France: To the Jugular

For awhile last week, the elegant grey squares looked and sounded more like Algiers than the ordered heart of France. Jostling into the Place de la Concorde, the Etoile, the Place de 1'Opéra, the Champs Elysées, and half a dozen other Paris landmarks, tens of thousands of Algerians came swarming from slums and shantytowns to protest a new 8:30 p.m. curfew that applies only to Moslems.

Chanting Algérie algérienne, the demonstrators at first shuffled peacefully by in the rain. But at the Rond-point de la Défense, just outside Neuilly, the rabble borrowed its tactics from French extremists in Algiers and Oran: slashing tires, overturning cars, shattering shop windows. Shots rang out and police, flailing night sticks and heavily weighted capes, clashed headlong with the mob.

For two nights in succession the Algerians held protest marches through downtown Paris and its industrial suburbs. By day, thousands of men, women and children staged demonstrations throughout northeastern France. As fast as they could catch them, police and security troops hauled the Algerians off to improvised detention centers, including a psychiatric hospital. At week's end, 15,000 had been bagged for what officials bragged was "the highest number of individual arrests ever made by the Paris police." By official count, the riots had taken five lives (all Algerian save one) and injured 60. Unofficially, the toll was reckoned three times as high, largely as a result of rough-and-ready police "justice."

Algerian Apartheid. The riots afforded disconcerting proof of the F.L.N.'s hold over France's Algerian population. Since 1947, when they were allowed to enter France freely as full citizens, they have flooded into the country in what French sociologists call "the immigration of hunger." Now 350,000 strong (200,000 in Paris alone), they are a vital segment of the labor force, do most of France's back-breaking labor from road building to stevedoring. They live in slums but earn union-scale wages—dazzling by Arab standards. As a result, they not only support one-fifth of all Algerian families, but bankroll the F.L.N. itself.

What led to the Paris riots was a vicious spiral of provocation and retaliation. In late August, F.L.N. terrorists in France launched a wave of attacks on pro-French Moslems and French police that in seven weeks killed eleven cops and 98 Algerians. As a countermeasure the government clamped a 7 p.m. curfew on the Algerian cafes, where F.L.N. leaders hang out. Algerians also were "strongly advised" to be off the streets by 8:30—and soon found that police, with newly issued bulletproof vests and three-foot staves for patrol duty, wasted no time repeating the advice to those who ignored the curfew. Algerians, who theoretically enjoy the same civil rights as Frenchmen, protested that they were subjected to a form of apartheid as virulent as South Africa's—and seizing on that mood, the F.L.N. organized the protest marches that ended in last week's bloody battles.