Le Printemps

Spring was as lovely as ever in Paris. Pale candle flames blossomed on the chestnut trees in the Champs Elysees, and the terrace cafes spread their chairs and tables out across the sidewalks again. Lovers exchanged lilies of the valley, and concierges, in good humor after the winter hibernation, restored their bird cages to outside window ledges. But beneath the soft blue sky, Paris was in torment; the war in Algeria was now like the Indo-China war at its worst. But unlike Indo-China in the days of Dienbienphu, no end, whether in defeat or victory, was within sight in Algeria.

In their morning newspapers the coffee drinkers on the boulevards read how police inspectors, making the rounds of Paris' Quartier Jean-Jaures, had been jumped by four armed Algerians. Since the war began, gunfights between Algerians have been an everyday event in France proper (120 killed, 741 wounded this year), but this was a planned attack on Frenchmen in Paris. The worst fears of the Paris police were being realized: Algeria's nationalists had decided to bring their war to the mainland, not for military gains but for the counterterrorism that they calculated it would provoke.

Terror & Reprisal. In Algeria terrorism is paying off handsomely. On the one hand, it has prevented moderate Moslems from getting together with the French (near Constantine a fortnight ago police found the trussed cadavers of nine Moslem delegates who had agreed to participate with the French in a municipal-reform program). On the other hand, it has driven Algeria's million Frenchmen to a frenzy of resentment and counterterror. Typical were the riots provoked by the assassination in Algiers of Patrol Sergeant Camille le Prial, which last week brought more than a hundred paratroopers smashing through the casbah and resulted in the death of three Moslems, a score injured. Such incidents work to the advantage of the rebels by creating in metropolitan France what the French themselves acknowledge to be a crise de conscience.

Even General de Gaulle has been stirred to offer a "solution" for Algeria. De Gaulle's plan: partition the country into ethnic communities (French, Berber, Arab, etc.) in a "mutation of empire" where the "autonomy would be great but the framework rigid," the whole to be part of a "French ensemble." Such a solution would probably have to be imposed, since the National Liberation Front demands recognition of Algeria's complete independence as the first condition of an armistice. But France, which has sent 700,000 troops to Algeria since the war began and is spending over a billion francs a day keeping the situation barely under control, has no margin for imposing solutions which do not have the support of the majority of Algeria's 8,000,000 Moslems. Said De Gaulle last week: "It will be 15 years before there is peace in Algeria."

Policy of Grandeur. Raymond Aron, the Walter Lippmann of France, who writes in the conservative Figaro, has now changed his mind about continuing to be tough in Algeria, believes loss of the empire is inescapable in the near future because "in 'the long run a country cannot play a role abroad out of proportion to its means." Aron, who blames a "policy of grandeur" for France's colonial mess, advises an approach to the National Front or "at least to recognize the vocation of Algeria to independence."

To French colons in Algeria such talk is treason. Close to the war, the colons are disgusted by the crise de conscience, say that the National Liberation Front, far from being anxious for a deal, is stepping up its terror campaign with the hope of making the French give up Algeria in despair.

Last week Socialist Premier Guy Mollet, attacked from all sides for failure of peace and absence of victory in Algeria, yielded to the uneasy conscience of metropolitan France by appointing a grandiosely designated Committee to Safeguard Individual Rights and Liberties. A week earlier another committee, appointed by the Radical Socialist Party for a similar purpose, had thought better of going to Algeria when Minister Resident Robert Lacoste warned that he would be forced to employ thousands of police to protect them from the French colons.

Though big, bluff Robert Lacoste rates as French proconsul in Algeria, his background as Socialist, trade unionist and World War II Resistance fighter gives him a viewpoint somewhat different from that of the colons he zealously protects. Last week he gave a group of intimates a new reason for continuing the war that cannot be won: If France surrenders, he said, it will mean the return to continental France of more than a million angry displaced Europeans, plus an army largely sympathetic to them. The outcome, hinted Lacoste, would be a rightist revolution a la Franco.

Recently, after a group of newsmen had bombarded Lacoste with questions, a U.S. correspondent strolled with Madame Lacoste through the gardens of Algiers' Palais d'Ete, rich with the strong colors and heavy scents of the North African spring. Enthused the correspondent: "Isn't this a wonderful place?" Madame Lacoste looked at him oddly, spat out: "I hate it, I hate it. My husband is a Socialist who spent all his life trying to help people. Now he is here killing people." Madame Lacoste burst into tears. For the French it was a tormented spring.

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