The Wrecker

In its classic form, the fall of a French Premier closely resembles a bullfight. First, the picadors and banderilleros harry the victim with light but painful barbs, until his chest is heaving and his flanks are blood-flecked. Then the matador steps forth in solitary grandeur, executes his breathtaking passes and finally plunges his sword in for the kill.

Last week, when it came his turn to face the corrida, Felix Gaillard got the full treatment. To his plaintive declaration that if France will not trust its allies "we are before a crisis of extreme gravity," Conservative Deputy Raymond Triboulet jeeringly retorted: "You're not before one, you're in one." At Gaillard's protestations of U.S. solidarity with France, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a right-wing tough elected as a Poujadist, interrupted: "Of the two dangers that menace the independence of France--Bolshevik Russia and the United States--the latter is by far the worse." Then the banderilleros retired, and Gaillard found himself face to face with burly Gaullist Jacques Soustelle, the man whom Frenchmen have come to call Jacques le tombeur--Jacques the Cabinet-wrecker.

Rattles & Fairy Tales. With an assurance born of experience--it was he who only six months ago led the attack that toppled Gaillard's predecessor, Maurice Bourges-Maunoury--Soustelle began by labeling Gaillard a "puppet" of the U.S. "If French policy is made in Washington," said Soustelle, "did you call the Assembly back here to play with baby rattles? A week ago you said the good offices mission was at an impasse. What caused you to change your mind? Only one new fact: the letter from Eisenhower."

"Pure fairy tale," snapped Gaillard.

Mercilessly, Soustelle persisted: "You yielded to foreign pressure."

Paling in rage, Gaillard smashed his fist down on his desk with a bang that sent papers flying: "I repeat. It is not true. I am overwhelmed that a man of your quality uses arguments of this nature."

"Synthetic indignation will get you nowhere," gibed Soustelle. Then, coldly, he delivered the fatal thrust: "In voting for you today, we would place France in danger. That is why we refuse to follow you."

The Aztec. A beetle-browed 200-pounder whose suits seem a size too small, 46-year-old Jacques Soustelle is well suited for his wrecker's work; he looks like an able-bodied warehouseman who has unaccountably wandered into the National Assembly from Les Halles markets. In reality, he is a coldly brilliant scholar who graduated from Paris' famed Ecole Normale Superieure at 20, won fame as an anthropologist by a series of notable books on the Incas and Aztecs. Soustelle's travels in Latin America with his Tunis-born wife--also an anthropologist--won him the youthful nickname of Jacques I'Aztec; they also convinced him of the justice of South American outcries about U.S. "dollar imperialism," gave birth to the anti-Americanism that has been the one consistent theme of his political career.

First step in the transformation of "Jacques the Aztec" into "Jacques the wrecker" came when Soustelle joined De Gaulle's forces during World War II, wound up, despite a record of devotion to left-wing causes, as chief of the Free French secret service. The second step came three years ago when then-Premier Pierre Mendes-France named him Governor General of Algeria.

Regarded surprisingly as a left-winger, Soustelle took up the job determined to work toward equal rights for Algeria's Moslems, clung to his liberal policy until August 1955, when a group of Algerian rebels, in a sudden uprising, murdered and mutilated scores of French civilians at the mining town of El Alia. Sickened by the carnage at El Alia, Soustelle thereafter devoted himself single-mindedly to the military destruction of Algeria's National Liberation Front. His work so endeared him to the French population of Algiers that when he was removed as Governor General (by Socialist Premier Guy Mollet), 50,000 colons rioted in protest, did their best to keep him from getting to the ship that was to take him to France. "I was carried away," he said, "like a straw by the human flood. One hundred thousand voices cried in unison: Don't go, don't go. Nothing can give an idea of the force of the crowd . . . Over it seemed to drift a burning elemental collective soul."

Thunder on the Right. Back in Paris, still savoring this heady and mystical experience, Soustelle founded the Union for the Salvation and Rebirth of French Algeria, a lavishly financed "nonparty" organization, which surrounds him with private bodyguards, and which appeals to the thousands of embittered Frenchmen who have left North Africa to settle in less luxurious circumstances in France and are a volatile new element in the French electorate. Today, though he heads the 15-man Gaullist remnant in the National Assembly, and regularly calls for De Gaulle's return to power, Soustelle can scarcely claim to speak for De Gaulle; the two men have seen each other only once in the past several months. What Soustelle does speak for is the uncompromising imperialism of the French "ultras" in Algeria and the blind xenophobia that has seized the whole French right wing. Given power, he would probably try to lead France out of NATO into neutralism, abridge French civil liberties in order to crack down on what he calls the domestic "traitors and defeatists" who doubt the wisdom of the Algerian war.

Feared and distrusted by France's Socialists and Catholic moderates, tough Jacques Soustelle has little hope of winning by parliamentary means the power he craves. But last week during his assault on Gaillard, Soustelle thundered: "Neither you nor I has a monopoly on patriotism. But I have my conscience. I also have the confidence of brave men in France and across the Mediterranean." For a moment the Deputies sat in silence, stunned by the Cabinet-wrecker's implicit boast that it might be within his power to topple the Fourth Republic itself. From the benches on the extreme right of the Assembly came a crash of applause.

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