Word: algerianness
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When the European settlers of Algiers began their uprising fortnight ago, it seemed unthinkable that 1,000,000 Algerian "Frenchmen"-60% of whom are Spanish, Italian or Maltese by ancestry-could topple a government satisfactory to the majority of their 45 million fellow citizens in Metropolitan France. But as last week wore on, metropolitan Frenchmen came to realize that it was not the insurgent settlers they had to fear; it was the French army, which stood revealed as neither a neutral witness nor an unwilling accomplice, but as the active and continuing patron of the settlers' revolt. "The army...
...General Challe, who only three days earlier had also tried to quit his job, took no direct action against the armed ultras holed up in the heart of Algiers; while he hesitated, the insurgents strengthened their barricaded positions (see below), and echoes of the uprising spread to other Algerian cities. By the time the Cabinet assembled in Paris next afternoon, even De Gaulle seemed hesitant. Uncommunicatively, he listened while one group of ministers headed by Novelist André (Man's Fate) Malraux called for "launching fire'' against the insurgents, and another led by Minister for the Sahara...
...command post in the country. He called upon Algeria's 9,000,000 Moslems ("I beg you, I beseech you") to come out into the streets demonstrating for De Gaulle-an appeal which, had it been heeded, might easily have set off the worst blood bath in Algerian history...
...university. Students cradling Tommy guns sat on the roofs, dangling their legs. Members of the Front National Français poured in from the nearby slums to stand guard under their black Celtic crosses or to drill in the makeshift uniforms of the territorial army, a sort of Algerian home guard. Truckloads of armed peasants had rushed in from the rich plain of Mitidja. And there were the girls of all of them, serving as nurses or waitresses or human chains to pass stones to the barricades, but, nevertheless, wearing high heels, tight skirts and floppy sweaters...
...fertile and congenial parts of Africa where Europeans have established colonies and built cities, the news from Algeria was a warning of what it might be like in their own countries if conditions worsened. For the Algerian parallel was often present-a minority of white settlers, economically dominant but numerically outnumbered, who found themselves out of tune with a distant capital (London or Paris) which recognizes that the days of old-style colonialism are over. Nobody mentioned Algeria around the table under the glittering chandelier of London's Lancaster House last week, as the Kenya Constitutional Conference entered...