The Duellists

The sands of time for the Fourth Republic's parliamentary regime seemed to be running out.

At 5 o'clock one morning last week a military airplane from Algiers quietly set down on Corsica, the small Mediterranean island from which Napoleon Bonaparte sallied forth to win an emperor's crown. Out of the plane stepped Corsican-born Pascal Arrighi, a French National Assembly Deputy and passionate adherent of the two-week-old Algerian insurrection. Barely 13 hours later, 36-year-old Pascal Arrighi, at the head of 250 Corsica-based paratroopers and a mob of 10,000, seized control of the island capital of Ajaccio. From the balcony of the Ajaccio Prefectural Headquarters a local contractor announced, amid shouts of "Vive De Gaulle," the formation of a Committee of Public Safety whose membership "was prepared long ago in Algiers."

In Paris grim-faced Premier Pierre Pflimlin hastily called an emergency Cabinet meeting to deal with the second uprising against the Fourth Republic in twelve days. Early next morning Pflimlin's tape-recorded voice boomed out from the radios of France condemning the Corsican insurgents as "a handful of rebels" who "are seeking to drag us down the slope which leads to civil war."

The Great Silence. The delicate--and for the first two weeks, bloodless--state of balance could not last indefinitely, for two great forces were in a deadly duel to determine the fate of France. Defending the Fourth Republic was testy Premier Pierre Pflimlin, armed with constitutionality and the tough internal security forces commanded by stooped, whitehaired Interior Minister Jules Moch.* On the attack were the insurgents of Algeria, armed with the bulk of France's effective military strength and the full-throated approval of the Algiers mob. Off to one side, waiting for a summons to take over, stood towering Charles de Gaulle, whose fortunes rose every time the insurgents scored a point.

The duel went on in a strange silence --a silence imposed on the mass of the French people not by Jules Moch's troopers but by a fundamental indecision. Economically prosperous, politically cynical and weary, Frenchmen could not summon up enough enthusiasm for De Gaulle to rush to the barricades on his behalf. But for the most part they seemed not to feel enough hostility to offer him active opposition, were apparently prepared to accept him as ruler of France, if it came to that. When, early last week, France's two biggest unions called for a general work stoppage to bar De Gaulle's way to power, only 35,000 out of 600,000 Paris workers actually walked off their jobs.

The Soft Sell. This curious situation was skillfully played upon by De Gaulle himself, that odd, proud man who satisfied no one but who was many people's choice as a last resort. During his jam-packed Paris press conference at the beginning of the week, the man who boasts that he brought the Fourth Republic into existence gave open encouragement to Algeria's rebellious soldiers and settlers, noted sardonically that they "have not been the object of any sanctions on the part of the public authorities . . . Why would you have me call them sedition-mongers?" But at the same time the general made it clear that he had no intention of leading a coup d'etat. "I am a man," said he, "who belongs to nobody and belongs to everybody."

Moderation, in fact, was the keynote of De Gaulle's game. Ostensibly, France's World War II hero spent most of the week in solitary retreat at his home in the village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, waiting for France to send for him. But from "authoritative sources" and "persons who have talked to the general within the last 48 hours" came a rash of inspired stories on his political intentions. Their burden: De Gaulle had in mind "only a short term of office," and if he got it, would confine himself to settling the Algerian war and reforming France's constitution. The idea that he might embark on hair-raising adventures, such as pulling France out of NATO, was ridiculous. Fact was, chorused the "authoritative sources," that De Gaulle wanted to strengthen NATO, not destroy it.

As De Gaulle was well aware, this line of attack had its risks. In the minds of some Frenchmen, De Gaulle's soft sell and his insistence that he must be invited to power reawakened a longstanding suspicion that "le grand Charlie" lacked the capacity to be either an effective democrat or effective dictator. "After all," mused a dentist in Chateau-Thierry, "De Gaulle had the country in his hands in 1945 and couldn't run it. We need somebody who is better at politics." But on the minds of many Frenchman, De Gaulle's tactic of moderation seemed to have its effect. It might not make them yearn for his return to power, but it helped to resign them to the prospect.

The Finger Points. Unlike De Gaulle, who need not act, harried Premier Pflimlin was faced with the harsh task of demonstrating here and now his capacity to give France an effective government. In the National Assembly Pflimlin won "victory" after "victory''--including a committee vote approving his hastily drafted plan to revise the constitution so as to give the Fourth Republic stronger, longer-lived Cabinets. But when it came to the issue on which his government must stand or fall--its ability to re-establish control over the insurgents of Algeria--the only tactic Pflimlin found was to pretend that the insurgents were not really insurgents at all.

Early last week, by a vote of 557 to 0, the National Assembly humbly approved a motion expressing gratitude to the army for services it had rendered France "under the flag of the Republic." This farce had been scarcely played out when the Deputies went on to vote 473 to 93 in favor of giving Pflimlin special powers in Algeria--powers which Pflimlin blandly promised to delegate to General Raoul Salan, commander of the rebellious Algerian army.

For the first hour and a half of the debate, not a single Deputy had the temerity to question this absurdity or to mention De Gaulle. Then, in a blunt speech reproaching De Gaulle for giving "new life and encouragement" to the insurrection, ex-Premier Pierre Mendes-France leveled his finger at Pflimlin and cried: "We call upon you to condemn openly those insurgent leaders in Algiers." Pflimlin weakly replied: "I do not intend to disassociate the army from the Republic."

Giving a Push. Predictably, this display of weakness in Paris only served to spur Algiers to new assaults. Late in the week, abandoning all attempts to keep open a line of diplomatic retreat, insurgent leaders took a public pledge not to submit to Paris until De Gaulle governed France. The rebels seemed to have all the initiative and unity. Without risking an invasion of the French mainland, they could set off troubles, as in Corsica. And in Tunisia, violent fighting broke out between Tunisian army units and the garrison at Remada, one of the ten bases France still holds in its former North African protectorate--a development which gave new reality to the explosive possibility that the Algiers insurgents, to provoke Paris into surrender, might launch an all-out attempt to reconquer Tunisia.

Now at last the Paris government began to speak openly of "insurrection against the state." But even in this desperate hour, Pflimlin was careful to emphasize that he applied the word "rebel" only to the Corsicans and not to their infinitely more powerful sponsors in Algiers. The clear implication: Pflimlin was convinced that, no matter how great the provocation, he could not try to bring Algiers to heel by force. And since there was no apparent hope of bringing Algiers to heel any other way, the likelihood was that in the end the Fourth Republic would be obliged to capitulate to the insurgents --and to Charles de Gaulle.

* In Paris alone Moch had at his disposal last week 35,000 men drawn from five different units--the Police Judiciare, the Police Generale, the Police Municipale, the Compagnie Republicaine de Securite and the Garde Mobile.

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