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Moving enthusiastically to enforce Bourguiba's order confining all French soldiers to barracks, Tunisian National Guardsmen threw up roadblocks, and armed civilians dug slit trenches around France's ten Tunisian bases. Three men set up a machine gun at the canal at the entrance to the great naval base of Bizerte to bar the entrance of further French vessels. At other bases, food supplies were shut off. When a French diplomat formally requested permission to revictual the garrison, Vice Premier Bahi Ladgham told him coldly: "Leave Tunisia and you can find all the food you need." Should the French try to force their way in or out of the bases, warned Bourguiba, "it will mean war." Breathing defiance, he took to the radio to proclaim: "Today I am the President of the Republic, but I will be the first to join the Maquis." Typically, he added in the next breath: "Tunisia is always ready to turn the page."
. . . And Our Sacred Interests. Bourguiba, whose ill-equipped army of 6,200 men could not conceivably stand up to a serious French attack, was taking a major gamble. "I have promised the Tunisian people that the French army will go," said he. "If I fail, I will be swept away." Clearly, any successor in such circumstances would be far more hostile to France and the West.
The French press all but forgot the bombing in their outrage at Bourguiba's move. Foreign Minister Christian Pineau announced that France had offered to negotiate withdrawal of her forces from Tunisia, but only if Bourguiba ceased his "pressure and provocation." Declared Pineau grandiloquently: "France intends to defend her interests, and the Tunisian government must understand their sacred character." To offset Bourguiba's U.N. appeal, Pineau lodged a countercomplaint with the Security Council, charging, accurately enough, that Tunisia had permitted Algerian rebels to operate from Tunisian soil. Said Pineau: "We are the accusers."
Second Thoughts. All week long France's allies worked feverishly to find a solution that would save face all around. In New York members of Britain's U.N. delegation scurried about trying to drum up support for a demilitarized Tunisian-Algerian border patrolled by a force similar to the UNEF in Gaza. One obvious objection to this scheme: it would severely handicap the Algerian rebels by depriving them of their privileged sanctuary and would thereby damage Bourguiba's prestige with his countrymen, the bulk of whom ardently support the rebel cause. In Paris U.S. Ambassador Amory Houghton urged moderation on Felix Gaillard, and in Tunis Ambassador Lewis Jones did the same with Bourguiba. At week's end Secretary John Foster Dulles, who had summoned French Ambassador Herve Alphand to his home the day after the Sakiet bombing, prepared to interrupt a long-planned vacation to take personal charge of U.S. efforts to ease the crisis.