France

NOTHING could better illustrate Charles de Gaulle’s Olympian way of doing things than the casual manner in which he extended his invitation to Habib Bourguiba at the beginning of February. The occasion was one of those pompous diplomatic receptions at the Elysée Palace, and the General, who can be as stuffy as any man alive when he deems that the dignity of his office requires it, chose for once to be unpretentious. Taking the Tunisian chargé d’affaires over to a window, where no one could overhear them, he told him that he would be glad to receive President Bourguiba in Paris any time that it would suit him.

The invitation was so offhand, as a matter of fact, that De Gaulle had not even bothered to give advance warning to his own Prime Minister, Michel Debré, who learned about it first from the newspapers. The invitation, which had been long coming, was another logical milestone along the course that the General had deliberately plotted in his speech of November 4, in which he spoke for the first time of an Algerian republic; the course he had stuck to in undertaking his hazardous trip to Algeria in December of 1960, and which he had got the French people to endorse in the referendum on January 8.

The invitation to Bourguiba put an abrupt end to several weeks of confused speculation about De Gaulle’s post-referendum plans, which was singularly abetted by the contradictory nature of various statements made by leaders of the Algerian rebellion. While Ferhat Abbas, the President of the provisional government of the Algerian republic, was off touring the Orient and haranguing Egyptian, Malayan, and Indonesian audiences in a strongly anticolonial and anti-French tone of voice, the F.L.N.’s headquarters in Tunis was busy issuing counterstatements which all but denied what the F.L.N. boss had been saying.

The private explanation given to observers on the spot was that this was a necessary tactic for anyone visiting formerly colonized areas in the East, but that the Algerian rebels in Tunis were nevertheless anxious to keep the door open for possible negotiations with Paris. The confusion reached its height toward the end of January when the F.L.N.’s French federation released an official pamphlet on “The West, Africa, and Decolonization” on the first page of which De Gaulle was dismissed as a “pitiful charlatan.”

Behind this confusing barrage of contradictory utterances, unofficial emissaries had been traveling back and forth between Paris and Tunis trying to smooth the way for eventual negotiations. By the end of January the F.L.N. had actually agreed to make an important concession regarding the future status of Frenchmen who chose to go on living in an independent, Muslim Algeria.

Hitherto, the Algerian rebels’ position had been that the colons who wanted to stick it out after independence would either have to accept Algerian nationality or get out. The question had so worried Jules Roy, the former French Air Force colonel and author of the best-selling La Guerre d’Algérie (The War in Algeria), that last November he wrote an “Open Letter to Ferhat Abbas” in the Paris weekly L’Express, imploring the Algerian leader to reassure the French on this point.

A brief reply, purporting to be written by Ferhat Abbas, was published by L’Express in January, just after the referendum, but was immediately denounced in Tunis as a forgery fabricated by the French intelligence. (There is strong reason to believe that Abbas actually wrote it, only to be overruled by his fellow ministers.) At the end of the month, however, the F.L.N.’s official organ, El Moudjahid (The Holy War Fighter), came out with an issue examining the problem of the European minority in Algeria and assuring them that their future status in an independent Algeria would be subject to negotiation.

The rocky road to peace

For the Algerian rebels, this was quite a concession. It attested a tentative new spirit of moderation which began to manifest itself in the wake of the bloody Algerian riots of mid-December. These riots had a twofold significance. On the one hand, they struck a mortal blow at the phantom hope of a French Algeria and provided a dramatic demonstration of the immense prestige enjoyed by the F.L.N. among Algerian Muslims; to the extent that the F.L.N. from here on out feels strong, it can afford to make concessions.

On the other hand, the riots also disturbed the F.L.N., since in many cases they were the work of Muslim youths of from sixteen to twenty-two who disregarded orders from the F.L.N. For the first time, the rebel leaders in Tunis found themselves confronted with young nationalist fanatics who threaten, if the Algerian war goes on much longer, to escape from their control altogether.

Just how these different considerations will weigh on negotations between Paris and Tunis remains to be seen. But it is already clear that the road to peace is a rocky one, with at least three major obstacles — the French Army, the problem of the Sahara, and the question of the guaranties to be given to the European minority.

France’s economic stability

For good or ill, the Algerian problem continues to dominate the French political horizon and to exert its powerful influence over many walks of French life. Without the Algerian war there would probably have been far more social unrest last year than there actually was, for on a number of occasions French workers restrained their demands for higher wages or put off strike threats in order not to create trouble at home for De Gaulle at a time when he was trying to deal with a restive army which might easily have welcomed an excuse to intervene and “restore order.”

Under Finance Minister Baumgartner’s firm and orthodox direction, the French economy has been kept on a fairly even keel. The cost of living rose by 2.6 per cent during 1960, a marked improvement over 1959, when it rose by 8 per cent, but the rise in prices has not been matched by a rise in wages, and this is a cause for latent dissatisfaction.

For the second consecutive year, French exports in 1960 exceeded imports — a feat which France had not realized since 1927. Thanks in no small part to the stimulus of the Common Market, among whose members tariff barriers were once again lowered last January 1 by 10 per cent, France’s overall trade — imports and exports — jumped an impressive 28 per cent ahead of 1959.

The country was able to achieve all this in spite of aid to the former French territories in Africa totaling $860 million — about three times what the United States contributed last year to the economic welfare of the Dark Continent.

De Gaulle and Adenauer

France’s determination to stick with the Common Market through thick and thin has, indeed, been one of the surprises of the last couple of years, and a vindication of PaulHenri Spaak’s contention that institutions, once set up, automatically acquire a life of their own.

The Common Market has survived and thrived despite General de Gaulle’s notorious lukewarmness to this kind of supranational institution. The General’s reservations have cast a decided chill on his once cordial relations with Chancellor Adenauer. Last July, when Adenauer was De Gaulle’s guest for a weekend at the French presidential château at Rambouillet, De Gaulle outlined a comprehensive scheme calling for closer cooperation and consultation between the various ministers of the six Common Market countries and the establishment of four commissions to coordinate policy in the foreign, economic, cultural, and educational fields.

The Chancellor, who saw in the scheme only the grand outline of that European rapprochement which he has tirelessly worked for, returned to Bonn in a state of high spirits. His enthusiasm quickly evaporated, however, when the French President’s project was submitted to the detailed scrutiny of the German Foreign Office’s experts, who detected in it a thinly veiled maneuver to put the Common Market into cold storage, to liquidate Euratom, and to set up a kind of European rival bloc capable of challenging American leadership inside of NATO.

The Chancellor, who regards the existing European institutions as sacrosanct and friendship with the United States as the indispensable condition for Western Europe’s welfare and survival, was deeply shocked by the discovery. General de Gaulle, he felt, had tried to pull a fast one on him. His confidence in the French President has, since then, never fully returned.

De Gaulle followed up the fatal Rambouillet encounter with a press conference on September 5 which was the most caustic he had held since taking power. In the course of it he referred sarcastically to the “so-called United Nations,” aired his dissatisfaction with NATO, and expressed himself with withering condescension about the vagaries and naïveté of American foreign policy. He succeeded in browbeating a reluctant French Parliament into voting through his pet scheme for an independent atomic striking force — a blatantly anti-European scheme.

To still the growing apprehensions on the other side of the Rhine, De Gaulle’s much-harassed troubleshooter, Prime Minister Michel Debré, was dispatched to Bonn in October. He did his best to reassure a dubious Chancellor Adenauer that France was committed, as firmly as ever, to a policy of European integration, at least in the economic field.

The Dutch demur

A more ambitious attempt to patch up the differences was made in early February when the six chiefs of state of the European Economic Community met in Paris for a “Little Summit” meeting. Here De Gaulle’s scheme for closer ministerial cooperation between the six Common Market states ran into unexpected opposition from the Dutch, who insisted that no new steps toward political coordination should be made without including Britain. It later transpired that what most worries the Dutch is the fear that De Gaulle may be trying to set up some kind of Franco-German political hegemony over the less powerful Common Market partners, of which he would be the moving force. The inclusion of Britain in all future moves toward political coordination would help offset this threat.

The present situation is oddly paradoxical; for, on the one hand, De Gaulle’s desire to substitute interstate cooperation for institutional integration closely parallels the longstanding British insistence that the approach to Western European union must not involve any surrender of national sovereignty.

On the other hand, De Gaulle has shown scant enthusiasm for admitting Britain to the Common Market. The General, who is a proud, hypersensitive Frenchman behind his mask of aloof indifference, has not forgotten the humiliations and restrictions to which the British subjected him during his wartime exile in London.

The gap between Paris and Bonn still remains as wide as ever in regard to NATO and the attitude to be adopted toward the United States. De Gaulle has failed to show the slightest enthusiasm for General Norstad’s idea of a NATO atomic striking force, a project which SHAPE’s Supreme Commander improvised last autumn in a hasty attempt to head off the independent French atomic force. And as late as December 31, in a New Year’s address to the French people, De Gaulle could not resist referring to an “assembled Europe, and America its daughter.”

This is precisely the kind of patronizing language which Konrad Adenauer thinks can do only harm to the future of Western Europe’s relations with the United States. But it is the kind of language Washington will have to get used to. The new Administration should have few illusions on this score. General James Gavin, the new American ambassador in Paris, will probably have his work cut out for him in trying to persuade a once brilliant military theorist that his present ideas about warfare are no longer as prophetic as they were thirty years ago.