Word: pineau
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...exasperation one day last month, French Premier Guy Mollet turned on Christian Pineau, his Foreign Minister, who was fretting about what the U.N. would do with the troublesome Algerian problem. "What matters to me," snapped Mollet, "is not the United Nations but the United States." To hard-headed Guy Mollet it seemed self-evident that the treatment given the two-year-old Algerian revolt in the glass palace on the East River would be largely determined along the banks of the Potomac...
...vocation and the friendship. In contrast to 1955, when France boycotted a discussion of Algeria, its representative (largely to win U.S. backing) not only agreed to discuss the rebellion but even to inform the U.N. of France's plans for restoring peace in Algeria. In defensive tones, Christian Pineau outlined Mollet's Algerian program: first an unconditional ceasefire, next free elections and finally negotiation of Algeria's future status with whoever won the elections...
Above and beyond that, Pineau said France has vast and beneficent plans not only for Algeria but for all its African territories. Said he: "On the day when the [European] Common Market . . . has been created, [France] would like to promote the formation of a Eurafrican whole. Europe in. its entirety, bringing to Africa its capital and its techniques, should enable the immense African continent to become an essential factor in world politics...
...Pineau's vision of Eurafrica did nothing to dampen the perfervid anticolonialism of the Arab-Asian countries. "The reputation of France at the present time," growled Syria's Delegate Farid Zeineddine, "is at its lowest ebb." Then, accusing the French of everything from cowardice to genocide, 18 Arab-Asian nations proposed just what France most dreaded: a resolution demanding that the people of Algeria be granted "their fundamental right of self-determination...
Less than 48 hours before Christian Pineau outlined his bold "Eurafrica" scheme to the U.N., the French National Assembly hastily supplied him with a timely token of France's good intentions in Africa. In a predawn ballot that suggested that the lessons of Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria had finally penetrated the French consciousness, the Deputies voted to give a limited degree of self-rule to the island of Madagascar and twelve provinces of "Black Africa...