COMTE DE PARIS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 January 1943, Page 3

COMTE DE PARIS

PRETENDER TO FRENCH THRONE INTRIGUING IN NORTH AFRICA. REPUBLICANS AROUSED. (By Telegraph—Press Association—Copyright) (Received This Day, 11.10 a.m.) ! LONDON. January 8. The arrival in Algiers of the Comte de Paris, the 35 years old pretender to the French Throne, has complicated the already extremely unsettled situation in North Africa, says the “Daily Express.” . The Comte, before the war, was exiled from French soil and lived in Spanish Morocco. He was at Rabat when the Allies entered North Africa. Leaflets distributed in Algiers say the Comte proposed a coup d’etat which involved the assassination of Admiral Darlan. The leaflets state that the coup was intended to place the Comte at the head of French North Africa, where he would declare the union of the French Empire and solidarity with the United Nations, thereby presenting London and Washington with a fait accompli. This, at any rate, is the theory of ardent Republicans, who are carrying on a private feud with the Monarchists. Reuter’s diplomatic correspondent says that Bonnier De La Chappelle, who has been identified by the Vichy radio as Darlan’s assassin, was an anti-Ger-man Royalist. He was a son of a French journalist in Algeria, with whom he lived.

TANGLED SKEIN' AND DEAD HAND OF VICHY. TALK OF A POLITICAL CESSPOOL. (Received This Day, 1.15 p.m.) LONDON, January 8. However else the situation in North Africa may be described, it certainly cannot be called satisfactory at this stage. The tangled skein of French politics, the First Army’s slow progress, and the growing annoyance caused by the censorship of news, are all combining to produce a mood of dissatisfaction and uneasiness. Any unofficial hopes that delicate negotiations would produce acceptable results thus far have not been realised. Vichy’s dead hand hangs over North Africa, and despite co-operation with the Allies, prevents the welding of the French forces there with General de Gaulle’s Fighting French. Generals de Gaulle and Giraud have both issued statements in favour of a union of French forces, and if it were left to them they would probably have achieved it, but General Giraud, who is a soldier and not a politician, is in a political position as High Commissioner, and his advisers are the antiethis of everything for which the ? Fighting French stand. French officials in North Africa are a mixture of Vichy supporters, Royalists, Doriotists and Croix De Feu supporters, who have at no time been in favour of General de Gaulle’s stand for democratic principles, the laws of the Republic and the immediate formation of a Provisional Government for the whole Empire as a pre-condition to the fusion of military forces. Comments by British daily newspapers on the situation have been cautious and restrained, but the “New Statesman and Nation,” which is a weekly, does not mince matters: “Dying upwept,” it says, “Darlan left in French North Africa a political cesspool, whose stench not merely infects the cause of the Western Allies, but threatens, unless there is plain speaking and better understanding, to end by poisoning Anglo-American relations. A mistakenly cautious American censorship in Algiers emasculates 1 correspondents’ comments about the set-up, on which the British, no less than the American army depends.” Commenting on the latitude shown to the preesnt regime in North Africa, the “New Statesman” says: “It remains free to retain in high office M. Chatel, the notoriously pro-German GovernorGeneral of Algeria; to maintain in appointments unreliable Petainist officers who form a majority in the senior ranks serving under General Juin (comman-der-in-chief), who at best are described as avowed Vichy-supporters; to leave unsuppressed the SOL and other Fascist, part-military organisations which infest 'Vichyist North Africa; and to turn a blind eye on the activities of Axis agents.”