Paris

ON THE WORLD TODAY

AFTER frittering away the first eighteen months of its freedom in often futile and sometimes scandalous flirtation with minor matters, the liberated nation of France has finally come to grips with its principal problem. The debate over the future constitution of France shows that the fundamental issue is: How shall the Fourth Republic be governed? The complete disagreement between President de Gaulle and the parties of the Left over this issue resulted in de Gaulle’s abrupt departure from power.

The answer to this question will determine whether the executive or the legislative branch is to be supreme in the new republic, and also whether the government will come back under de Gaulle or go to a political alliance of Communists and Socialists. In the meantime, unless there is another rapid evolution in her political position, France is condemned to a makeshift interim government, with the three major parties, Communist, Socialist, and Popular Republican, maintaining a cautious political truce and serving with President Felix Gouin until the elections scheduled for June determine the form of the constitution.

The January crisis that brought about this political situation was accompanied by startling deterioration of the physical and the moral situation. Food supplies went from little to less. Bread rationing returned, at a lower level than it ever reached under the Germans. The electricity supply dwindled, and with it industrial production. The financial situation slumped equally badly, with a more than twofold devaluation of the franc, unchecked inflation of currency, further increases in prices despite controls, and strikes for higher wages.

Adding to political and economic difficulties, the winter, which started mild, turned suddenly severe, with successive waves of clear, sharp cold down to fourteen degrees in the Paris region. Then came fogs that made Paris look like London and left the thin interior walls of unheated houses dripping.

Suffering in freedom almost as much as they did in German slavery, and deserted without reasonable explanation by the man they had been educated to consider as their only possible leader, the people reached a low point of distress and demoralization.

The battle for position

The immediate need was for a strong government that could and would take effective measures for recovery. But first there had to be a decision on the form of government. In retrospect, it became clear that the leaders of the provisional de Gaulle regime had been preoccupied in the struggle for power — a struggle between de Gaulle on the one side and the political parties on the other, and then between the parties themselves.

The general election in October proved to have been an empty affair. Of the two questions submitted to referendum, one answer was a foregone conclusion — that there should be a new constitution. The real electoral battle was fought for domination during the provisional period. De Gaulle appeared to be the victor in that battle. He formed a government on November 21, satisfying the Communists — the largest single party in the Assembly — by making their leader, Maurice Thorez, a Minister of State.

But an artificial crisis broke on New Year’s Day when de Gaulle flatly rejected a Socialist request for a 20 per cent reduction in military appropriations for the 1946 budget. Taking an unusually strong stand on what seemed to be a relatively small matter, de Gaulle went to the Assembly that day to say, “This will doubtless be the last time that I shall speak in these surroundings. I want to tell you that if you do not take into account conditions of responsibility and dignity of government you will see the time come when you will bitterly regret the path you have taken.”

His words were too strong for the occasion. That crisis was by-passed temporarily, but de Gaulle had raised on the secondary issue of army funds the primary question of executive responsibility.

During the honeymoon

Then came a pause for honeymoons. De Gaulle gave his daughter Elizabeth in marriage on January 3 to a member of his staff, Commandant de Boissieu. The same day Francisque Gay, Minister of State, saw his daughter married. Foreign Minister Georges Bidault was already on honeymoon with Suzanne Borel, France’s first woman career diplomat.

On this eve of grave political crisis, the polite society of Paris struggled with petty problems much as the haute société of Brussels danced at the grand ball on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo. De Gaulle insisted that his daughter’s wedding be private — so much so that he told a delegation from the Diplomatic Corps that he did not want a wedding present. The bewildered wives of ambassadors and ministers, having already collected the money, settled for a silver tray that could be concealed under a silver tea service given by members of the Cabinet.

Bidault, however, invited the entire Diplomatic Corps, the officers of the French foreign service, the members of the Assembly, and even ten American and ten British correspondents, to his wedding reception in the Salon de l’Horloge of the Foreign Ministry. The difference in wedding receptions reflected frequent differences in policy between the Foreign Minister and the President.

The Assembly took a vacation the first two weeks in January and the most important ministers left Paris. René Pleven, Minister of Finance, repaired to his electoral district in Brittany. Marcel Paul, Communist Minister of Industrial Production, made a trip to Kemsdam on the Rhine, where he urged French workers not to strike but to work, work, work. Charles Tillon, Communist Minister of Armaments, traveled to Toulouse to visit an arms plant. Bidault took his bride to Switzerland.

Hunger and politics

But most important of the mid-January vacationers was de Gaulle, who went alone to a villa at Cap d’Antibes on the Riviera and reflected on the course of French politics. It was there that he reached the tentative decision to resign.

These much publicized ministerial vacations coincided with the sharp descent of the French people into the abyss of misfortune. All meat shops in Paris were closed. Butchers complained that they could not make a living at the retail prices fixed by the government while wholesale prices were uncontrolled. Bread tickets were reinstated New Year’s Day, after bread had been off rationing two months, when blundering estimates of the wheat supply were discovered.

When de Gaulle returned to Paris on January 14, he was appalled by the situation. He called a Cabinet meeting immediately, scolded the Ministers like a schoolmaster chastising delinquent students, and attempted to resume control.

Assemblymen returned the next day. First on their agenda was the foreign policy debate. De Gaulle, tapping his foot restlessly, must have thought that this debate reached the depth of decadence in democratic practices, and that it confirmed his contention that executive power should be supreme.

A spokesman from each party took the rostrum for a limited time in the hallowed Chamber of Deputies, which once echoed to inspired speeches, and each uttered well-known, hackneyed views of his group, applauded mechanically by his group alone. The speech that drew the loudest applause was that of Florimond Bonte, because his group — the Communist — was the most numerous. Then the Assembly proceeded to try formalistic debate on the supply situation.

De Gaulle bows out

By then de Gaulle had reached confirmation of the decision he made during his vacation. At noon on January 20, Sunday, an unusual day for a Cabinet meeting, he called the Ministers to the War Office, an unusual place (the sessions are customarily held in the Hotel Matignon). In a few curt words he announced his resignation. The de Gaulle government, born of crisis, expired without a struggle.

The only explanation de Gaulle gave his Ministers was that he always felt that his leadership should end when political parties were ready to assume control; that since the period of transition had ended, France was no longer in a state of alarm and therefore no longer needed him. He repeated this explanation in a formal letter to Félix Gouin, then President of the Assembly, not requesting permission to resign, but announcing his withdrawal. The Assembly had no alternative but to accept.

In the absence of an immediate explanation and in the presence of a quick spurt of rumors, it is interesting to reconstruct the sequence of events. It appeared that de Gaulle’s impulse to resign was reinforced on Friday, January 18, when the Socialist-Communist Committee of Entente, after considerable polemics, announced its “desire to see agreement achieved on the principal problems of the day, in particular on the elaboration of a constitution.”

Joint Socialist-Communist action in drafting the constitution implied a common stand in the election next summer. Last October, de Gaulle had carried the Socialist vote, in winning limitation of the powers of the Assembly, against the Communists, who wanted to make parliament supreme. In January, the Left united against de Gaulle.

The Communists take the offensive

Bolstered by the Socialist accord, the Communists passed immediately to the attack. On Saturday, January 19, Jacques Duclos told the Central Committee of the Communist Party, “The political situation is such that the possibility of a new governmental formula can be envisaged.” Benoit Frachon, Secretary General of the General Confederation of Labor, told a meeting of Paris cadres that the de Gaulle government “does not correspond to your desires.”

That day de Gaulle made the final decision to resign. He had long felt that his role as President in a threeparty government had become futile; and with the pride that at times has been his glory, at times his handicap, he refused to lend his name to the constitution being prepared for the country. With newly acquired political sense, he saw his position being gradually reduced to a point where he would be at the mercy of the leftist parties.

He went out in the maladroit manner that has been typical of his political career. News leaked Saturday through the British Agency Exchange Telegraph that de Gaulle intended to resign. His office would say only that there would be a Cabinet meeting Sunday and that the President would speak over the radio Monday. He was persuaded not to speak to the nation over the heads of the Assembly, but let it be known that he would issue a statement. Then he decided not to do that, lest he split the nation in two, and withdrew to the country.

De Gaulle’s sudden retreat brought a sudden drop in his public standing. His announcement that he was leaving because all was going well, when every Frenchman felt that things were going worse than ever, was ridiculous to a politically conscious people. His failure to follow up with an immediate explanation compromised his position even more. The current saying became: “De Gaulle has his head in the clouds, his hands in blood, and his feet in mud.”

De Gaulle’s ever present amanuensis, Gaston Palewski, announced that de Gaulle had withdrawn “irrevocably” to private life. Doing a quick political double-take, he tried through the Ministry of Information to have the statement withdrawn. It was too late. But no one was deceived into believing that de Gaulle had really left political life forever.

Looking for a leader

During the subsequent crisis his long shadow lay over the negotiations — first for a Socialist-Communist government, and then for a three-party Cabinet that would include the Popular Republicans and would be headed by Socialist Gouin, chosen for his non-party role as Assembly President. No one believed that this quiet little lawyer from the Midi, who took his new role nervously and reluctantly, was the strong man France needed.

The most memorable fact of crisis was the resurgence of Pierre Mendes-France, a member of the discredited Radical-Socialist Party, but a skilled financial expert who had quit de Gaulle’s government as Minister of National Economy because the Cabinet refused to accept his stern deflationary proposals. He was the man Gouin consulted most on the formation of a Cabinet and of a program. He did not become Minister, because his party decided to boycott the new government; but most of his ideas were incorporated in the government plan, with Socialist Andre Philip as Minister of Finance and National Economy.

The showdown will come over the adoption of the constitution this summer. At the vigorous age of fifty-five, de Gaulle with his pride and ambition is unlikely to let the country he led in spirit for five years go a way he disapproves. Whether he offers his own constitutional plan or opposes the leftist draft with a new party, he will be heard from again.

The GI’s leave France

In the midst of political crisis the French hardly noticed the departure of an American phenomenon. The unfortunate affaire GI in France had virtually ended. A new military establishment called Western Base Section was set up in Paris on January 15, merging the former Oise base at Reims with the Seine base in Paris. Its sole function was to close out the United States Army from France.

In terms of everyday life for the French, the notorious black market opposite the Madeleine ceased. The price of American cigarettes mounted astronomically because of shortened supply. Hotels, buses, and taxis reverted to civilian use, and the boulevards lost their khaki tinge. No one who noticed this event regretted it unless it was the black-market operators.

Both the GI’s and the French had begun to compare each other to the Germans. The French found the Germans more “correct.” The GI’s found the Germans more “like us.” It was high time that the French were left alone to their problems.