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CHAPTER SEVEN 1960: THE MORAL BALANCE TILTS TO PEACE The anger and frustration felt by Protestant partisans of French Algeria at de Gaulle's 16 September speech was shared not only by the usual right-wing colons but also by certain French army units doing battle with the FLN. In January 1960, a coalition of these disgruntled groups rebelled, challenging not only de Gaulle but the democratic base of the fledgling Fifth Republic. On 18 January a German newspaper published an interview given by General Massu in which he condemned de Gaulle for betraying the hopes placed in him in May 1958. That helped bring this new crisis to the boil. De Gaulle demanded Massu's immediate removal from Algiers and on the same day he made clear to three of Algeria's deputies in the National Assembly his conviction that integration (or by implication francisatiori) was a lost cause and that the colony's independence was inevitable. The resulting explosion began on 24 January.The rebels planned to combine a general strike with a seizure of all critical nerve centres in Algeria in hopes of setting the stage for an assault on the regime in Paris. De Gaulle appears to have been badly shaken by this latest challenge, but he recovered his nerve and brought the rebellion to an end by appealing to the rank and file in Algeria over radio and television on 29 January. Jean-Pierre Lumire, a liberal Protestant in Algiers who served as the regular correspondent ofReforme, offered the newspaper's readers a personal chronicle of the uprising which he attributed to a well thought through plot. At first he and other moderates had dismissed the insurrection as a farce, but it gathered momentum because of the inertia (or complicity) of certain elements of the army. Popular support for activists such as the student leader Pierre Lagaillarde came from the conviction of many colons that de Gaulle's promise of self-determination signified their abandonment. They had taken to the barricades to defend the status quo or, failing that, to promote the forcible integration of Algeria into France proper where they would become part of the dominant majority.1 Reforme devoted its entire 6 February issue to the rising. With more or less enthusiasm, all the contributors saw de Gaulle as more than ever the only person capable of leading France through this new crisis. Finet chided the Left for failing to recognize the general as "the republican and liberal aristocrat" he had always been.2 Roger Mehl told Christians they must stop seeing all those in power as the enemy. Unless they offered support for the 163 164 The Call of Conscience "empirically effective and juridically structured" use of power shown by de Gaulle, he urged, they might soon experience its more perverse, Latin American, equivalent. Jacques Ellul saw the insubordination of members of the officer class as a problem which had plagued the nation since the Revolution when the army and the nation were wrongly taken to be one and the same. In the present circumstances, it was vital that the army in Algeria be either dismissed or made to obey the civil authority. Adopting asomewhat more nuanced position, Paul Adeline tried to get his readers to understand the "passionate exacerbation" of thzpieds noirs who would be just as much a minority in continental France as they were in an independent Algeria; their resistance to forcible integration into an independent Algeria where they would be subject to a "pan-Islamic tyranny" was just as legitimate as the struggle being waged by Algerian nationalists. Contributors to Cite nouvelle were understandably quick to rejoice at the collapse of the January insurrection. Jan Czarnecki remarked in the aftermath: "As of now, the myth of "fraternization" has had its day: that of French Algeria should fade away soon enough."3 Andre Philip urged his fellow citizens to stand firm against insubordination in the army or face the prospect of seeing their nation become another Paraguay. Gilbert Allais thought it worth celebrating that, for the first time since 6 February 1956, the power to control events had returned from Algiers to Paris. Among Pastor Elisabeth Schmidt's parishioners in Blida, news of the insurrection was greeted at first with spontaneous enthusiasm, even by the most thoughtful of her flock. Some anxiety followed as tensions continued to rise in Algiers. Thepastor tried her best to persuade her congregation to admit that the European minority was using extreme provocation to...

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