms; naked light bulbs glared pitilessly from white tiled walls. This crude dormitory was only a temporary haven, but it was reasonably dry and fairly warm, and a step up in the world for most of the Algerians. By week's end bulldozers churned the wooden huts and abandoned hovels of the Montparnasse eyesore into the ground.

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