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"Republican General." Salan and another general handed the government a secret report on the difficulties of the Indo-China war. When it was ignored, Salan leaked it to the newspapers, only to find himself virulently attacked by right-wing politicians as a defeatist and 'passionately embraced by left-wing Socialists and radicals as a "republican general" who was against colonial wars.
Thus when Socialist Premier Guy Mollet took office in 1956, he turned to General Raoul Salan as the man best qualified to liquidate the Algerian war. The fearful pieds-noirs, convinced that the "republican general" meant abandonment and betrayal, prepared his execution. At dusk one evening, two months after his arrival in Algiers, Salan sat at his desk in the general-staff building. On a terrace only 50 yds. away, a pied-noir named Jean Castille took aim with a bazooka, closed his eyes to mutter a prayer, then opened them and fired. In that moment of prayer, Salan was called from his office—the rocket struck and killed another officer, who was passing the desk at the instant of firing. Two years ago in Spain, when both were fugitives from De Gaulle, Salan and Castille met and were reconciled.
End of the Fourth. Although in Algeria Salan cracked down hard on the F.L.N. and brought in the loth Paratroop Division from the field to counter its big terror campaign, the pieds-noirs continued to distrust him. In May of 1958, the chaotic Fourth Republic had its final convulsion. Its last Premier was Pierre Pflimlin, a man the pieds-noirs suspected of favoring a deal with the F.L.N. The European mob poured into the Forum, still jeered at Salan as the "republican general." But in private talks with the Europeans' "Committee of Public Safety," Salan announced that he was with them. He appeared on a balcony overlooking the impatient thousands in the Forum, and this time they listened as he shouted, "Algerians! I am one of you!" Salan concluded his speech with "Vive de Gaulle!" The crowd, like Salan, believed De Gaulle in favor of a French Algeria, and broke into pandemonium.
To Salan and his backers, De Gaulle proved a bitter disappointment. As De Gaulle more and more spoke in terms of self-determination for Algeria and even of a cease-fire with the F.L.N., the pieds-noirs saw one more betrayal. To their disgust, Salan was recalled to Paris by De Gaulle, who correctly gauged him as an obstacle to his policy. Salan was assigned to the purely honorary post of Inspector of Defense. He was without troops, without even an office.
In June 1960, having reached the required age limit, Salan retired from the army and was soon delivering flaming speeches, urging war veterans "to take justice into your own hands." In October 1960, Salan eluded Gaullist security guards assigned to watch him, slipped across the border to Spain. From a Madrid hotel room, he resumed his links with the conspirators in Algiers and with other anti-Gaullist exiles like Susini and the two Algerian leaders, the roughneck cafe owner Jo Ortiz