PARIS LETTER
419
he is, in principle, a Socialist. While the Right press is free of restraint,
a timid effort made by the liberals to maintain their newspaper, the
Espoir,
failed and publication has had to be suspended. Not only was
the paper constantly being seized, but most of its editors have been
put in prison or concentration camps.
So it is necessary to note that not only is no solution of the Algerian
problem visible now but one seems to recede each day. There is a
stupid intransigence on the part of the nationalist leaders, who are
committing ignoble excesses and crimes. On the French side, there is
a strong tendency pushing them to the same intransigence, and a few
individuals who are also committing unpardonable excesses. Finally
there is the fear which is perfectly sound, whether it is confessed or
not, that the end of the struggle in Algeria will mean the transfer of
part of that struggle to France herself. There is no solution which can
satisfy the contradictory demands of the uncompromising, on the one
side and on the other. Any concession-and there cannot be a solution
without concessions- will be considered by the Right as treason. Once
again the time for the settlement of accounts will have come. We may
add this : the military men who for months have been waging in Algeria
a war which cannot achieve its goals, perceiving that they are suffering
for nothing, will for that reason nourish an understandable grudge
against the regime. Traditionally of the Right, they will find that they
possess ideas in common with the Fascist extremists, who will discover
useful allies in them.
In such a situation, a government is forced to live in unreality,
so to speak, because reality is too threatening to be faced. And it is
thus, to return to the analysis which Raymond Aron has made of these
circumstances, that has been created "this strange combination of
vanity and of despair .which we have been witnessing without a recess
for twenty years. More and more, there is a difference
i~
official pro–
nouncements between what our statesmen think and what they say,
between what they do and what, in the privacy of their own thoughts,
they deem reasonable."
So it is that when a man entrusted with important responsibilities
decides to say what he thinks and to act as he deems reasonable, he
causes a scandal. When General de la Bollardiere asked to be relieved
of his command in Kabylia, he wrote a letter to Jean-Jacques Servan–
Schreiber in which he said that the army was risking the loss of its
traditions in carrying out operations employing methods not natural to
it; the government reacted sharply and sentenced the scrupulous general
