France

ATLANTIC

January 1951

on the World today

BEFORE the news of the Viet-Minh attacks erupted suddenly into the headlines, the French public had paid scant attention to what was going on in Indo-China. The average Frenchman was quite unconscious of the fact that a real war was in actual progress, for the newspapers devoted little space to it. He thought of the fighting there, as the Englishman thinks of the fighting in Malaya, as an annoying “police action.”This attitude has now changed completely. News is much more plentiful, and there exists a deep feeling of solicitude for the soldiers lighting in the jungles of IndoChina.

This unexpected change in the attitude towards Indo-China is symptomatic of the general change which has slowly been taking place in the preoccupations of the French people during the past year. Domestic problems have been giving way to foreign ones. All the major questions which have confronted the French Assembly since the summer recess have in one way or another concerned international problems.

The split among the anti-Communists

In the background, of course, stalks the rising cost of living. Although food costs over the past year have risen only slightly (the crops in France last summer on the whole were good), the rise in the prices of manufactured goods, due in part to the rise in the world prices of raw materials and in part to the speculation of the public following the outbreak of war in Korea, has been dramatic. The inevitable result has been a recrudescence of the demands of labor for wage increases.

The bargaining position of French labor is not as strong today as it was two years ago, when it presented a more or less united front, for there are now three main labor groups: the Communist CGT, the Confederation of Christian Workers, and the Force Ouvrière, plus a number of small independent unions as well.

While the workers are in general divided into two camps, one Communist and the other antiCommunist, there is no effective unity in the antiCommunist camp, although at times a form of tactical coöperation in the presentation of wage demands is achieved. The anti-Communist camp, which is not subjected to the iron rule of discipline prevailing in the Communist camp, is split into religious and antireligious, revolutionary and nonrevolutionary, factions somewhat similar to those which are characteristic of French political life, both national and provincial.

At the Second Congress held in Paris last October by Force Ouvrière, delegate after delegate arose to criticize other unions, and particularly the Christian Confederation, in violent terms, only to demand, in the next breath, continued coöperation with them in order to maintain a solid labor front against the Communists and the egoistic resistances of management. This is not the kind of spirit which is likely to promote much fraternal harmony within the ranks of the non-Communist workers.

Force Ouvrière suffers, indeed, from an internal contradiction between revolutionary sentiment and moderate action. Its leaders are hesitant to resort to drastic action in pressing their demands for fear of playing the Communist game, yet they are reluctant to give management the impression that they are spineless and servile. Thus they are caught between the Scylla of orderly pressure and the Charybdis of aggressive agitation.

Rearming

To build up the French armed forces as rapidly and as effectively as possible, in accordance with the program laid out by the government last September, compulsory military service has been increased to eighteen months and exemptions from service for reasons of family have been eliminated.

The government has taken the first steps towards the creation of an internal defense system to combat sabotage, fifth-column action, and hostile parachutists in case of war. As the head of this organization a military man has been appointed — General Chouteau, Military Governor of Paris and a member of the Supreme War Council. It will be his job to coördinate the various active police units with others composed of reserve officers and enlisted men and men deferred from active service as the nucleus of this metropolitan and internal defense force. This is a knotty problem.

Why France is afraid

The ideas and the opinions underlying French resistance to German rearmament have not always been very clearly understood outside of France. In 1914 France had a metropolitan and overseas population of about 40 million. In the four terrible years (1914-1918) in the trenches before Verdun, on the Chemin des Dames, and in the mud of Flanders, 1¾ million men were killed and ¾ million “grands blessés” sustained major injuries, were gassed and shell-shocked. Two and a half million out of 10 million males between twenty and fifty years — 25 per cent of the future fathers and leaders of France — were sacrificed for freedom.

In World War II France lost another ¾ million soldiers and civilians — 200,000 were killed in battle; 198,000 patriots were shot or died from torture by the Gestapo; 37,000 Maquis or underground fighters were killed in action; 59,225 were killed by aerial bombardment; 182,000 deportees died in German concentration camps; 90,000 war prisoners and labor draftees died in captivity. The Germans cynically said in 1916 that they would bleed France white. They did. There is your answer to the question “Where are France’s leaders today—leaders like the great Clemenceau, Poincaré, Briand, Foch?”

The prevailing impression in Paris last summer, when the matter of German rearmament was first brought up, was that Secretary Acheson was insisting upon its acceptance in principle in order to strengthen his uncertain position with the U.S. Congress and in the face of the open hostility of Louis Johnson, then Secretary of Defense.

When General Marshall succeeded Johnson, it was thought that the Secretary of State, thus strengthened in his position by the arrival of an ally, would relax his pressure for the immediate acceptance of the principle of German rearmament.

The French were consequently surprised to discover that the Cabinet change had only reinforced the adamant stand of the State Department on this question.

The Pleven Plan

Thus the Pleven government was on the spot. It could not accept the American demand, if only because the Socialists, who form one of the three pillars of the government, are naturally inclined to pacifism and instinctively hostile to rearmament in general and German rearmament in particular. Nor could the government simply reject the American proposal. The result was the Pleven Plan, the French government’s counterproposal.

Judged from the purely French parliamentary and tactical point of view, the plan was singularly ingenious, for it succeeded in reconciling the Socialists and in winning over the Assembly to the principle of German rearmament. Significantly enough, among those who came out most emphatically in praise of the Pleven Plan was Paul Ramadier, one of the leaders of the Socialist Party and himself a former Minister of National Defense. In a leading article in Le Populaire (the Socialist daily) which appeared early last November he lauded the plan above all for its exemplary clarity.

The structure of the plan, crowned at the top by a little parliamentary Assembly, also appealed to the French. The same idea of a supranational Parliament, ever on hand to cheek possible abuses, lies at the heart of the Sehuman Plan. This basic faith in parliamentary sovereignty underlies all the efforts of the French to achieve a European Parliament.

It is around this point that all the disagreements between England and France over the question of Europe’s political future fundamentally revolve. The Englishman, who takes such pride in the solemn and majestic proceedings of his own Parliament, does not, for all that, believe that the institution of parliamentary rule necessarily solves all problems. Some of the most important work in the House of Commons, he knows, is done in rommittee or behind closed doors.

The behavior of other Parliaments, furthermore, and particularly on the continent of Europe, does not strike the Englishman as being exactly a model of responsible conduct. Conservative or Socialist, he recoils instinctively before the voluble stream of Continental oratory. The idea of exchanging the gravity and dignity of his own parliamentary life for the turbulent and passionate life of a Continental supranational legislature does not appeal to him at all. That is fundamentally why he prefers a nonparliamentary approach to the solution of European problems.

Union of Europe?

The Frenchman, on the other hand, accustomed as he is to the heat and violence of his own Parliaments, which condemn each successive government to a relatively insecure existence and often to a policy of inertia, looks to a European Parliament as a way of transcending the conflicts which beset and paralyze his own. That is why the French government has seized at every opportunity to further the cause of the parliamentary union of Europe.

This is the instinct which underlies the Pleven Plan, and no one has given it clearer expression than René Pleven himself, when, addressing his party Congress at Lyon in October, he said: —

“What is it that the French nation lacks? It lacks a faith, an enthusiasm, a grand design. And we say that this faith, this enthusiasm, this grand design are to be found in the constitution of the European community, in the constitution of Europe. And what country better than France can take the lead in this task and bring it to fulfillment?”

A Grand Design? Did Pleven utter those words casually? To anyone acquainted with French history they have a familiar ring. That was the title which Sully, the great minister of Henri IV, gave to his ambitious project for uniting the monarchies of seventeenth-century Europe. The union of European nations is hardly a new idea, and in trying to promote it the Pleven government could at least claim to be acting in the spirit of “an old French custom.”