The Atlantic Report on the World Today: Paris

PARIS, like many a great metropolis, is a conglomeration of different cities. The official one, the smiling, happy one, the one which so many tourists come in crowds to see, lies like a carnival mask upon the face of the complex metropolitan community which is the capital of France.

Behind this expansive countenance lies the sober bourgeois Paris of everyday pedestrian life, and beyond it, on the periphery, the Paris of the banlieues, of the suburbs, seething with a restless populace which a tireless propaganda maintains in a state of sullen discontent and which from time to time erupts into the heart of the city.

This spring one of these sporadic explosions burst onto the Champs-Elysées around the offices of Le Figaro, littering the pavement with broken wicker chairs and pieces of concrete. With this attempt to intimidate the press, the Communists’ carefully orchestrated 1950 campaign took another step along the road of violence, which is the prelude to civil war.

Lest anyone should mistake this demonstration of violence for a spontaneous outburst of popular feeling, the Twelfth Communist Congress, which was being held at the same time, gave official consecration to the new “tough" party line. To make eloquently clear the indissoluble alliance of the Communist Party and the workers of suburban Paris, the Congress was held on a market place in Gennevilliers, on the northwest outskirts of the capital, beneath a great marquee dripping with yards of red velvet and portraits of Stalin.

The five-day Congress devoted itself to a rigorous “auto-criticism" which revealed, among other things, that the party had declined from a million to 700,000 members, that it had degenerated into a. stagnant, bourgeois party, and that many of its leaders had become mere bureaucrats.

The Congress culminated in the election of some new “tough” militants to the Central Committee of the party. Among these, presumably, was Jeannette Vermeersch, who was elected to the Politburo to take her place beside her husband, Maurice Thorez, as the “symbol of the woman and mother of the day.” The model pair were congratulated on this happy event with gifts of all sorls, ranging from a gold collar and a handbag to a bottle of Armagnac and a statuette of Joan of Arc. The toughness of the party line had thus not yet succeeded in crushing the instinctive spirit of French gallantry within the ranks of its elite.

A people without a state

The new policy of “direct action” which the French Communist Party, on the orders of Moscow, inaugurated in its Congress is obviously intended to take advantage of a situation of growing government paralysis which, as the influential Swiss weekly Die Weltwoche remarked not long ago, has left the French a “people without a state.”

The Bidault government has done everything but govern. Supported by an insecure majority grouped around a coalition of Radical-Socialists, Popular Republicans, and small right-wing parties, and enjoying on most occasions the tacit support of the Socialists, it has managed to cling to power by improvising a series of day-to-day expedients and has thus maintained a regime which the RPF has stigmatized, in true Gaullist style, as one of “national mediocrity and chloroform.”

If the authority of the Bidault government is small, the prestige of the Assembly itself at the present time is even smaller. The riots which its Communist members unleashed at the time of the Atlantic Pact debates, and more recently the publicity given to two political scandals, the “Wine Scandal" and the “Affair of the Generals,” both involving prominent parliamentary figures, have done nothing to enhance the average Frenchman’s opinion of politicians.

It is even believed by some that in the ReversMast case the Assembly’s Committee of Investigation has tried to fasten public attention on the unorthodox behavior of two generals in order to detract attention from similar maneuvers on the part of many deputies. As is inevitable in any political scandal, the result has been a poisoning of the political atmosphere which the Communists, in particular, have done everything to encourage.

At a time when all France was looking to the Assembly for the solution of the strike problem, the whole attention of the Assembly seemed to have been absorbed by the scandals, to the detriment of everything else. In the end, the strikes which had swept the country fizzled out of their own accord after barely a month. The workers simply did not have enough money to be able to sustain their strikes any longer in the face of the determined opposition of management to their demands for a 20 per cent wage increase.

There has been considerable controversy in the French press as to the justification of labor’s demands. Throughout 1949 there was a gradual increase in the over-all cost of living conservatively estimated at around 8 per cent. Wages, however, did not rise correspondingly, and it was generally agreed at the beginning of the year that some increase in wages was due.

The two major non-Communist unions, Force Ouvrière and the Christian Workers, in an effort to draw away members from the rival Communist (Jencral Confederation of Labor, look the lead in demanding a flat cost-of-living bonus of 8000 francs (or about $8.50) for all workers earning less than 20,000 francs a month. The bonus was granted for the month of January, but instead of 20 per cent, management offered a 5 to 6 per cent wage increase, and in the end labor had to agree.

Wages and security

The average worker in France today does not receive as high a direct wage as he did before the war. But his indirect wages, his social security benefits, are much higher now than they were then. Part of these social security benefits is paid for by the worker out of his monthly salary; another part is paid by his employer over and above the salary he pays to the worker. This, combined with the salary tax which the state imposes on all salary payments, considerably increases the total amount which an employer must pay out.

Since the salary tax and the social security payments are calculated as a fixed percentage of the salary the worker receives, any increase in a worker’s salary involves a considerably greater increase in the employer’s costs. Thus, for example, a 5 percent increase in a worker’s wage necessitates a 9 per cent increase in the employer’s costs.

If any further increases in wages are to be made, French employers insist that they will have to be made without corresponding increases in social security and tax payments. At the present time French industry cannot afford to increase its costs, because it is faced by an increasingly stiff competition from German and Italian products on the domestic and foreign markets, and because the country is pledged to keep down its trade barriers for the sake of European economic integration.

“Communism or Association”

The wave of strikes which succeeded the institution of free collective bargaining in February (the level of wages having hitherto been determined by the government) has been exploited by the RPF, the party of General de Gaulle, as proof that the traditional form of capitalist contract can only continue to divide management and labor into hostile camps. The RPF which is popularly spoken of in many countries as an extreme right-wing party, has a very hold social policy which is summed up in the slogan “Either Communism or Association.”

The Association of Management and Labor within the framework of each enterprise is, according de Gaulle and his collaborators, the only effective answer that capitalism can offer to Communism. It is the only way, they claim, that harmony can be established in the realm of industry which the prevailing capitalist system keeps divided into two intransigently opposed social groups, each ever trying to impose its will on the other.

Last March the Rassemblement, the four-page weekly which is the official organ of the RPF, issued a formal project for institutionalizing the system of Association around three cardinal principles: (1) that the fruits of exploitation should be shared by all participating in production; (2) that the authority of the management of industry must not be challenged; (3) that the basis of the system of Association is an industrial contract which unites the interests of the participants, rather than one which conciliates opposing interests.

Experiments in profit-sharing

Hardly a week goes by that the Rassemblement does not publish an article lauding the achievements which the system of Assoeiation has realized in France. Perhaps the most remarkable of these is that of Télémécanique, a company manufacturing electromagnetic machines, which has its factory in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre. Founded in 1923, it today employs 1200 workers and has two new factories under construction.

From the beginning all profits have been shared between capital and labor, and most of the employees have bought shares in the company. Most employees work fifty hours a week, strikes are unknown, and all the members of the Communist CGT have handed in their party cards.

The majority of French industrialists are suspicious of such experiments. Where they have succeeded, they claim, it has been due less to the merit of the system of Association than to the personalities of the managers. Furthermore, they add, only in certain industries, usually of a specialized character, are the workers intelligent or interested enough to associate effectively with management.

The Association of Management and Labor is only one of many different experiments of this sort which are at present being tried in France under the active encouragement of a progressive group of young French entrepreneurs, who call themselves the Gronpe des Jeunes Patrons. Treated in 1938 in the tempestuous wake of the Front Populaire upheavals, the group has slowly grown in size and influence, and since 1947 has issued a monthly review in which it publicizes the latest experiments in management techniques and strives to establish a code of social responsibility in the managerial class.

Those who are engaged in these experiments share one belief in common

with the majority of French industrialists, who are content with the status quo —that the problem of conciliating management and labor must be tackled, not on the level of the state, as the Socialists believe, but on the level of individual enterprise.

The Socialists lose heart

The death of Léon Blum symbolizes in dramatic fashion the complete decline of Socialism in the country of Saint-Simon, where it was first invented. With two of its lenders implicated in the current scandals (Jules Moch, ex-Minister of the Interior, in the “Wine Scandal Paul Kamadier. ex-Minisfer of National Defense, in the Revers-Masl affair) and a third, Vincenl Auriol, installed as a powerless figurehead in the Presidency, the Socialist Party gives an appearance of utter impotence.

No longer a member of the government, it still lacks the courage or the will to oppose it. With an almost romantic regret, its leaders look back to its Golden Age in the days of Jean Jaurès and wish in vain to re-evoke a political passion that has fled away. That passion, with its visions of an ideal collectivist society, the brutal totalitarian experiments in Germany and Russia have stifled.

Hitherto the recovery of France, which was essentially an economic one, has been achieved despite the instability of the government. France’s agricultural recovery is complete. For the first time in eleven years she now has a surplus of both wheat and livestock available for export to England, Holland, and Germany. In January , prior to the February strikes, the monthly figure for French over-all industrial production was 30 per cent above the average for 1938 and 4 per cent above that for the record 1929.

But the grave problems which now face France, and which hinge on her defense, internal and external, behind the battlements of an armed and fortified Western Furope, demand a government more resolute and energetic than any France has had for some time.

No army, no defense

Two years ago Ramadier, who was then Minister of National Defense, announced that by 1951 France would have twenty modern divisions. Today these words sound utopian.

France at present has but five fully equipped modern divisions, much of them now in Indo-China, with another four divisions in training. With an unarmed Germany between herself and the frontiers of the Russian sphere of influence, she feels the full helplessness of her exposed position. Nowhere is this more keenly felt than in the French Army, where there reigns a profound demornlization.

There have been numerous cries of alarm in the Paris press over the sad slate of the Army and the neglect with which it has been treated by the Assembly. The most impassioned appeal has been that of General Billotte, who resigned his post as French Military Representative with the United Nations to devote himself to dramatizing the gravity of France’s and Western Europe’s military position.

No defense of Western Europe is even conceivable, as General Billotte has made clear and as every professional soldier realizes, without the participation of Germany, But in France the mere thought of rearming Germany, or even of incorporating German military units in a Western European army, is taboo.

With the single exception of the RPF, all of France’s major political parties continue to insist that a rearmament of Germany is out of the question. The RPF alone has had the courage to come out publicly and say that just as France was forced at the beginning of the century to swallow her traditional enmity against. Great Britain, so today she must force herself to overcome her hostility to Germany and to welcome her as a comrade-in-arms.

Militarily speaking, this is certainly the only language which makes sense. But the middle-of-the-road French parties are afraid to stare reality in the face. By so doing they only aggravate the pessimism of the French Army, which, fully aware of its present inability to protect France from military aggression, is repeatedly told that it must also assume the burden of the territorial defense of the Continent. The French have suffered so much at the hands of the Germans that they do not find it easy to accept them as allies. But this is the only way that the Atlantic Pact can become anything more than a mockery.