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The man whose words created such furor had held no political office since 1946, had expressed no public position on political issues since 1954. He had only a handful of avowed followers in Parliament and offered his countrymen only the most unspecific of programs. Yet no man in France last week cast so long a shadow or so completely embodied the crisis of the Fourth Republic as General Charles Andre Joseph Marie de Gaulle.
He had always made his terms clear. The idol of France at one of the crises in its life, he had served an ultimatum upon his countrymen: if they wanted him to take part again in the game of French politics, they must change the rules. Specifically, they must turn their backs on France's prewar system of parliamentary supremacy and accept a chief executive empowered to make policy without constant interference from the National Assembly. When, after World War II, a majority of Frenchmen opted for the old rules, De Gaulle retired to the sidelines and sat there for a decade, croaking, like Cassandra, of impending disaster. Last week his prophecies, like Cassandra's, were being borne out, and the kind of hour for which he was created was about to strike once again. For De Gaulle, as Historian Herbert Luethy noted, is essentially a "politician of catastrophe," and it was catastrophe that stalked France last week.
After the Coffee. The crisis was long abuilding, and a surprise to no one when it came: the only question was which of France's innumerable Cabinet crises would produce the crise de regime. France had been without a government since the fall of Felix Gaillard a month earlier; two would-be Premiers had tried to put together majorities and had failed. Now testy, white-haired Pierre Pflimlin of the
Catholic Popular Republican Party had submitted his prospective program to the Assembly, and the Deputies, wearied by a full afternoon of oratory, had adjourned for dinner in various excellent restaurants in the neighborhood. Shortly before 9 o'clock, while most were still lingering over their after-dinner coffee, news tickers pounded out word of the military insurrection in Algiers.
In Algiers, for nearly a week, the right-wing press had been working on the emotions of the city's French population by preaching against Pflimlin as an apostle of "abandonment," because he was known to favor negotiations with the rebel Algerian National Liberation Front. Then came the explosive word that Algerians had executed three French prisoners in reprisal for the execution of three rebels in Algiers' jail. Driven by uncontrollable fury, thousands of colons surged into the streets of Algiers shouting "The army to power!" and "Vive De Gaulle!" (see below). They were quieted only when General Massu placed himself at the head of a junta with the ominously evocative name of the Committee of Public Safety.*
In Paris, when the well-fed Deputies returned to the Assembly, the debate on