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Joseph Ortiz, 47, is of Spanish descent, likes to say he was born an "orphan ward of the state," owns an Algiers bar called the Forum, which has long been a hangout for loud-talking ultra right-wingers. Dark, muscular and tough, Ortiz was captured by the Nazis in 1940 but escaped. He was jailed for five months on suspicion of being a member of the terrorist gang that tried in 1957 to kill General Raoul Salan, then military commander of Algeria, and succeeded in murdering one of his aides. He dislikes making speeches, has an Algerian accent thick enough to blunt the sharpest knife, and a rabid hatred of Arabs, whom he calls "les melons." Ortiz is founder of the paramilitary Front National Français, whose 15,000 members are largely drawn from Bab El Oued and El Biar, the European workers' districts of Algiers. When not manning the barricades or rubbing out opponents, he and his men turn out pamphlets denouncing everyone who disagrees with them, including De Gaulle. Most of the insurgents behind the barricades were Ortiz followers.
Robert Martel, 42, is the country equivalent of city-bred Jo Ortiz. He also was jailed on suspicion of being involved in the plot to kill General Salan. A winegrower from Rouiba, a whitewashed village in the rich plain of Mitidja, Martel has recruited and armed some 5,000 men. Unlike his fellow rebels Lagaillarde and Ortiz, Martel is deeply religious and has borrowed the heart-and-cross design of the missionary White Fathers as the emblem of his "Movement of May 13." Martel hates capitalists, Communists and the power of money, and is fond of explaining that the "de-christianization" of France has caused its decline.