"We Interrupt This Program"

Abruptly, just as he was about to catch a train, Charles de Gaulle last week gave up his legal authority to be near dictator of France. A few hours before leaving for his first whistle-stop tour since a terrorist's bomb came within a damp fuse of killing him, De Gaulle issued a brief communique. As of Oct. 1, he announced, he would relinquish the extraordinary powers he had assumed* to quell the Algerian army revolt in April.

De Gaulle's stated reason, that the major phase of squaring accounts with the rebels was ending (some have been tried in absentia), told only part of the story. Eying the increasingly restive French National Assembly, the General was loading a weapon specifically denied to him under emergency rule but normally available under the constitution: the President's right to dissolve the Assembly and call new elections. To appease a vociferous farm lobby, De Gaulle allowed the winter price of milk to go up 4%.

Then, knowing a good exit line as well as anyone, De Gaulle took his special presidential train to test his personal strength in the farm country of south central France.

Hold Intact. For his 14th tour since becoming President (he has stumped 60 of France's 90 departments), De Gaulle tackled the depressed "French desert" of Rouergue, a mountainous land of tiny hillside farms, stone walls, and traditional opposition to Paris. As nervous security guards patrolled overhead in helicopters, De Gaulle climbed off the train at Villefranche-de-Rouergue, lumbered straight into the town square, pumping hands and patting babies.

All did not go as smoothly as De Gaulle had hoped. In Villefranche-de-Rouergue, the mayor demanded "social justice and democratic liberty." Throughout the department of Aveyron, teachers and veterans boycotted his appearances. But in general, despite a boycott ordered by farm and labor unions, De Gaulle got a rousing welcome. As his convoy of black Citroens wound through patches of woodlands tinged with autumn, past slate-roofed farmhouses, farmers and their families came to the edges of their fields to wave and doff their berets; and at crossroads, schoolchildren fluttered paper flags. Once again, De Gaulle showed that despite sporadic signs of discontent, his hold on the French people remains largely intact.

Message Repeated. For De Gaulle, the critical area is not Metropolitan France but Algeria, where the ultranationalist Secret Army Organization of ex-General Raoul Salan seemed to be sneering louder every day at De Gaulle's attempts to reach agreement with the F.L.N. From his hiding place near Algiers, Salan wrote a letter, which was published in Le Monde, denying that either he or the S.A.O. had been connected with the bomb attempt on De Gaulle's life. Two days later, Salan's men bombed the national television station's transmitter near Algiers just before a scheduled program on De Gaulle's tour. As TV screens went blank, the voice of Salan came on (it was obviously broadcast on the TV station's frequency from a nearby clandestine transmitter). "All Algerians should consider themselves mobilized," said Salan. "We must remain vigilant and understand the importance of the Secret Army in Algeria."

The broadcast, which lasted 25 minutes, called for French Algerians to demonstrate their support; the following evening, thousands of colons raged through the streets of Algiers, banging pans and honking horns in the familiar beat of "Al-ger-ie fran-caise." Even before the clamor started, the S.A.O. again broke into the national TV channel to rebroadcast Salan's taped message, call for three more demonstrations this week and next, a show of black-and-white S.A.O. flags, a massive traffic jam, and a half-hour general strike. "Courage; victory is close," said the voice of the S.A.O. "De Gaulle, it is you who will fall."

-Under Article 16 of the 1958 constitution, the President may take "the measures demanded by the circumstances" whenever the republic is "threatened in a grave and immediate manner."

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