FRANCE: The Barricades Trial

• Share

After two and a half years of almost unprecedented power, France's Charles de Gaulle was still struggling last week to bring peace to Algeria. Just what he was up against could be seen in Paris' ornate Palais de Justice where a nine-man military tribunal was trying 16 leaders of last January's European insurrection in Algiers in which 24 people died and 250 were wounded. As they reviewed the events leading up to the bloodshed, the defendants in the "barricades trial" unwittingly spotlighted the extent to which De Gaulle's hands have been tied by opposition to his policies in the French army and even within his own Cabinet.

May & January. The men on trial at the Palais de Justice ranged from students and teachers to bankers and roughnecks. Politically, all were fanatic right-wingers who had in common an injured belief that their treason had been blessed in advance by high figures in De Gaulle's administration.

First to make the charge was Colonel Jean Gardes, 46, formerly France's top psychological warrior in Algiers. Gardes, who took the stand in full uniform, wearing white gloves and an array of 24 medals and citations collected in World War II and the Indo-China war, had volunteered for duty in Algeria, believing that "there we lead the last struggle of free men." Soon after his arrival in Algiers, said Gardes, General Maurice Challe, De Gaulle's own appointee as commander in chief in Algeria, had assured him that the army was firmly behind a French Algeria; he was told not to take seriously De Gaulle's talk of "self-determination," since it was just "a maneuver to get past the United Nations debate on Algeria." As an intelligence officer, Gardes was in close touch with the leaders of the January uprising, and thought he was speaking the truth in promising them army backing.

Tall, handsome Pierre Lagaillarde added to the indictment. A 29-year-old doctor of law, Deputy in the National Assembly of the Fifth Republic and a demagogic crowd pleaser, Lagaillarde had been a passionate Gaullist in May 1958, when Algeria's Europeans set off the train of events that brought De Gaulle back to power by storming the 14-story Algiers Government General Building. Now, he demanded of his nine judges: "If in May 1958 I was not blamed for taking a public building by assault, why should they blame me for last January?" Derisively, he added: "A plot that succeeds is a return to legitimacy. But a protest that fails is transformed, as by a miracle, into an atrocious plot."