Democracy in France

French President De Gaulle urged recently that his countrymen confront the Algerian dilemma by "looking straight at the problems." But a growing number of Frenchmen were looking apprehensively over their shoulders at M. De Gaulle. The rising tide of suspicion that the government is threatening civil liberties has rocked the nation, which for two years had slept in the absence of any real political life.

The articulated dissent embodied itself in a manifesto "On the Right to Refuse Service in the Algerian War," which was issued on September 1. The document signed by Jean-Paul Sartre, Simon de Beauvoir, Andre Breton, Simone Signore and 117 other French artists and intellectuals was essentially a refutation of responsibility for the excesses of the repressive French army. "French militarism, fifteen years after the destruction of Hitlerism, has restored torture," declared the signers. "What is the meaning of good citizenship," they asked, "when it is defined as shameful submission?"

The manifesto's resounding effect is largely attributable to the great popular interest in the "Jeanson trial." Professor Francis Jeanson was the leader of an underground network composed largely of intellectuals, Moslem Algerians, and former resistance fighters, supporting the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Along with twenty other Frenchmen and five Algerians, Jeanson was tried for treason this fall, in the same military tribunal where Capt. Dreyfus was sentenced as a traitor in 1894. The defense claimed, "When a people resists oppression, it is entitled to every respect... and all the help one can give it." Jeanson, however, was sentenced in absentia to a prison term of ten years.

The manifesto challenged the government by demanding, "When the army is in a state of open and latent revolt against democratic institutions, does not revolt against the army assume a new meaning?" And the government replied by black-listing the artists and firing, without hearing, the civil servants who had signed.

It is indeed a sorry situation in which the Gaulist movement finds itself. The rightist army has already attempted twice to seize power, and Frenchmen must live in constant peril of a third attempt. On the left, the intellectuals and union leaders, both Catholic and Communist are calling for opposition to the government's war effort. In attempting to solidify his power, De Gaulle has unfortunately equated dissent with treason, and this seems desperate and futile.

Student rallies have been banned. Newspapers are sporadically "withheld" from the public, as are many books on the Algerian War. There is great justification for Sartre's recent comment, "Algerian independence is already a certainty. What is uncertain is the future of Democracy in France."

De Gaulle has, in all probability, saved his country from a fascistic army regime. But the fact that a little repression is preferable to mass repression, does not make it praiseworthy. The corrosion of republican principles is always a disconcerting and menacing specter. It is to be hoped that the present dissent will give rise to a rebirth of French political life.