Round and Round the Mulberry Bus
By DARSIE GILLIE P You would have to go a long way 16ack to find a visit by a British Prime Minister to Paris during which helmeted riot police were on guard outside the British Embassy to protect it against hostile demon- strations. Fortunately it was the police and not the demonstrators that were noticeable. There was, how- ever, a unanimously severe and to a great extent hostile press. The Sues alliance has brought bitter fruit, and not much less bitter for lack of demon- strators. So much of the press had in the last week given its readers to understand that the arms to Tunisia were really on their way to the rebels in Algeria and would therefore kill young French- men that you could scarcely have blamed any demonstrators who might have turned up, if we were as base as that! A great many newspaper readers must have noticed something odd about this story, for after all the French Government was not opposed in principle to being itself the supplier of arms to Tunisia.
The deeper resentment that the Tunisian arms affair has brought to the surface is of a more serious character. It is that Britain, the ally of Suez, who a year ago had accepted by implica- tion the essential rightness of France's policy 011 Algeria, was now tagging along with the cop sa as to earn respectability. That is the popular reading of the situation and the one which it would be valuable to disprove in a big way. 11/ win over the French Prime Minister and high officials is quite insufficient. Even those French" men who are fully aware of President Bourguiba 5 situation in Tunisia and of the urgency of remedy'' ing it that grew daily during the French Cabinet crisis cannot help wishing that Britain had done less than her duty in the matter. The situation might have appeared different to the ordinifrY man if any newspaper had thought of inquiring what the still very large French colony in Tun thought about it. Its members would be the first to be threatened if President Bourguiba were swept Out of office by extremists supported by the large body of Algerian rebels camped on his side of the border. But just as President Bourguiba cannot himself publicly speak of this 'threat will' out appearing to dissociate himself from the cause of Algerian liberty, so the French in Tunisia can' not on their own initiative cast doubt on the stability of his government.
M. Gaillard's Government certainly did verY little to curb the nationalist press in France, bill M. Gaillard could not forget that his predecessor M. Bourges-Maunoury fell after M. Soustelle had addedvenom to his attack on the first Algeria 3111 hY accusing M. Pineau, Minister of Foreign Affairs in both the last and the present Government, of being weak-kneed when faced with the American insistence that President Bourguiba must be allowed to equip his small army. M. Pineau had actually stated on September 30 in the Assembly that not one of the rifles hitherto delivered to the Tunisian army had ever been captured in rebel hands, though much rebel equipment smuggled into Algeria from Tunisia has been taken. This is the kind of admission that undermines the simple French nationalist's supposition, that trouble must be attributed to a villain and a villain whom a strong self-respecting government could deal with. •The hundred Conservative Independents and Peasants who provided the votes that brought M• Bourges-Maunoury down consented to vote for M. Gaillard's investiture and provide him with three Ministers. But half of them turned sup- port into abstention last week when it was a question of voting a hundred milliard francs of new taxes. M. Gaillard had to consider his des- perate need of their support for his new version of the Algeria Bill.
M• Gaillard, it must be- remembered, has climbed to the top as a financial and economic specialist; there is no reason to think that before becoming Premier he had concerned himself very deeply with problems not immediately connected with his own sphere, which was large enough to Preoccupy him. This is not to say that he will not learn; but, from his investiture speech onward, h, e has pulled out the patriotic stops when Algeria has been mentioned, and can scarcely be said to have discussed it at all. Speaking to the Con- gress of his own party, the Radicals, last Satur- day, he defended himself quite frankly on the ground that no government was possible in the Present Parliament without the Independents and Peasanti except a renewal of the Popular Front 01' 1936—this time dominated by the Com- munists who would now be the largest party in it. The conclusion that M. Gaillard would for the moment draw seems to be that the Gov- ernment must ration itself in words or deeds offensive to the Right for fear that there shall be no government at all. While the financial and economic problem has priority, you have to cause them pain about that and therefore must avoid doing so on other matters.
There would be a good deal to be said for this if. Algeria were not in fact the key problem; and lies about Algeria, the gravest single disease from Which France is suffering. The cost of Algeria in every respect has never been faced. France has unquestionably transferred her main military force from Germany to North Africa, breaking tiP her highly modernised divisions into small nineteenth-century units for hunting down guerrilleros. If Britain is in fact playing the un- comradely part in NATO that France fears, this surely is the circumstance that makes it possible. No less unquestionably France has allowed the financial cost of Algerian operations to swell to a figure that only foreigners examine (as M. Mendes-France pointed out to the Assembly the other day). It is probably enough to account for three-quarters of the deficit this year and almost the entire forecast deficit of 1958. The state of France's finances is yet another reason why her Position in NATO is insecure and the future of the Common Market is threatened. To remain in power and deal with it, M. Gaillard needs the support of the Right. Yet the emotionalism of the Right about Algeria is one of the principal obstacles to putting Algerian policy back on a realistic basis and so materially reducing the deficit.
France is thus moving in a vicious circle. She must have a Government, but a government can only be kept in office by the 'immobilism' with which the French reproach their politicians. Immobilism' is simply the recognition by poli- ticians that if they move in any direction the Government will fall down, for votes essential to it will be lost on one flank or other of the majority. A government so placed cannot even move with the queue. It must tend to lose its place. It must feel itself cheated by its friends. The ultimate hope must lie in the vitality of the French people. It cannot lie elsewhere because by the nature of the case no one but the French can direct the action of French forces in Algeria. However much one may disapprove French policy there, one must accept the fact that only the French can change it. As President Bourguiba has said, the danger in Algeria is an endless deadlock due to the deadlock in French politics. That internal deadlock is now the source of evil, the reason why French governments cannot revise their policy. In this situation what contribution can foreigners make? The English at least can do two things. They can remember they were at Suez and they can refuse all complicity in the French illusion that the Algerians do not really want to be a nation.
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