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As prime minister, then president of the Fifth Republic -
with powers as much strengthened as he had wished - de Gaulle
wheeled and dealt with the pieds noirs and Algerian rebels,
while the war continued. In 1961, a General Salan staged a military
reolt and set up the OAS (Secret Army Organization) to prevent a
settlement. When his coup failed, his organization made several
attempts on de Gaulle's life - thereby strengthening the feeling on
the mainland that it was time to be done with Algeria.
An
episode in the same year - covered up and censored until the 1990s -
when betweven seventy and two hundred French Algerians were killed by the
police in Paris, reinforced this feeling. This "secret massacre" began
with a peaceful demonstration in protest against police powers to impose
a curfew on any place in France frequented by North Africans. The
police, it seems, went mad - shooting at crowds, batoning protesters and
then throwing their bodies into the Seine. For weeks corpses were
recovered, but the French media remained silent.
eventually in 1962, a
referendum gave an
overwhelming yes to Algerian independence, and pieds noirs
refugees flooded into France. Most of the rest of the French colonial empire had
achieed independence by this time also, and the succeeding years were to see a
resurgence of fascist and racist actiity, both among the French "returnees" and
the usual insular, anti-immigrant sectors.
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From the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s a French
labor shortage
led to massie recruitment campaigns for workers in North Africa,
Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece. People were promised housing, free
medical care, trips home and well-paid jobs. When they arried in
France, however, these immigrants found themseles paid half as
much as their French co-workers, accommodated in prison-style hostels
and sometimes poorer than they had beven at home. They had no ote, no
automatic permit renewal, were subject to frequent racial abuse and
assault and were forbidden to form their own organizations.
De
Gaulle's leadership
was haughty and autocratic in style, more concerned with gloire
and grandeur than the everyday problems of ordinary lies. His quirky
strutting on the world stage greatly irritated France's partners. He
blocked British entry to the EC, cultiated the friendship of the
Germans, rebuked the US for its imperialist policies in ietnam,
withdrew from NATO, refused to sign a nuclear test ban treaty and called
for a "free Québec". If this projection of French influence pleased
some, the ery narrowly won presidential election of 1965 (in which
Mitterrand was his opponent) showed that a good half of French oters
would not be sorry to see the last of the general.
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