France

on the World Today

STANDING on the steps of the Elysée Palace in mid-August a French cabinet minister remarked wistfully: “It is said that the summer is always for France a period of great trials. There was the summer of 1914, the summer of 1939, the summer of 1940, and closer to the present, the Indochinese summer of 1954, the Moroccan summer of 1955, and now here we are plunged in the summer of Abdel Nasser.”

The Suez crisis caught Paris at a season of the year when it is traditionally deserted by almost half of its inhabitants, who flee to the provinces or to the seashore to escape the dog days of July and August. Thousands were visiting the Loire valley and its nocturnally illuminated Renaissance chateaux. Others were making the pilgrimage to the romanesque basilica of Vézelay in Burgundy, where a nightly pageant was staged re-enacting Saint Bernard’s preaching of the Second Crusade in 1146.

Avignon was busy with its annual theater festival put on by Jean Vilar’s Théatre National Populaire against the splendid medieval setting of the Palace of the Popes. Mediterranean Menton and that lovely city of fountains, Aix-en-Provence, were preparing to celebrate the memory of Mozart, while the old corsair port of Saint Malo in Brittany was honoring George Bernard Shaw with outdoor performances of Caesar and Cleopatra, staged in the shadow of its castle battlements. Even as far away as Karlovy Vary in Czechoslovakia there were Parisians on hand to see a new French film win the Grand International Prize.

But wherever they were, the French — with the characteristic exception of those whom General de Gaulle has labeled the “separatists,” that is, the Communists — instinctively felt that Nasser’s “Suez coup” was another blow directly aimed at France’s declining international prestige. A few Frenchmen with long memories recalled that back in 1884 Ernest Renan had hailed Ferdinand de Lesseps’ admission to ihe Académic française with the prophetic words: “Thus cut, the isthmus becomes a strait, which is to say, a battlefield. . . . You have thus marked out the spot of the battles of the future.”

But most Frenchmen have naturally taken a shorter-range view of the situation, regarding the crisis less as a new act in a world-wide drama of geopolitics than as an immediate challenge to France’s policy in Algeria. “A now Dienbienphu,” “Another Rhineland,” were two of the slogans that found immediate favor with the French press, and Guy Mollet was speaking for the great mass of his countrymen when he denounced Nasser’s coup as the work of “an apprentice dictator.” In private dining rooms and salons the denunciations were much harsher, and normally soft and cultured feminine voices were raised to advocate the assassination of Nasser as the only solution to France’s woes.

Such denunciations may sound hysterical, but they are a natural by-product of the war fever which has been enveloping France. The fighting in Algeria has already immobilized 400,000 out of the 800,000 officers and men in the French army. To keep that number of men in the field, reservists have been called up and most conscripts are now forced to serve two full years of duty, though the official draft period remains eighteen months. Yet the war continues unabated, and neither the well-advertised optimism of Robert Lacoste, the hard-boiled Resident-Minister for Algeria, nor the military censorship imposed on dispatches emanating from there can conceal the fact that each week the violence in Algeria has been increasing and the cleavage between Europeans and Moslems has grown deeper and more irreparable.

The one and idivisible France

It is one of the strange paradoxes of France’s present situation that the government which has been pursuing this tough policy in Algeria is a government of the Left, made up for the most part of Socialists who are traditionally opposed to all forms of “colonialist oppression.” When Guy Mollet was given a triumphant vote of confidence on the Suez issue in late July, one of the bluest of blue French conservatives enthusiastically exulted: “When we were in power, the Socialists refused every measure we proposed which would have saved France. Now Mollet heads a successful government because he and his Socialists are further to the right than the Right itself.”

The explanation for this strange state of affairs cannot be found merely in terms of the usual wear and tear of administrative experience, though it is certain that Mollet’s disastrous trip to Algiers last February served to shatter many a previously held idee fixe about the ease of finding “ liberal “ solutions for colonial problems.

Much of the credit for the government’s tough policy must go to Robert Laeoste, who has imposed his powerful personality on his cabinet colleagues and even to a certain extent on his fellow Socialist Party members, who have shown themselves increasingly perturbed by the course of events in Algeria. But the chief reason for the Socialists’ departure from an anticolonial tradition lies in the fact that Algeria is not officially a colony, but an integral part of France. A revolt in Algeria, therefore, is a direct assault upon the unity of the “one and indivisible” Republic that the Socialists, like all good French Republicans, have been brought up to regard as sacrosanct.

The French Socialists are a party traditionally dedicated to the belief that all men are basically good, and it has not been easy for them to accommodate themselves to a policy which is not conspicuously motivated by a feeling of universal brotherhood. When they first took power last February, many of them may have believed that being Socialists, and therefore lovers of progress and oppressed humanity, they would gain the coöperation of Moslems in Algeria and Cairo who had opposed the policies of France’s previous rightist governments. But here again they have been disillusioned.

Pineau’s courtship

With no one is this more the case than with Christian Pineau, Guy Mollet’s Foreign Minister. On taking over the Quai d’Orsay last spring, Pineau set out to give French foreign policy a new orientation, more in keeping with Socialist aspirations. There was a general shake-up in the Foreign Ministry and it was made clear that Paris was going to be far more vigorous in seeking to dampen the conflict between East and West in the cold war. As a pre-war member of the Confédération Générate du Travail (at a time when it was not yet dominated by the Communists) and as a sympathizer with the Popular Front of 1938, Pineau evidently calculated that he would be in a better position to play the role of mediator than his predecessors.

Such was the purpose behind the trip he made with Mollet to Moscow last spring, and of the subsequent trips he made alone to New Delhi and Cairo. In each case the presumption was that such an overt manifestation of friendliness and good will would suffice to secure the coöperation of Moscow and Cairo in the solution of France’s North African problems.

But nothing of the sort occurred. In Moscow Khrushchev bluntly criticized French “colonialism” the moment Pineau’s back was turned, and in Cairo all he got was a noncommittal reception followed by a stepped-up program of abuse from The Voice of the Arabs Radio.

It is this which explains the bitterness of the Mollet government’s denunciation of the Suez coup. It is irritating to the French people that they should have become one of the chief victims of a retaliatory measure taken to avenge a negative decision on the Aswan Dam—a decision taken in Washington and not in Paris. But for men like Mollet and Pineau, who had staked so much on their eager advances to Moscow and Cairo, Nasser’s snub has had all the sting and humiliation of a jilted courtship and a frustrated honeymoon.

Inflationary pressures

Although the country’s national production was almost 10 per cent higher in the first part of this year than it was in 1955, the burden of financing war reconstruction, the modernization of industries, and a vast guerrilla war in Algeria is beginning to impose a serious strain on the French economy. The calling up of reserves and the maintenance of young Frenchmen in the army beyond their obligatory term of duty have created a significant shortage of skilled labor. It is obvious in the coal mines, where French production reached a ceiling in 1955 which it has not been able to pass, simply for lack of miners. In 1946 there were some 211,000 coal miners in France; today there are just over 140,000, and the figure is expected to go on declining if the present trend continues.

It is the same story with building construction. This year France is building something like 220,000 new houses, which is a post-war high. Two thirds of the houses that were destroyed during the Second World War have now been rebuilt, but France will not be able to make up fully for this terrible war damage until 1960. In the meantime the population has been growing, and while the building industry estimates that it cannot, for lack of skilled labor, push its present output beyond 240,000 houses, the country’s real needs are closer to 300,000 a year.

More serious than these restricting bottlenecks, however, are the immediate dangers of inflation now menacing the French economy. Since 1952 the cost of living in France has remained relatively stable, and the workers have enjoyed a gradual rise in their living standards, due to increased productivity and fairly stable prices. But today, as the French economist Alfred Sauvy recently remarked, France “has entered the inflation on tip-toe.”

Socialist philanthropy

The bitter frost of last February has momentarily thrown food prices out of kilter; and at a time when the French treasury is staggering under financial burdens, the Socialist government has chosen to inject another $400 million into the economy in the form of social security benefits and increased old-age pensions for persons over sixty-five (or over sixty for those who cannot work).

Having been out of office since 1951, the Socialists have evidently seized on the first opportunity to reiterate their championship of the principles of the welfare state. To distribute the additional $400 million needed for social security Paul Ramadier, the Finance Minister, has set up a special board with the pink-ribbon title Fowls National de Solidarité. The board is composed of seventeen members, representing the interests of salary and wage earners, retired workers, farmers, and artisans, and it has received President Rene Coty’s most avuncular blessing.

While all this is reassuring to the advocates of state philanthropy, it has done nothing to ease the difficulties confronting the French treasury. This year military expenses in Algeria alone are likely to exceed $800 million, and this additional strain on the state’s resources promises to push the total budgetary deficit up to $2.5 billion — a formidable sum when it is remembered that this amounts to about 20 per cent of this year’s French budget.

To reduce this deficit to the direst minimum, Ramadier has already obtained drastic fiscal legislation aimed particularly at “soaking the rich.” But as the rich are pretty hard to pin down in France, this measure will no doubt end up, like most of its predecessors, by “soaking the corporations,” which have long been complaining that such taxes are detrimental to their investment and modernization programs.

The clearest proof of the difficult straits the French Finance Ministry now finds itself in has been given by its resort to that classic device, the semi-forced loan. Ever since the time of the legendary Calonne, the happiest of Louis XVI’s happy-go-lucky ministers, the French treasury has found it easier in a pinch to resort to loans invoking the patriotism of Frenchmen than to increased taxes that adhere to the rigid precepts of fiscal orthodoxy.

In this respect Ramadier has been running true to form. The new “Algeria loan” which he is launching is supposed in theory to net some $430 million. It is also supposed in theory to be “voluntary” and to be subscribed to with zeal. However, the carrot has been cunningly combined with the stick, and should the receipts fall short of w hat the authors of the loan hope for, a locust army of fiscal vexations — everything from retroactive tax increases on personal and corporate incomes to higher taxes on gasoline and tobacco — is being held in reserve and will be unleashed at the appropriate moment.

Parliamentary shock-troopers

This climate of financial uncertainly has undoubtedly given a new and welcome lift to the faltering fortunes of Pierre Poujade, the muscular former bookseller from Saint Céré, who has been trying for several years to stage a new French revolution of which he would like to be the Marat, the Mirabeau, the Bonaparte, and most recently, the Joan of Arc. For better or for worse, Poujade has been a force in the land ever since last January, when he confounded his enemies by getting fifty-two deputies elected to the Assembly. Although twelve of these elections have since been contested and some of the Poujadists have been unseated by vote of the Assembly, a hard core of forty-odd members, under the leadership of a former parachutist named Jean-Marie Le Pen, have made themselves into :i formidable desk-thumping block of parliamentary shock-troopers who have on more than one occasion reduced the Assembly to a state of paralysis.

The leader himself has never sought election to the Assembly, which he once termed “the greatest bordello in the country.” He hits preferred to mastermind the activities of his party deputies from his base at Saint Céré (in southern France) or from the Hôtel du Globe in Paris, which serves as a combined headquarters, phalanstery, and barracks for his parliamentary rank and file.

Poujade’s new “crusade”

Whatever may he thought of his language and his tactics, it cannot be said that Poujade is a man lacking in resource. His latest moves have been a systematic campaign aimed at a kind of nation-wide taxpaying martyrdom. When a Frenchman who refused to pay his taxes was recently haled into court, Poujade not only hastened to testify on his behalf, but he also requested that he too be tried for refusing to heed the “piratical levies” of the state. The trial, at which Poujade spoke at length in his own defense, earned him a nominal fine of 200,000 francs, but it also won him a lot of useful publicity at a time when the war in Algeria threatened to bring about his political eclipse.

But his greatest triumph to date was undoubtedly his reception by the Pope last July. Since that time his anti-taxpaying crusade seems to have adopted an almost evangelical note. The Poujadist organ Fraternité Française has now begun to preach the virtues of Christian love and charily, and “the simple, but eternally true notions . . . of the family, work, professional conscientiousness, respect of others, reciprocal tolerance, and the love of one’s neighbor.”

Just what the future of his movement will be, it is impossible to say.

There are indications that its membership is rising. Its basic appeal is almost irresistible to those millions of Frenchmen who have always had an inveterate abhorrence of paying taxes. The statistics it cites — that on an average annual income a Frenchman today pays 36 per cent in taxes to the state, where he paid only 20 per cent in 1930 — provide ammunition for all those petits bourgeois who are determined to maintain their own independence and to fight off the octopus growth of the welfare state.

Revolt or renaissance?

In essence, this movement is a new form of revolt of the country against the town. It is a violent, and in certain respects pathological, expression of the French peasant’s traditional suspicion of the city slicker from Paris. In the provinces Poujade is never more sympathetically heard than when he declares that the highest posts of the administration and of the state-owned and -operated enterprises are all held by members of the same powerful cliques and families, whose sisters, cousins, aunts, and mistresses effectively influence the distribution of the state’s rewards.

Above all, what has made Poujade a real force is the increasingly manifest instability and impotence of the French Parliament in the face of France’s terrible problems in its overseas possessions. There is an element of French “isolationism” in the followers of Pierre Poujade. For ten years they have wanted to be left alone by the tax collectors to pursue the slow, steady work of reconstruction and the quiet tilling of the fields at home. But always the state has intervened, and one political crisis has followed on the heels of the next.

In many of this year’s local elections the Poujadist candidates came close to the top in the numbers of votes received, at the expense of older and more experienced opponents, This has led certain observers to claim that if new elections were held tomorrow, the Poujadists would gain 150 Assembly seats. His own followers, of course, are convinced of it, and they hail Poujade as a political genius whose judgments are profound. They consider him the chosen leader for a new national renaissance. Perhaps that is his ambit ion, but it is clear that he has a long way to go before he can achieve it.