Word: lois
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Paris Gaillard drove through the long-delayed loi-cadre (framework law) to give Algeria limited home rule. Only two months ago the Assembly had cut a more liberal draft to shreds and so brought down Gaillard's predecessor. Partly because Deputies were unwilling to overturn a brand-new government, partly because the new Premier had prudently pruned away the clauses most objectionable to right-wing nationalists, the bill was approved by a 269-to-200 vote...
Biggest storm blew up not over the loi-cadre itself but over Pierre Mendès-France's plea that France could not afford to wave off Tunisian-Moroccan offers to mediate a settlement with the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Mendès was howled down. He managed to finish only after his bitter political enemy Georges Bidault shouted: "If Mendès-France has not the right to speak here, then no one has the right to reply...
...Vote. Gaillard's loi-cadre reaffirms that Algeria, land of 1,000,000 Europeans and 8,700,000 Moslems, is "an integral part of the French Republic." It provides for six territorial assemblies, but requires that each assembly share its powers with appointive "Councils of Communities," whose members will be named by a French governor on the basis of a fifty-fifty split between French and Moslems. A new electoral law abolished the old system, which weighted voting in favor of "non-Moslems" (French), and replaced it with universal suffrage. This was qualified by a system of proportional representation...
...French assembly has consistently showed its desire to grant some autonomy to Algeria; the 1947 Witner's laws. It needs no prodding from any one at all; as you well know, of the 272 deputies who voted against the Loi Cadre, 159 did so because they felt it too weak. France is ready to conduct elections under the aegis of the United Nations; the F.L.N. is not. The Algerian war, for the mass of the French population, is not a colonialist war. The war in Algeria is not between colonialists and anti-colonialists; it is between partisans of gradual independence...
Ironically, Gaillard was only doing in November what he had been unable or unwilling to do as Finance Minister in July. His policy on Algeria was only a watered-down version of the loi cadre proposal that brought Bourges-Maunoury's downfall. Typically, the French Deputies had tried everything else first, brought on a 36-day crisis in the attempt to avoid the inevitable. Admitted one Deputy: 'It was either Gaillard or nothing...