Word: massue
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that Algerians had executed three French prisoners in reprisal for the execution of three rebels in Algiers' jail. Driven by uncontrollable fury, thousands of colons surged into the streets of Algiers shouting "The army to power!" and "Vive De Gaulle!" (see below). They were quieted only when General Massu placed himself at the head of a junta with the ominously evocative name of the Committee of Public Safety...
Insurrection broke out first in Algiers, when 30,000 French colons, fearful that a new French government might abandon Algeria, rioted in the streets, sacked the Government Building, and were calmed only when Paratroop General Jacques Massu announced that he had taken power in Algiers in defiance of Paris. That left it up to Paris: to the National Assembly to capitulate or fight back; to the mobs in the street to enlist for or against the battered, precarious Fourth Republic...
...Eleventh Hour. For a few hours it appeared that perhaps Pflimlin and Coty had turned the trick that easily. The first response to their appeals was hopeful: General Massu acknowledged General Salan's authority. But then, in a speech of masterful ambiguity, Salan acknowledged himself in authority but finished off with the rallying cry of the French colons in Algeria: "Vive De Gaulle!" On top of that came De Gaulle's "I am ready" statements from Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, neither endorsing nor disavowing Massu's coup -a fact sure to put new heart into the insurgents...
World War II. On the day France surrendered to the Nazis in 1940, Jacques Massu, still a lieutenant commanding a fort in the Sahara scribbled a "rude French word'' in his diary and beneath it the pledge: "Nous vainerons" (We shall win). Hearing De Gaulle's radio appeal from London, Massu joined the Free French in Africa, was nicked in the calf by an Italian bullet in a desert battle, calmly cauterized the wound himself with a cigarette, fought on across North Africa and into France and Germany as a lieutenant colonel with General Le-clerc...
...Berets. In January 1957, with the Algerian rebellion in full tilt and the capital city terrorized by bomb attacks, Massu was named Military Commander of Algiers. With 20,000 paratroopers, spearheaded by his own loth Parachute Division, he directed the cleanup of terrorists with thudding thoroughness and violence. He came under fire in France for the "police state" operations of his network of 1,500 block informants, and the torture methods admittedly used by his men on captured Moslems...