Algiers still celebrates to-day, like a painted clown in a tragedy, as the poor French nation stumbles into the night. The news from Corsica has swept through the city like a trumpet call and only a few thoughtful citizens, only a few apprehensive soldiers seem to realise how gloomy and how gigantic are the elements it is summoning.
The Corsican revolution, it seems clear, was hatched in Algiers. The parachutists whose ominous energies mounted a coup in Algeria have taken a stride towards France. The authority of Paris has been defied again. Force has been used against the armed representatives of the Republic, and this blithe Algerian movement has brought France at last to the edge of the precipice.
A sickly haze of optimism still hangs over the city. For the colons, Corsica sets a seal upon French supremacy in Algeria. For the Gaullists it is another labour pain in the birth of a new France. For the soldier it promises the resurgence of French glory and the redemption of old disgraces. ╥Merci, la Corse,╙ the crowd shouted this morning when a group of girls paraded in Corsican costumes and to-night in the forum on the hill we shall have yet another ecstatic celebration. And the generals and the politicians will wave from the balcony, the flags will fly and the bands play, the paratroopers look benevolently on, and the poor people delude themselves that this is a moment of happiness. Algiers listens in the gathering dark and only the Cassandras fancy they see the horizon smudged and smoky or hear a drum beat above the folk songs.
The course of events has shifted and the future of Algeria is now only a footnote, as it were, to the text of the French drama. ╥Vive l╒Algerie Francaise,╙ the crowds cry, expressing their own homely and perspective inspirations, but if the colons are thinking of Algeria, the world is thinking of France. So are the revolutionaries.
M. Arrighi to-day sent a fraternal message to M. Soustelle, the hero of Algiers. It mentioned General de Gaulle, and it mentioned the brave paratroopers and it mentioned the committees of public safety and it ended ╥faithfully yours,╙ but it made no reference to the future of Algeria. We have moved to-day from one degree of crisis to another, from the grave to the terrible, from the forgivable to the irrevocable, from Algiers by way of Corsica to the threshold of civil war.
If you happen to be in Algiers to-day you cannot escape the word. The generals here have challenged the Republic by the force of their paratroopers╒ arms and, M. Pflimlin is not alone in wondering whether their military ambitions reach to Paris itself. In his speech last night he drew a dividing line between the patriotic insurrection in Algiers ╤ ╥an expression of the will of compatriots to remain French╙ ╤ and yesterday╒s coup in Corsica ╤ ╥a menace against our public liberties,╙ but if he discovers that the Corsican affair was in fact arranged in Algiers he can scarcely elude the responsibility of impeaching the generals and their associates for treason.
Unless General de Gaulle is returned to power and the Committee of Public Safety are thus appeased we must prepare for the worst, and be ready for a deliberate confrontation of strength between the French in Paris and the French in Algiers. Consider the dark implication of this prospect; the opportunities offered to Moscow both in Europe and among the Algerian rebels here, the Communists able to pose both as the true defenders of the Republic and the champions of liberty; a menace of a Popular Front; the possibility of intervention, dividing the world, as the Spanish war divided Europe twenty years ago; the dangers of a clash in North Africa with the Tunisians or Moroccans; disintegration of N.A.T.O.; the hideous consummation, thus provided, to the theory of Western decline.
And who would win, anyway? Many of the elite troops of the French army are here in Algeria, including most of the formidable parachutists, but most of the armoured forces are in Europe and most of the aircraft. The armies in Algeria already have a war on their hands against the rebels in the mountains and get their supplies from France, but the Government in Paris must be inhibited by the presence in France of 50,000 anxious soldiers╒ families. Moreover, if the loyalty of the forces in France may be open to question, so is the battle-fervour of the conscripts serving with the army in Algiers. This would be a brother╒s war with a vengeance, more tragic and mixed up and suicidal than the war of the North against the South.
It is disagreeable to think about these things, and the Algiers crowds prancing up the hill for a manifestation are still resolutely ignoring them, but if you sit at a rickety table in the Casbah this evening and sip the sweet thick coffee and listen to the alien Arab quarter tones from the wireless and watch the thin Arab figures huddled earnestly at the tables of the cafe, it is easy enough to feel that we stand at a corner in history, as France squabbles and stumbles towards chaos.
