Foreign News: To the Barricades

The hotheads, toughs and ultras held the heart of the city of Algiers. Their barricades of paving blocks sealed off street after street around the university. Students cradling Tommy guns sat on the roofs, dangling their legs. Members of the Front National Français poured in from the nearby slums to stand guard under their black Celtic crosses or to drill in the makeshift uniforms of the territorial army, a sort of Algerian home guard. Truckloads of armed peasants had rushed in from the rich plain of Mitidja. And there were the girls of all of them, serving as nurses or waitresses or human chains to pass stones to the barricades, but, nevertheless, wearing high heels, tight skirts and floppy sweaters.

Direct Action. The insurgents looked like an armed mob, but they had a leadership of sorts (see box). Handsome Pierre Lagaillarde shouted orders to his student followers and strode about, impressive in his paratrooper uniform of camouflage cloth, looking—with his neatly trimmed beard and mustache—like a well-barbered Fidel Castro. Burly, olive-skinned Jo Ortiz led the slum contingents instead of setting up drinks in his Forum bar. Pious Robert Martel had brought in the farmers who belonged to his "Movement of May 13."

These three men had set in train the circumstances they now uncertainly faced. It was Lagaillarde who persuaded the other two to "direct action" to protest De Gaulle's removal of Paratrooper General Jacques Massu (TIME, Feb. 1). Once, as they sat in the cafe plotting, he turned on Ortiz, pulled his pistol, and barked at the older man: "I should drop you right now, with this!" After the bloody Jan. 24 fight with the gendarmes (19 dead, 146 wounded), it was Lagaillarde who ordered up the barricades and dug the first shovelful of dirt.

Three or 20,000. On that first Sunday there was a bad moment for the insurgents when General Maurice Challe issued a tough communique: "I am bringing troops from the interior . . . All meetings of more than three people are forbidden." But it soon became clear that if a meeting of three people was illegal, a crowd of 20,000 was unstoppable. Next day the hastily built and ill-manned barricades were surrounded by crack regiments of paratroops and Foreign Legionnaires. But the paratroops in their red and green berets merely patrolled, did nothing to interfere with well-wishers who brought food, drink, munitions and weapons to the insurgents. From several hundred, the defenders of the barricades grew to several thousand, and by nightfall they were turning away volunteers, "unless you've got a damn good gun."