The General's Olive Branch

Of all the things that General Charles de Gaulle has done, or not done, since he took over as Premier, nothing so riled the extremist colons of Algeria as his failure to give a Cabinet post to their burly idol, Jacques ("Le Tombeur") Soustelle, the Parisian politician who was the brains of the Algerian settlers' revolt against the Fourth Republic. When, during his first visit to Algeria, the streets rang with the cry "Vive Soustelle!", De Gaulle in his laconic and oracular way merely said: "Soustelle will have a place at my side." But it was not until last week that Soustelle got "his place" at last. As Minister of Information, he will become De Gaulle's official spokesman--a service until recently performed by voluble Novelist Andre Malraux.

Aside from the Communist press, only Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber's weekly L'Express complained aloud, gloomily predicting "a terrorized silence of all daily newspapers." In his new post Soustelle also has the right to hire and fire anyone on the state-owned French radio and television, which gives him far more authority there than over the printed word. In Algeria, news of the appointment made the wavering Moslems cooler to De Gaulle, while the colons' Committee of Public Safety proclaimed a victory. Others saw Soustelle's appointment as a neatly timed maneuver to deprive the committee of its most dramatic grievance and hence one of its chief reasons for existence. "When the olive branch was extended to us," said one colon sadly, "we could do nothing but accept it."

De Gaulle had other sops to throw--a third star for Brigadier General Jacques Massu, the balcony hero of the paratroopers, and France's highest military award, the Medaille Militaire, for teeter-tottering General Raoul Salan, who last week abandoned his flirtation with the ultras long enough to pledge that his army would "give to General de Gaulle the magnificent performance he has asked of us." De Gaulle also invited Salan and Massu to share the Bastille Day platform with him in Paris this week.

To counterbalance these moves, De Gaulle made two other appointments to his Cabinet, both regarded as champions of a liberal policy towards Algeria. He also made it clear that Andre Malraux would still be his chief "minister of new ideas." As for Soustelle himself, he had been given a position where he can announce policy, but presumably not make it. Those who regard De Gaulle as still in control of events, and not their prisoner, were not yet alarmed. As one Gaullist put it: "The purpose of the operation was to deactivate M. Soustelle."

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