ALGERIA: Successful Mission

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    When Massu had finished, De Gaulle courteously but firmly announced: "L'Al-geérie, c'est moi"—a characteristically grandiloquent phrase that turned out to mean he intended to act as his own Minister for Algeria, and to use pliable Five-Star General.* Raoul Salan. overall French commander in the area, as his deputy on the spot. Suavely De Gaulle added that Soustelle would soon be called to Paris "to take up the high position he deserves." As soon as the opportunity presented itself, France's new Premier took the insubordinate Massu aside, gave him an old-fashioned three-minute military chewing-out, concluding with the words: "Henceforth, my generals will be administrators, not politicians."

    "I Have Understood." The hours that followed this initial display of firmness were critical ones. The men whom De Gaulle was trying to bring to heel had made one revolution and were quite capable of making another. They were also men who, for all their shouts of "Vive De Gaulle!" believed that they had brought him to power and had some claims to controlling him. A few hours later, when it came time for De Gaulle to address the people of Algiers from the now famous balcony of the Government General Building, two of his ministers who had come from Paris with him were nowhere to be found. Minister of State Louis Jac-quinot and Minister for the Sahara Max Lejeune had been decoyed from the general's side and confined in an isolated office under temporary guard. "Lejeune is lucky to be alive," snapped one member of the Public Safety Committee later. "If he had not come with De Gaulle, we would have executed him."

    At this point, had De Gaulle tried to widen the breach, he might have lost the day. He was too clever for that. Having quickly taken the temperature of Algiers, De Gaulle (yet unaware of what had happened to his two ministers) proceeded to deliver a speech that contained whole phrases lifted from Massu's abortive ultimatum. De Gaulle's opening salvo was the simple, ringing statement: "I have understood you"—a fatherly offer of absolution for the civic misbehavior of the past weeks that sent the Algiers crowd into wild cheers. Then, playing to his audience, De Gaulle paid tribute to the "ardent, coherent and disciplined French army" and trumpeted the insurgents' slogan that "in all Algeria . . . there are only Frenchmen."

    But along with these crowd-catching phrases, De Gaulle included a few jolts for the colons. He paid cautious tribute to Algeria's Moslem rebels for putting up a fight "that is courageous but that is cruel and fratricidal." And he bluntly spelled out what he meant by proclaiming the equality of French and Moslem Algerians: "This means a livelihood must be given to those who have not had it. This means that dignity must be granted to those whose dignity was contested." It also meant, added De Gaulle, dropping a political blockbuster, that "not later than three months hence" the 9,000,000 Moslems of Algeria would start to vote along with all other Frenchmen on a one-man-one-vote basis, would be entitled to elect "their representatives to the public powers as all other Frenchmen will do."

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