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EPILOGUE The sense of responsibility and commitment which had led so many Protestants to become involved in the Algerian war was sustained in a variety of ways following the coming of peace. Jacques Beaumont continued to serve as secretary-general ofCIMADE until March 1968, urging the Protestant relief organization towards new commitments throughout the developing world as well as towards a fuller expression of its ecumenical potential. At the executive meeting which accepted Beaumont's resignation, Pastor Marc Boegner paid special tribute to qualities of intellectual daring and faith which had brought the secretarygeneral to take risks which others would not have considered. In his response, Beaumont pointed with pride to the example given by CIMADE of a service sans frontieres, an initiative that had served as a model to other ecumenical minded relief organizations such as Medecins sansfrontieres) A few years after leaving CIMADE, Beaumont quit France for New York where in the mid 1990s he acted as lobbyist at the UN and in American academic circles on behalf both of the developing nations and of the world's homeless. Several of Beaumont's collaborators during the Algerian crisis stayed on in the newly independent country after the war. Mireille Desrez, who had spent two years in Medea, was remindedby Prefect Poujol towards the end of her stay that the Constantine Plan of 1959 had included a solemn French pledge to establish a nursing school in Algeria. Eager to take up the hint, she went back to France to complete her own professionaltraining, then returned to Algeria after independence to accept the direction of the nation's first Centre d 'Enseignement medical at Constantine. Over the next six years, until replaced by an Algerian, Mile Desrez supervised the training of 350 nurses. Like MireilleDesrez, Jean Carbonare committed himself after the war to preserving, even enlarging, the personal as well as social bonds established with Algeria's Muslim community. On 1April, 1962, Robert Buron wrote to convey his own and the government's gratitudetothe former CIMADEworker who was "among those who have createdbonds between the two communities as well as between French and Algerianleaders and who have never hesitated to reforge these bonds whenever one party or the other has broken them."2 Carbonare's commitment to the new Algeria included fourteen years service as director of the Chantiers populaires de reboisement, a radically expanded version of the reforestation project he had launched from Constantine in 1961. Early in 1963, Premier Ben Bella wrote to express 253 254 The Call of Conscience thanks onbehalf ofthe new republic for the substantial contribution Carbonare was making not only to the nation's economic development but to the maintenance of the fraternal relations between the peoples of France and Algeria.3 As a student leader during the war Pastor Jacques Maury protested against the government's Algeria policy and the army's methods there. Later he served as president of both the ERF and the FPF and in the mid-1990s headed the CIMADE executive. Madeleine Barot after devoting a great deal of her time and energy to the cause of women's emancipation, died in 1995. Pastor Tania Metzel, although severely handicapped, remained committed to the dispossessed until her death in 1997. Mme Marjolaine Chevallier, widow of the last president of the Algerian synod, is a professor in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Strasbourg. Bernard Roussel, no longer a pastor, is a professor of religious studies at the Sorbonne. A tiny band of French academics, including Bernard Picinbono and Jean Bichon, remained on the faculty of the University of Algiers until tensions inside as well as outside the campus meant the end of academic freedom and of civilized social relationships. As of the mid 1990s, Picinbono is professor of physics at the University of Paris—d'Orsay. Maurice Causse, after many years teaching in Algiers, lives in Saintes north of Bordeaux, pursuing a number of research projects, still deeply troubled by what he learned during the war, and still battling against what he considers to be philistines in the French Protestant establishment. Elisabeth Schmidt stayed on in Algeria into 1963. Then, despite pleas from local Muslims includingherfatma who assured her that "there will be no Saint Bartha's (St. Bartholomew's Day, a reference to the massacre of Huguenots by Catholic mobs in 1572) in the new Algeria" she left to take up a post as pastor in Nancy.4 She died, after publishing an account of her Algerian...

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