Men of Conviction
PARIS
From DARSIE GILLIE THE National Assembly is on holiday. Before separating, M. Debr6 gave them their home- work. They were to study the House of Com- mons. They would then discover how much freer and happier they were than MPs. M. Debit is apt to overlook the subjective factor. The depu- ties don't feel free and happy. They have some reason not to. The House of Commons cannot even in theory call itself together. The Assembly can in theory, but cannot in practice. The House of Commons may have been reduced to a formal theatre in which political performances are held under outside control. They are at least held there. The Assembly knows that the real per- formances are elsewhere and mostly in private. M. Debre is sent down to it to keep it quiet. It gathered in April full of protest. It has gone away full of frustration. It has voted some laws to keep the peasants quiet. But nobody really wanted its help.
The Assembly only offered serious resistance in defence of the two and a half million orchard owners' monstrous right to distil tax-free five litres of alcohol a year and their illegal oppor- tunity to distil twice as much. It was defeated as it deserved to be. On foreign policy it was not even asked its opinion; it was told what was what. Is now learns that the Government is meditating an amendment of the law on the liberty of the press, but has not yet decided whether this should be done by a new law passed through Parliament or by a decree Parliament will be told later. The Government's intention is of course to strengthen the liberty of the press by regulating it better. (The constitution, it will be recalled, was designed to reinforce the position of Parliament by pre- venting it from incurring an undesirable reputa- tion.) The sad thing is that Parliament could have strengthened its own position once upon a time by really defending the liberty of the citizen in Algeria; so might the press, but with a few excep- tions it gave up trying in 1956.
Are the French a deflated nation of once free men? There are constant reminders that this is also a country where there are always some men who know that the proper use of a neck 'is to stick it out. The most obvious example this sum- mer has been the students. The National Union of French Students is not a debating society. It is much more like a trade union, and a particu- larly active one. It plays a point in organising students' restaurants and hostels and on defend- , ing their claims to postponement of military service. (The vast majority go to the university before military service, and therefore only serve in the army when twenty-two or twenty-three in- stead of at twenty like other young men.) The Union receives, or rather received, a substantial subsidy for its social services. This has not pre- vented it from voting a firm resolution for peace by negotiation, and from resuming relations with the Association of Algerian Moslem Students with its headquarters in Switzerland now that it is banned in France. The Union stuck to its attitude when the Government withdrew the sub- sidy. A special congress called to review the position voted the same motions with an en- hanced majority and the minority did not as on a former occasion secede. A delegate was recently sent to represent the Union at the Moslem stu- dents' congress at Paris, where he was greeted as if he had come to support the rebel policy. He stood up stoutly to deny this and to denounce terrorism. That is a pretty good beginning for responsible citizenship.
The students' demand for a negotiated peace i,. in part inspired by their knowledge that the army in Algeria has undertaken a task of repres- sion in which torture has been widely used. Any conscripted soldier may find himself ordered to turn the handle of the magneto that gives an interrogated man electric shocks in his genital organs. Once in the army the choice is much harder. Most young men end by obeying, but there are some who do not. Here knowledge of what happens is much more limited. There is conscientious objection which leads to prison, and there is desertion, which may lead to much longer sentences if the man is caught and cer- tainly means exclusion from the national com- munity if he is not. There exists at least one illegal organisation which recommends and helps desertion, as well as assistance of a non-com- batant kind to the rebellion Its leader, a former university teacher named Francis Jeanson, has so far successfully avoided capture by the police, although he has given one newspaper interview while on the run. This intellectual Robin Hood is a problem for the non-Communist Left. He is one of the few French intellectuals who has pushed political conviction to an entirely indi- vidual conviction and become an outlaw. But the consequence of his doctrine on young men— since it condemns them to exile for the best years of their lives; its inefficiency—since it is improb- able that it would ever have a wide appeal; and the grave consequences for France if it did— since it would prevent her from having a reliable army for any purpose, lead to its emphatic con- demnation by nearly all the Left, as well natur- ally as by all moderate men.
The problem for a priest of a young man who believes that desertion is his only alternative to participation in acts categorically condemned by the Church is a difficult one. Recently a priest was condemned to a year's imprisonment for having encouraged desertion. He denied having done so, but said in court that moral theology gave little guidance on desertion and' remarked that the canonised parish priest of the early nineteenth century, the Cure d'Ars, had de- serted. The Bishop of Lille sent written testimony to the court which expressed sympathy with the priest's position. The official figures for desertion do not suggest a great number—fifty or sixty a year including all types of cases—but the army does seem concerned about it. It resents, in par- ticular, the attitude of priests who do not auto- matically support all hierarchical authority. The Students' Union naturally completely rejects any such attitude.
It may be much harder for a young rebel against service in Algeria to choose conscientious objection, for it involves an immediate head-on clash with a totally unsympathetic authority. There is no legal provision for the conscientious objector in France. He is punished for military disobedience'(from one to two years in prison) and, on cording out is called up again, so that if the law is applied he has the prospect of spend- ing his life in prison with a few short intervals as long as he is of military age. M. Guy Mollet when in General de Gaulle's Government pointed this out. The General admitted that a law was needed and decided that objectors should not be indefinitely persecuted. Two or three sentences adding up to about five years' imprison- ment would be 'enough as an alternative to two and a half years' military service. In a recent case a man of twenty-five who had given substantial evidence of character and serious conviction was treated by the military court as a self-infatuated fool. The prosecutor was evidently unaware that taxes were paid and the criminal code respected in. countries where conscientious objection to military service was legally recognised. Counsel for the defence pointed out that most war crimes trials had been based on the assumption that soldiers should have individual consciences. There is no more chance that conscientious objection will become a major influence in French politics than there is in British, nor, indeed, would most of us wish it. It is the students' attitude which is more likely to have important influence in the coming years, but the extreme cases of moral opposition, even if wrong-headed and, as in the case of desertion, essentially undesirable, show that French opinion can still be given a hard edge. France is not only la douce.
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