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It would take too much space to detail all the inaccuracies your reporter has fallen into. A sample: I am not, and never was, a supporter of "the old system of proportional representation" against which I have consistently fought for the last twelve years.
The main points I object to because I believe they are meant as a slanderous propaganda are the following:
1) The "one-party bloc" fallacy. Your article is so contrived as to make the average reader believe I am in favor of a one-party system, i.e., of some fascist state. On the contrary, I am on record as having stated or written many times (e.g., in the February issue of the Paris Revue des Deux-Mondes) that France cannot expect to have less than five or six parties. What I did was to lead some splinter parties which had exactly the same basic ideas to merge into a single organization, which surely is no crime against democracy.
2) The whole article is based either on affirmations or innuendoes to the effect that I have been, so to say, conspiring against General de Gaulle and that he scored a triumph in a battle against me. The first point I consider a gross insult, as I have been on General de Gaulle's side for 18 years, as I still am; the second one is simply ludicrous. It is ridiculous to talk of my "blasted dreams" and even more to say that France experimented with the birth of hope because I, the number one enemy, was "under control." By the way, the "liberal" policy in Algeria stated by the President in his Constantine speech entirely coincides with the reforms plan I put together myself when I was Governor of Algeria in 1955. Now, by what curious magic should this plan 1)0 liberal in one case and reactionary in the other ?
3) The paragraph "Furious at his setbacks," etc. ... is a tissue of distorted facts and even, I am sorry to say, of downright lies. I was not furious at any setbacks; I was invited by General de Gaulle to have a cup of coffee with him, and we quietly and confidently discussed the political situation. Neither did I "demand" bluntly or otherwise permission to form a right-wing coalition, nor did the general have to "icily refuse." All this interview, as narrated by TIME, is to what really happened what a fairy tale is to reality.
It is quite evident that all those developments have been simply copied from extreme-left Paris papers which have taken me as their favorite aim because my political action up to May last proved a stumbling block to their policy of surrender in North Africa. I feel it is a pity that an American magazine should think it fit to feed its readers that sort of unwholesome stuff. What, may I ask, would America and indeed the whole free world gain if Algeria fell into the hands of anti-Western fanatics?
JACQUES SOUSTELLE
Minister of Information Paris
TIME'S source was not the Parisian left-wing press but its own reporting of key figures in the De Gaulle government. And TIME (like everyone else) assumes that De Gaulle had Soustelle's front specifically in mind when he for bade campaigning under the name De Gaulle "even as an adjective." ED.