France

on the World Today

IN dissolving the French Assembly early in December, Premier Edgar Faure achieved what he had tried to maneuver the deputies into agreeing to: the holding of national elections in January instead of June. Back of this move was the desire to pull the rug out from under the feet of his dynamic rival, Pierre Mendès-France, by not giving him a chance to organize a springtime electoral offensive aimed at sweeping the Country with a left-wing majority of Socialists and Radicals.

In trying to engineer this difficult feat, Faure was once again proving himself to be — behind a smoke-screen of “reformist” and “clean sweep” slogans — an arch-champion of the status quo and a cynical judge of French political realities. For no one knew better than this 47-year-old deputy from the Jura that precipitated elections in France would almost certainly bring back the old familiar faces, and that most of the new ones would be spouting the same glittering platitudes with which the deputies of France like to butter their parliamentary bread.

This ability to take a disabused view of French political realities is one of the secrets of the phenomenal rise to power of a man who became Premier just five years after first being elected to the Assembly. With uncanny skill he has managed to place himself at the exact dead center of the seesaw of French politics. The result has been that for the last three years — serving in l hree successive cabinets, as Finance Minister, Foreign Minister, and Premier—Faure has enjoyed a greater measure of political power than any other man in the country.

The explanation of his success lies in his extraordinary intelligence. Faure’s memory is so prodigious that he rarely has to ask his secretary for a telephone number. He is capable of reading a magazine article through once and then reciting it word for word. It was this phenomenal gift which permitted him to memorize the 2000 provisions of the French fiscal code several months after being named Minister of the Budget in 1949. In a bureaucratic labyrinth where others have often been easily lost he has alw ays been at home.

The most striking example that has yet been offered of Faure’s political virtuosity was his recent tour de force in keeping an utterly disunited cabinet going for months when many Parisians doubted that it could last more than a couple of weeks. The Faure ministry of 1955 would more properly be called the Fanre-Pinay ministry, for from the outset it was a two-headed monster.

It is not, of course, uncommon for French cabinets to have more than one head. If anything, it. is the rule; for to keep a coalition of mutually suspicious parties together it. is often easier to choose a nonentity to be its chairman than an aggressive party leader. The Laniel government of 1953—1954 was one of this type. With Bidault as Foreign Minister, Pleven as Minister of Defense, Faure as Finance Minister, and Reynaud as Deputy Premier, it had at least five heads, and even a couple of arms with independent nervous systems besides.

Two-headed government

The novelty of the Faure-Pinay government lay in the fact that its two-headed character was emphasized, rather than concealed, from t he start. To counterbalance Faure, who is a middle-of-the-road Radical Socialist, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was given to Antoine Pinay, the champion of the conservatives and a man with about as much, interest and experience in foreign affairs as the late Stanley Baldwin.

The result was one of those paradoxical situations which would be surprising in any country but France. For the first few months of this Janus-faced duumvirate it was Faure, nominally the Prime Minister, who was running the country’s foreign policy, and it was Pinay, nominally its Foreign Minister, who was keeping the parties in line and doing the fence-mending at home.

The terms underlying this shotgun wedding between the right-wing Independent and Peasant parties and the middle-of-the-road Radical Socialist and Popular Republican parties were simple. In return for making concessions on the home front to the sugar-beet producers, the alcohol distillers, the winegrowers, the small manufacturers, the grocers, the distributors, the exporters, the anti-tax Paujadistes, and all the other lobbyists that haunt the corridors of the Assembly, Faure was given a free hand to pursue a liberal policy abroad.

Morocco EXPLODES

The trick of maintaining this elaborate piece of political camouflage might have worked for a number of months but for the Moroccan crisis, which exploded in June. What touched it off was the assassination of Jacques Lemaigre-Dubreuil, one of the leaders of liberal French opinion in Morocco and a personal friend of Edgar Faure. His murder at the hands of French “counter-terrorists” was a clear signal that something drastic had to be done to curb the systematic gangsterism which certain French businessmen, politicians, and police officials weresponsoring in Casablnnca. Faure’s answer was to dispatch an energetic new governor, Gilbert Grandval.

In purging the administration and preparing the ground for Sultan Hen Moulay Arafa’s removal, Grandval faithfully fulfilled Faure’s instructions; but at the same time he destroyed the delicate equilibrium of the Faure-Pinay machine. For the shake-up of the Moroccan administration directly threatened the privileges and powers of some of the groups which the government’s hands-off policy at home was supposed to have appeased. It was no longer possible to keep the fields of colonial and domestic affairs separate, pursuing a liberal policy in one and a conservative policy in the other.

What followed was probably the most skillful piece of political juggling that France has seen since the war. The tortuous maneuvering, that Edgar Enure had to undertake to push through his Moroccan “policy” against the resistance of rebellious officials, outraged ultra-nationalists, and embittered French generals, mobilized behind Antoine Pinay, was well illustrated this autumn in a Paris cartoon. In it a bespectacled snakecharmer called Fakir Edgar was depicted sitting cross-legged on a bed of nails playing a flute with which he was trying to charm a coiled snake labeled Antoine et Compagnie.

At the root of this intra-cabinet chaos is the fact that there is no visible majority opinion in the French

Chamber on colonial policy. While every deputy has his own particular opinion, only a handful have any real knowledge or experience of colonial matters. Right up until the day that El Glaoui, the Pasha of Marrakesh, threw his “bombshell” (by requesting Mohammed Ren Yussef’s return to Morocco), a good quarter of the deputies of t he Assembly were still obstinately claiming that Sultan Ben Moulay Arafa was the popular and legit imate Sultan of Morocco.

Algerians in the Assembly ?

The same ignorance, not to say blindness, reigns today over the far more difficult problem of Algeria. Recause Algeria is officially an integral part of France, the policy of the French government has been to further its polit ical “ integration.” If this were carried out to the letter, it would mean that some eighty or ninety Algerian Moslems would be sitting as deputies in the French Assembly.

Such a sizable bloc could easily wield a commanding decision in votes on domestic, as well as overseas, questions, and if any of the Algerians were to fall under the pan-Islamic spell, it. could even mean that Cairo could exercise a decisive influence over policy-making in Paris.

The proposition is obviously grotesque. But as it forms part of the official mythology of the “French union,” few French politicians have dared to challenge it openly. Edgar Faure, for example, has been emphatic in proclaiming his support for the policy of “integration,” and even as courageous a politician as MendèsFranee has been significantly silent on the subject.

Will Mendès-France return ?

Because the French find themselves boxed in here by the ironclad walls of their own rhetoric, the coming mont hs promise to be dramatic, whatever the outcome of the elect ions, and whet her or not Mendès-Franee comes hack into power. This is a possibility that cannot be discounted, for if another crisis comparable to that of Indochina develops, it is certain that his fellow deputies will turn to him again in desperation.

As it is, Mendès-France has had an uphill fight trying to prepare his return to power. This has been a boom year for France which has seen an increase of almost 10 per cent in the country’s overall production, so that arguments about the imperative necessity of overhauling the country’s antiquated economic apparatus have fallen on relatively deaf ears. And though there are signs that France’s budgetary and balance-of-t rade positions are likely to deteriorate next year, no amount of anticipatory warning can have the impact of an immediate crisis.

Mendès-France’s one clear triumph so far was his seizure (the word is not too strong) of the secretariat of the Radical Socialist Party at its annual convention last May. This coup, which he pulled off with the blessing ofEdouard Herriot, the party’s Grand Old Man, has not endeared him to all of that seasoned party’s seasoned politicians, or to Edgar Faure, not least among them.

Political duel with Faure

The open warfare that has recently broken out between these two brilliant men has already become the most dramatic political duel of postwar France — first of all, because they were once close friends. It was Mendès-France, in fact, who persuaded Faure to join the Radical Socialist Party and enter the political arena.

At bottom the difference between them revolves around a question of tactics as much as it does around one of political orientation. MendèsFrance has always been a believer in movement, change, momentum. He is the advocate of the steam-roller attack, the frontal assault , and he might well be called the Guderian of French politics. Faure, on the other hand, has never believed in attacking on all fronts at once or in tackling obstacles head-on. His instinct has always been to circumvent obstacles, to proceed by subtle flank attacks, quick skirmishes, and strategic retreats in a campaign designed to confuse the enemy and wear down his resistance.

In the days when both were less prominent than they are now, Mendes-France was always trying to dissuade Faure from joining governments with which he was not in sympathy. In practice, this meant that. Faure, like Mendes-France, could only join a government of which he himself was the head. Faure, on the other hand, has always believed that it is better to operate from within, controlling the levers of power and patiently molding men and institutions to one’s particular views. Acting on this principle, he has never refused the offer of a cabinet post.

This led directly to the first estrangement between them in 1953, when Faure agreed to join the Laniel government as Finance Minister. Subsequently they patched things up, and Mendes-France allowed Faure to keep his post as Finance Minister when he succeeded Laniel in July of 1954. But the rift between them broke out anew when Faure consented to head the government that succeeded MendesFrance’s last February.

Until their clash over the date of the elections neither of them had openly attacked the other in public debate (they are after all members of the same party); but on several occasions Mendes-France had ostentatiously abstained from voting for his onetime friend, and in the corridors of the Palais Bourbon, where so many governments are made and unmade, he has often been busy agitating against him.

Now newspaper in Paris

The aim of these maneuvers, it should be said in justice to MendesFrance, was less to bring down Faure’s government than to set up another headed by Antoine Pinay or some other conservative leader who would offer him a good target for attacks in the steam-roller electoral campaign that he was planning. The failure of this maneuver is not the only one that Mendès-France has suffered in recent months. An even more striking one has been the fiasco surrounding the launching of a dally paper, L’Express, which he wanted to make the loudspeaker for his political views.

Up until last September L’Express was the youngest and in many ways the best political weekly in France. But it did not appear frequently enough to suit Mendes-France’s impatient taste. So he persuaded its editor, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, to turn it into a daily. The metamorphosis took place in early October with one of those “events” that Parisians love to celebrate.

Among the5000 people—well sprinkled with the usual mondaines and demi-mondaines — who turned out on the Champs Flysèes to witness the launching were a number of gloomy editors who were afraid that the new prodigy was going to drive their own papers off the newsstands. Their gloom turned to jubilation, however, when the first copies of the new paper appeared on the stroke of midnight. Though it could boast such editorial names as Francois Mauriac, Albert Camus, and Pierre Mendès-France, the new paper was no more than a four-page rag.

Since then L’Express has improved but slightly in bulk and quality. Lacking a staff experienced in the manifold complexities of putting out a daily paper, it has tried to fill its middle pages with a hodge-podge of “ flashy” features, including everything from boulevard gossip about Paris celebrities to capsule-size love stories.

Even t hequalityofMendès-France’s editorials seems to have been diluted by the necessity of churning them out on a mass production basis. It is clear, in fact, that this first plunge into the cold, uncharted waters of daily journalism has not been a success. But the attempt is significant, for it marks the emergence of a new Mendès-France — one who has abandoned his previous Cato-like role of criticism from the sidelines for active intervention in party politics.

Much of the aura surrounding his name came from his nine years of political exile from 1945 to 1954, during which he coidd nourish a reputation for absolute integrity. But how will this legend stand up under this new treatment? As his recent electoral tours of France have shown, he is still the most popular politician in the country. But it is a popularity more associated with his record as a dynamic Premier than with his vigorous new advocacy of Radical Socialism.

The Saar plebiscite

Another thing that has tended to diminish Mendes-France’s prestige has been the shock experienced by the French people by the crushing rejection of the Saar Statute in October. The fact that the plebiscite had been arranged when Mendes-France was Premier was promptly seized upon by his numerous opponents as further proof of what they have labeled his “policy of liquidation.” The charges were plausible enough to oblige Mendès-France to issue a statement making clear that the idea of a Saar plebiscite had become part of the Quai d’Orsay’s official policy long before he came to power.

This is true as far as it goes, but the admission that he was no more farsighted than the “European experts” of the French Foreign Ministry has not enhanced the myth of MendesFrance’s international omniscience. In fact, of course, the error that underlay French hopes in the political wisdom of Saar voters much exceeds a question of personal miscalculation. The Saar vote proved once again that it is risky to believe that the best way to solve explosive national issues is to submit them to a popular referendum, where they are subject to all the fearful pressure of reckless demagogy and blind emotions.

The Saar vote was, at bottom, another delayed consequence of the serious diplomatic blunder made by our State Department in the autumn of 1950, when it thought it could foist the idea of German rearmament on the French with no diplomatic preparation. Prior settlement of the Saar problem was bound to be the sine qua non for any such eventuality. Had the French governments of 1950 and 1951 had the backbone to insist on it, and had Washington had the foresight to agree to it, the whole question could have been settled then and there without having to make it a football for chauvinistic passions.

For such a solution two great precedents exist. The first was the agreement made in 1830 between Palmerston and Talleyrand to establish an independent Belgium. Thesecond was the agreement reached by Clarendon and Bismarck in 1867 which recognized the independence of Luxembourg.

The Saar should logically have become another such buffer state. Had the problem been tackled in 1950 shortly after the establishment of the West German Republic and before it had become an industrial giant, not only the problem of the Saar but the whole question of the EDC might have been transformed. The failure to do so when the time was ripe may yet prove to be one of those great missed opportunities which can have such fateful consequences years later.