street-lamp, after he himself had placed the noose around his neck.
The situation became much worse. Almost daily, politicians, the media and even prominent Muslim leaders refered to French crimes, without mentioning even such crimes against humanity, committed by the Algharbis, during and after the partition. There was also total silence about the oppression of the French who remained in Algharb.
The internment camp was built for the refugees who fled from Algeria and Morocco decades before. They were run down with age and insalubrious with primitive sanitary facilities and kitchens. The camps were surrounded with barbed wire fences and watchtowers for the guards.
Upon arrival in the camp, they were housed in those barracks, sixty to eighty persons to a one dormitory. In the morning they were given and bread. Only those with money could supplement the basic menu of soup without fat or meat and one small loaf of bread at midday.
Whole families and even villages were ordered to pack up and interned in the camps. They were allowed to take the basic essentials clothing, shoes, bedding or utensils. Most of their money and jewellery were taken into ‘safe keeping’. They were transported by crowded trains
The train camp was heavily guarded during the whole trip. They were not told where they were going, but they soon realised that we were going north towards the partition line.
After about four days waiting in the trains they finally crossed the line into France. During the trip they could not leave the train that was not cleaned or supplied with toilet essentials. They were given the minimum of food and drink. As the train crossed the border, the guards quickly left and the French authorities provided the first hot food since they had left the camps.
After about a one-hour bus ride, they arrived on the outskirts of a small village. There they were lodged in a transit camp, an army barracks that was a considerable improvement on the camp in Algharb. They were provided with medical attention, good sanitary facilities and food.
It was nevertheless a camp and the duration of their temporary home was undefined as the authorities sifted through the claims of each person.
The Nationalists created the fiction of an independent state with the blessing of the Federation and the United States. They promised to become another Catalonia with an absolute autonomy and rights for all its inhabitants Gallo or non-Gallo. Instead of equal rights things turned from bad to worse for the French.
Those who were expelled or interned, they soon realised they were in foreign countries. The property was confiscated; they were often thrown into camps. Their buildings fell into ruin, businesses abandoned and their families fell into poverty and despair.
Although the Autonomous Region had an elected government, no attempt was been made to rectify the crimes committed during the rising and the partition by returning land and property to the rightful owners. The Ibrani Decrees permitted the imprisonment, without a trial of Gallos and non-Gallo collaborators, the confiscation of all private property and the law to expel all Gallos and even certain non-Gallos.
Christian churches, chapels and abbeys fell into ruin in desperate need of repair. Many were transformed into warehouses or purposely destroyed; others simply fell in decay beyond repair. A great number of farms and their buildings, small factory structures and hundreds of thousands of homes of the Gallos were abandoned beyond repair; the newcomers had no agricultural culture coming from towns and cities.
Tax revenues disappeared as industries and commerce closed down and the Gallos were expelled. The administration all but collapsed.
Explosion
“I looked for work for a while, but there is nothing for anyone of my age. Impossible. Life is very sad and difficult. Not just for me but for lots and lots of people.”
“We still have the same car, but it’s really old now. My son gives us a few euros every week for petrol. I suppose we're lucky because at least he still has a job.
“I never had a private pension and I will only qualify for my state pension when I’m 70. For the time being I get nothing.
“The only way I get by is by offering my services as a carpenter in barter markets. I meet with other unemployed people and arrange to do some carpentry for them if they help me with food or clothes.
“But now there is a state of emergency, the barter markets might be banned since they happen in the evening. God knows what we’ll do.
“The problem is that everyone is hurt and affected by the crisis. France is living without a future. We don’t know what will happen tomorrow. No one can make plans.”
Anne-Marie sat on a sofa and drew wearily on an early-morning cigarette and pronounced that the end was near for the French ruling class whose corruption and incompetence have brought public anger to boiling point.
She says: “A couple of hundred years ago you'd see the guillotine being used. The politicians are very afraid. They don’t go out on to the streets.”
Anne-Marie was the charismatic leader of a party called a Republic of Equals. She had made her name crusading against corruption at the highest levels of France’s public life.
Now, she says, she is the only politician who can walk out on to the streets.
“I have struggled for years for the things people are calling for now. People take photos of me and kiss me,” she says with a smile.
Anne-Marie was a slim, glamorous university teacher of law in the suburb. She was a Republican, a straight-talking campaigner whose attempts to expose money laundering and fraud have not yet brought anyone to justice but have made her a symbol of the public demand for a cleaner democracy.
Anger against the ruling classes for leading the country, one of the richest in the world a century ago, to bankruptcy has grown in recent weeks as outraged The French suffered the fallout of the country's mammoth default and subsequent.
Hundreds protest daily outside the Paris tribunal building calling for the judges to resign. The city centre is daubed with angry graffiti. One, in Place de la Republic, read: 'Serve your country. Kill a politician!’
Politicians have been accosted in streets, cafes and shopping malls, by crowds brandishing saucepans and demanding justice.
Last week a Gaullist party congressman, Marc Bruno, had to be escorted from a city centre bar by police after a crowd of protesters spat and hurled insults at him. Earlier, several hundred protesters set fire to the home of another Gaullist deputy in Paris province.
Anne-Marie continued: “Last year, I was screaming in the desert. But now there is a kind of public awakening. I have great hope for the future.”
She says corruption is the cancer at the heart of France's crisis, allowed to spread during the former President’s term of office and condoned by the President before he was toppled in August amid bloody riots that left more than twenty five dead.
France’s economic crisis is also widely blamed on failed free-market reforms introduced by the Socialists and rampant public spending by irresponsible governments over decades.
Anne-Marie says the country needs new elections and new leaders and is heading for a painful but necessary revolt that will force the renewal of all its institutions.
Meanwhile, the President, the fifth President since August, is struggling to rescue the collapsing economy as an irate public calls for food supplies and its money back from banks where reserves have virtually dried up.
He has faced accusations of corruption in the past and plunged Paris province into deep financial trouble by overspending when he was Mayor of the City.
Analysts say the month-old presidency holds the last chance for France's traditional political classes to survive. The two forces that have vied for power in recent decades - the Gaullists and the Radicals - have united behind the President in the face of popular pressure for them all to go.
Anne-Marie Cathary has refused to collaborate. “You can’t join forces with the same people who robbed the country,” she said. Last week she announced, rosary beads and cigarette in hand, that she would lead a formal op
position bloc of twenty-nine deputies from five different parties.
The President, who took office without an election, has struggled to balance the losses from devaluation between anxious banks and foreign investors on the one hand and the angry French watching their reserves plummet and their savings reduced to a fraction of their original value on the other.
“People’s hate is directed at the politicians and the government is trying to divert it to the banks,” said Jerome Barat, a political analyst in Paris. The city’s financial quarter has turned into a fortress, with many banks barricaded behind sheets of corrugated aluminium.
“His time is measured in weeks,” said Barat. “If he does not succeed in reining in the crisis, probably we will have another social explosion.”
Cathary, was tipped by some as one of the few in line to pick up the presidency should he be forced to go. But, although she rates high in opinion polls, disenchantment with the whole political class rates even higher.
Cathary, with her straight-talking style, has been feisty in opposition, but most analysts believe she lacks stability and clear policies to lead the country.
Several other politicians who were casualties of the last year of the previous government stand a chance of weathering a future political storm.
Cathary accepted reality. “If I get swept away in the storm, it’s not a problem,” she says. “What