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Quick Switch. In manning the barricades with his followers last January, Lagaillarde had thought he had the army and civil administration with him. How was it, he asked, that during the first days of the uprising "there were no police? One had the impression that there was incitement to demonstrate." He claimed that one morning, just before the insurrection, Paratroop General Jacques Massu, the city commander in Algiers, phoned three times to ask anxiously for an anti-Gaullist demonstration. Later Lagaillarde was summoned by two generals and a batch of colonels to a nearby barracks and told they were appointing him co-director of a Committee of National Safety. Army emissaries arrived from Paris to pledge their allegiance to Lagaillarde, and one of them, he testified, contemptuously dismissed De Gaulle as "an old man obsessed with death—there is absolutely nothing to be expected from him."
Then came his betrayal, Lagaillarde went on. When De Gaulle broadcast a demand that the insurrectionists surrender unconditionally, Lagaillarde's highly-placed army backers abruptly switched sides. A senior military officer said bluntly, "Your personal case is not important. We have to save the army." Weeping, Lagaillarde told the court: "If I had wanted to, I could have had with me numbers of soldiers and officers who were furious to see their chiefs not taking up their responsibilities." Instead, Lagaillarde meekly surrendered.
The Weeper. Last week was the turn of Alain de Sérigny, 48, owner of the right-wing newspaper L'Echo d'Alger, who described himself more duped than Gardes and Lagaillarde. In 1958, he said, he had arranged a 10 million-franc loan for the same Gaullists who were now charging him with treason. He had two interviews with De Gaulle himself that so blighted his hopes for the preservation of "French Algeria" that, after the second, "I have to confess that, on leaving De Gaulle, I wept on the staircase of the Hōtel Matignon."
But Jacques Soustelle, then a member of De Gaulle's Cabinet, convinced De Sérigny that the President's words were window dressing and that De Gaulle's actions would support a French Algeria. De Sérigny was further encouraged when Premier Michel Debré contributed a fire-eating article to his newspaper. And when the nervous publisher confided his anxiety to General Challe, he was again soothed. "Don't worry," said Challe. "The army is here for 15 years."
Running all through the testimony of the defendants in the barricades trial was the implicit charge that they had been deliberately provoked into rebellion by slippery-tongued members of De Gaulle's government. The presumable object of such a maneuver: to discredit as traitors and would-be instigators of civil war all partisans of "French Algeria."