France

on the World today

THE Parisians have in them something of the Venetian love of carnival and pageantry. From the beginning of May until the 14th of July, when half of the population abandons the city to the tender mercies of invading tourist armies, the Parisians allow their exuberant artistic fantasies free rein. Almost any theme will do if it can serve as an excuse for redecorating a shopwindow or a whole boulevard, and any available anniversary will be seized upon eagerly if it can be used as a pretext for organizing an exposition or a parade.

This year, not to be outdone by their friends across the Channel, the Parisians decided to celebrate their city’s two-thousandth birthday. The decision, of course, was quite arbitrary, for no one here is quite sure just when the mysterious birth took place; and like any lady of advancing years, Paris has shown no signs of admitting her true age.

But even the most pedantic chronological experts have made no attempt to deny that it was a good excuse for arranging a public festival in the honor of their cily. Thus night after night for a good part of this summer the great buildings of Paris have been illuminated and the fountains have played on the Champs Élysées and the Place de la Concorde. Not since the war has Paris appeared so radiant and shown fewer signs of suffering from the ravages of her bimillennial antiquity.

On the 8th of July on the parade ground that faces the Invalides, Paris officially opened her anniversary celebration with a magnificent fireworks display and the firing of the cannon once used by the Royal and Imperial armies. The very next day this same parade ground was covered with an imposing array of the French Army’s latest military equipment. Thus was inaugurated an “Army Week” which was climaxed on the 14th of July by a very impressive military parade.

A military parade is not, of course, an accurate index of an army’s real strength. About this neither the generals nor the politicians of the Fourth Republic have any illusions. They know very well that what was displayed in July was but a small beginning of a rearmament program which will have to go much farther before it amounts to anything substantial.

How many men in uniform?

At the present time France has about 720,000 men under arms (not including her police force), of which about 570,000 are in the Army, 90,000 in the Air Force, and 60,000 in the Navy. The present term of compulsory military service is eighteen months, but if this were to be extended to two years, the strength of the French armed forces would be increased by some 150,000 men.

Such an increase in the term of military service is certainly necessary to permit the French Army to fit out the twenty divisions which have been promised for 1953. It is estimated in the French Army that it takes at least six months to train a fairly good noncom and one year to produce a reasonably good officer. Consequently, any officer who comes from the ranks of the yearly contingents and whose term of service is limited to eighteen months is not of much use to the Army, for he can only afford it six months of profitable service.

This is not enough to allow the Army to build up effective combat divisions which have to be staffed in part by officers and enlisted men serving their terms of eighteen months. But if the length of compulsory service were lengthened to two years, nonregular army officers could give the Army one full year and noncoms a year and a halt of useful active service.

The shortage of professional soldiers

Leaving aside the question of manpower (of which there is still a grave shortage), what is most holding back the formation of active divisions is the serious shortage of professional officers and noncoms in France to train the recruits who are doing their term of service.

A large proportion of these professionals are in Indo-China, where France at present maintains an army of 150,000 whose effective strength is equivalent to that of five divisions. This expeditionary force is made up exclusively of professionals, who cannot be relieved by new recruits and sent back to Europe, because by the terms of the law of last November which extended military service from twelve to eighteen months, conscripts can only be sent to those parts of the French Union outside of Europe and the Mediterranean where active military operations are not in progress. Because of this legislation, no rotation plan, such as that which the U.S. Army has adopted in Korea, is possible in Indo-China.

The result is that the formation of new divisions has been seriously delayed. At present the French Army has five divisions on an active war footing in Europe, four of them in Germany and one of them in France, and the best it has been able to promise General Eisenhower for this year is five more divisions which can be activated in three days.

French military men feel that this legislation perpetuates a grave injustice in the treatment of the French Army. The last Assembly thereby refused to consider that the war in Indo-China was a war in which every young French draftee has a stake. It put the burden entirely on the shoulders of France’s military elite, who slowly but surely are being bled white in an interminable war of attrition.

As a result, the morale in the professional cadre of the French Army is not too good. The French Army in one way or another has always been in the breach and it is prepared to stand there again in any cause in which the welfare of the country is at stake. Its roll of honor is probably as impressive as that of any other army in the world. Out of the 40,000-odd that have graduated from the École de St. Cyr (France’s West Point) since its foundation in 1808, more than 8000 have died on the battlefield. The Army is proud of this record, but it does not feel that this should mean that the professional army is expected to take all the blows in order to allow the draftees to lead as soft a life as possible.

Too little pay

All state problems in France have some financial basis, and the Army’s problems are no exception. By and large French soldiers (and the same goes, of course, for airmen and sailors) are sadly underpaid. The French Treasury gives the armed forces no better treatment than it does its humblest secretaries. Thus where the minimum salary for a stenographer is around 20,000 francs a month, a second lieutenant on active duty begins with a pay of 22,000 francs (approximately $63), a sergeant with a pay of 13,500 francs a month (not quite $40), and a regular army private with a pay of 3300 francs a month (or 31 cents a day).

Comparisons with civilian wage-rates lend themselves easily to misinterpretation, because all members of the French armed forces enjoy substantial benefits in housing and in food. But if one considers the pay that members of the U.S. armed forces get in relation to civilian salaries, it is obvious at once that in comparison with the American Army, the French is an army of paupers. A French major general still earns no more than a U.S. second lieutenant.

This means, of course, that French military budgets which look at first sight so small to an American amount to many times more in real value — that is to say, in terms of the men that every billion francs can maintain. But unfortunately the members of the armed services in France are paid miserably low rates even by French standards. In 1947 there were 321,000 career officers and men in the French armed forces. Three years later in 1950 there were only 243,000 — a drop of 25 per cent. The number fortunately has begun to rise again, but at the end of this year there will still be fewer career officers and enlisted men in the French Army than there were in 1949. To remedy this situation the Army feels that an increase of at least 30 per cent in the current pay-rates is necessary.

The French Treasury is not likely, however, to prove any more generous in the future than it has in the past. As it is, the defense budget this year is 67 per cent greater than last year’s, and the Treasury is straining itself to meet this added expense.

This year slightly over one quarter of the French budget is going into defense (740 billion francs out of 2700 billion). Another quarter is going into the reconstruction of destroyed houses and into the modernization of industry. If the French government were to make a serious amputation in its reconstruction allocations in order to increase its rearmament effort, its action would prove detrimental to France’s industrial situation and would be bound to result in profound social unrest.

For some time to come, therefore, the French Army will be dependent mainly on the United States for its equipment; and the new weapons from French arsenals that it has been displaying, while as modern as any in the world, will continue to have a symbolic rather than an effective militarv value.

France needs raw materials

The French Treasury’s financial dilemma is aggravated by the fact that it derives its revenue not so much from direct per capita taxes (like the income tax) as from more or less indirect taxes derived from industrial enterprises and from sales. Its revenue thus varies in direct relation to the total of national production. To increase its receipts it can either increase its sales or corporation taxes, which French business claims have reached a crippling level, or it can hope for a general industrial expansion.

Some optimistic French economic experts believe that French industry can expand from its present high level of output (over 141 per cent of the pre-war level) to 160 per cent of the 1938 level by the end of this year and to 180 per cent of it by the end of next year. This would necessitate a great increase in the import of raw materials, which only the United States could assure.

French industry is already suffering from raw material shortages. The steel industry, for example, has had to cut down its production for lack of German coke. Thus the French rearmament program has been held up by the same technical shortages which afflict American industry.

Guns and butter

With the exception of the Communists, all French parties are now advocating national rearmament. During the June elections they vied with each other in demanding greater rearmament effort; but like any election slogans, these appeals had for the most part a purely demagogic aim, and promised the French electors that they could have their guns and eat their butter too.

But when the Assembly convenes this autumn, and the new deputies come to grips with the concrete economic difficulties involved, it will be another story. The French rearmament program will be continued, but it will probably not be accelerated very much. The French government, like our own, will prefer to believe that war is not an immediate threat and to plan for a steady, slow buildup of strength rather than rush into a frantic overnight effort. And in acting thus, it will certainly be acting in accordance with what the majority of the French think about the immediate fut ure.

The Soviet menace

To the average Frenchman the power of the Soviet Union is an everpresent menace, but it seems to him a potential rather than an actual one. He does not think that the Soviet Union will go to war and overrun Western Europe unless openly provoked.

This is not the view of General de Gaulle and many of his followers, who are much more concerned by the actuality of the Soviet menace. Unlike most members of the new Assembly, de Gaulle is a military man and he has a military man’s sense of urgency. He grows easily impatient with political wranglings or protracted political debates. What he wants in the realm of military defense is action, not words. To him the moment is critical. For if France does not build up her Army now, fast, she will soon find herself a second-rate power in Europe whose place will have been taken by Germany. De Gaulle wants France to be able to talk to Germany as an equal, which she can only do from a basis of organized military strength.

There is a certain logic in de Gaulle’s views on this subject, but it is not the kind of logic that the deputies from the center parties in the new Assembly will probably like. The new Assembly will certainly be further to the right than was the last; particularly for the old-timers who have been in politics for years, the essence of political strategy will consist in keeping the ship of state somehow afloat and in improvising solutions for problems as they crop up, without looking too far ahead in an attempt to anticipate them.

Compromise as usual

The new Assembly is not likely to act in a way startlingly different from the old. There are still too many parties which differ substantially from each other for a solid majority to be possible. Instead of 16 official parties there are now 12, but the change has not gone much further. A casual French observer is tempted to think to himself, “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’ As in the old Assembly, the question dominating all legislative procedure will be not what measures should be proposed, but what measure is likely to arouse the least opposition.

The new deputies may at first expect their parties to lay down definite political programs, but they will soon discover that every program, every policy, every individual measure will be made the subject of endless parliamentary wranglings and behind-the-scenes negotiations. In the course of time, like the old parliamentary hands, they will develop skill and patience in the eternal art of compromise. One day they will no doubt themselves develop into expert jugglers capable of keeping any number of legislative balls in the air at one time, and, like the old-timers, will end up eventually by becoming hypnotized by their own game.

As leader of one of France’s major parties, General de Gaulle has been criticized for staying out of the Assembly. But his decision was probably a wise one. When a deputy enters ihe Assembly, he quickly finds that his time is consumed in endless detailed discussions in and out of committee, and in protracted negotiations, political deals, and intrigues. This, of course, is what befalls any politician in any parliament, but in the French Assembly the number and the disparity of parties make the deputy’s life particularly frenzied and confused. It is only too easy for him, under the circumstances, to lose sight of the wood for the trees. In the months to come, France will need men who can still see the wood.