Defeat for the Right

In northern France's cathedral city of Amiens one afternoon last week, 35,000 French farmers raged through the heart of town, smashing windows and stoning cops in a riot that left 70 farmers and 50 police injured. By general agreement, France's farmers had legitimate cause for complaint: although they make up 25% of the population, they get only 10% of the national income.* De Gaulle's abolition of a parity index hitching farm prices to market prices had hit them hard. But the indignant farmers at Amiens (pop.100,000) were pushed into a rampaging mood by right-wing agitators who broke up their gathering with cries of "Vive null and "Algerie Franc,aise !" The head of the farmers' group was himself stoned to unconsciousness as he tried to quell the agitators.

Behind the violence at Amiens lay a desperate effort by France's right wing to strike back at Charles de Gaulle on the mainland. They were on the run in Algeria--the bastion from which they had defied the prewar Third Republic and toppled the Fourth. By last week De Gaulle had: CJ Scrapped the 100,000-man Algerian Home Guard, whose members manned most of the barricades in the recent insurrection.

P:Abolished the "Fifth Bureau"--the shrilly nationalistic army propaganda section which had worked tirelessly to sabotage De Gaulle's Algerian policies.

P: Slapped three right-wing generals onto the inactive list and punished seven other senior officers.

P:Replaced the six top officers of the Algiers police force and restored all police powers to the civil government.

P: Imprisoned most of the leading Algiers plotters--including Count Alain de Serigny, proprietor of Algeria's most influential daily, L'Echo d'Alger.

Canceled Cruise. For Algeria's European settlers, the most ominous move of all was the jailing (on charges of "plotting against the security of the state") of 48-year-old Publisher de Serigny. A World War II Petainist who barely escaped arrest when the Free French reached Algiers, bald, spectacled Alain de Serigny has long been the uncontested respectable leader of Algiers' European community, helped incite by his savage editorials the settlers' 1956 manhandling of Premier Guy Mollet (TIME, Feb. 20, 1956) and the 1958 uprising that sparked De Gaulle's return to power.

Never before prosecuted for his conspiracies, De Serigny tried to flee Algiers by ship. But last week, as police hauled him off to Algiers' Barberousse Prison to join 1,000 imprisoned Moslem rebels, he muttered to himself over and over again: "A De Serigny in Barberousse! It is impossible! It is incomprehensible!" Time to Talk. Said one Algerian Moslem happily: "Whatever is bad for De Serigny is good for us." De Gaulle's new assertion of authority over Algeria posed a problem to the leaders of Algeria's five-year-old F.L.N. rebellion. Millions of uncommitted Moslems might become less eager to support the harsh cries of the rebel leadership. From neighboring Tunisia, rebel leaders leaked word that they were about to request peace talks on the basis of De Gaulle's Algeria-wide self-determination offer of last September.

For the first time, the rebels even professed willingness to accept De Gaulle's stipulation that negotiations must not deal with Algeria's political future, insisted that all they wanted to talk about was the "technical" problems of ensuring an honest self-determination vote.

* In 1958 farm families made up 12% of the U.S. population, got 6.6% of the national income.

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