The Long View

Striding one afternoon last week into the gilded Salle des Fetes of the Elysee Palace, Charles de Gaulle took a seat in solitary grandeur upon an orchestra platform, signaled the beginning of the first press conference ever given by a French President. In the hour that followed, the 600 newsmen present witnessed the closest thing to a royal audience that France has seen since the days of Napoleon III. While the Cabinet of the Fifth Republic sat in dutiful silence at the foot of his dais, De Gaulle announced that he himself would speak for France at the prospective summit meeting--though, naturally, "with Premier Michel Debre at my side." With the disdain of a prince for a parvenu, he shot a derisive shaft at Khrushchev, "whom I met not so very long ago in Moscow in Stalin's entourage and who has come some distance since."

But for all his royal manner, De Gaulle was well aware that there was disaffection in his realm. Dryly, he conceded that Communist gains in France's municipal elections (TIME, March 23) stemmed in part from discontent with his austerity program. The press ("Excuse me. Messieurs les journalistes") had not accented the positive about austerity: the franc had been devalued by 17%, yet prices had since risen only 4%. "Now," said De Gaulle proudly, "we can meet any form of public expenditure without inflation. It is 20 years since that has happened. The value of our currency is uncontested in the world. A Frenchman of 40 has never before seen that."

How Much Time? With equal firmness, De Gaulle rejected the implication that his government had made no progress toward settling the four-year-old Algerian revolt. One by one, he ticked off France's recent accomplishments in Algeria: the extension of equal and universal suffrage to Algeria's Moslems; the progress of a program to provide schooling for all Moslem children ("There are a lot of them"); and, most important, the Constantine Plan, under which France will pour $420 million into industrial and agricultural development of Algeria in the next year. "By comparison," he said, "the desperate battles and outrages in Algeria appear each day more absurd."

De Gaulle talked as if peace were a far-off thing--a slow process of economic and political betterment that in time might convince Algeria's Moslems that they had more to gain from association with France than from independence. How long a time? Said France's 68-year-old President: "The efforts of a whole generation will be required."

Dream & Reality. In Algiers, newspapers of the diehard European settlers violently expressed their "distrust" of the man their riots had helped bring to power. Disheartening as De Gaulle's long view might seem to many of his countrymen, nothing else seemed to promise quicker relief. Last week Morocco's King Mohammed V, increasingly weary of the effect of the Algerian war on his own country, was angling for a visit with De Gaulle (who said fine), reportedly hoped to convince De Gaulle that autonomy within the French Community would be the best solution for Algeria.

In Tunisia, Secretary of State for Information Mohammed Masmoudi declared: "France's economic effort is modifying the face of Algeria. Looking at such changes, one cannot adopt a negative attitude." Most encouraging of all to French military men was dramatic new evidence of dissension within the rebel F.L.N. itself. Fortnight ago, after a pitched battle with other F.L.N. forces in Tunisia, 156 disaffected rebels led by Battalion Commander Ali Hambli fought their way out to Algeria, where they surrendered to the French army.

Hambli's desertion was a bad break for the F.L.N., since it coincided with an increasing war weariness in rebel ranks. But it would take far more than the surrender of a few score rebels to end the revolt. "History," noted Britain's Manchester Guardian Weekly last week, "offers no precedent of a colonial people turning away from its nationalist movement after four years of bitter war against the colonial ruler" and a loss of 80,000 lives.

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