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Message Received. On the troubled relations with Tunisia over the French base at Bizerte, De Gaulle was blunt to the point of rudeness. On a visit to France only last February, he recalled acidly, President Habib Bourguiba had accepted the French argument that France could not evacuate the Bizerte naval base so long as war threatened Europe. "Then, for reasons probably connected with what is happening in the Arab world, the Tunisian Republic suddenly changed its tone and its tune," sniffed De Gaulle. France certainly had no immediate plans to leave Bizerte. But this did not mean forever.
"The realities will remain," he said. "Would that Tunis take them into account and reach with Paris an agreement based on common sense. Such is the wish of France."
However blunt the words may have sounded to others, Bourguiba got the message. Already worried that the strained relations with France would ruin his country's economy, he returned from the neutrals' conference at Belgrade to call his own press conference, where he announced that the French were certainly welcome to stay in Bizerte until the threat of world war passes. He agreed to immediate negotiations to seek a "modus vivendi during the dangerous period." To get things rolling, he offered an exchange deal for French prisoners captured during the July Bizerte fighting. Bourguiba admitted that De Gaulle's statement had been embedded in "disagreeable" remarks about Tunisia. But these were "due, perhaps, to the game of political balance [in France]. You have to know how to interpret General de Gaulle and be accustomed to his fashion of speaking," he explained.
It was Charles de Gaulle's words on Algeria that stirred the anger of his most bitter enemies—the S.A.O. (Secret Army Organization), spearhead of Algeria's European ultras that has extended its organization to metropolitan France itself.
Three days after the press conference, De Gaulle wearily stepped into his official black Citroën limousine for the 140-mile trip to his country home in Colombey-les-deux-Eglises. On a dark stretch of highway 90 miles from his destination, a shadowy figure waited in the trees, a detonator in his hand, a long wire leading to a jerrycan of gasoline and a 9-lb. plastic bomb concealed at the edge of the road. As De Gaulle's car passed, he pushed the plunger. Flame spurted across its path, searing the Citroën's paint, damaging a headlight. But miraculously, the bomb itself did not explode. Lumbering out to inspect the damage, De Gaulle delivered his verdict: "Just a joke in bad taste." His police did not take it so lightly. The man who pushed the plunger was caught a few miles away, confessed he was an S.A.O. member. Within hours, police raids began all over France. One S.A.O. member was caught with 150 plastic bombs in his car. More shocking was the arrest of two army generals: one was General Paul Vanuxem. brilliant veteran of the Indo-China war, the other was General Paul de Crèvecoeur, former chief of the French contingent in Korea. These men, announced the government, were the principal leaders of the S.A.O. in France.