France

on the World Today

ALMOST ten years have passed since that memorable day in August, 1944, when General Charles de Gaulle strode past the great west door and up the nave of Notre Dame Cathedral through the smoke, noise, and confusion of scattered rifle shots that symbolized the death rattle of a hated occupation and the birth of a new era of freedom. In these ten years the Parisians have had time to make their beloved city once again the artistic, gastronomic, and even the political nerve center of Europe.

Today all trace of the barricades has disappeared; the bullet-splattered walls have been patched up. Visitors to the Square of Notre Dame will now find it filled, not with sandbags or machine guns, but with an improvised wooden amphitheater specially prepared for that breath-taking spectacle, Le Vray Mistère de la Passion, the greatest of French medieval mysteries.

Ten years have not made Paris any younger, but it is one of the marvels of this city that each year its ingenious inhabitants think up new ways of emphasizing its ageless beauties. The Arc de Triomphe, the Invalides, the Madeleine, and many another imposing monument are now regularly lit up three times a week. Versailles is again being transformed every night by the magic of illumination into a fairy castle rising out of an enchanted lake of darkness. This summer the same thing is happening to the fortress of Vincennes. Next year it is to be the Louvre.

This year once again the enterprising Madame Yvonne de Bremond d’Ars, Paris’s most extraordinary antiquaire, has dazzled her friends and her rivals with the glittering elegance of the Faubourg St. Honoré’s annual shopwindow competition, of which she has long been the moving spirit.

The years have done nothing to cloud France’s pre-eminence in the field of feminine fashion. The competitive challenge of the designers of Rome has proved a passing threat. “Coco” Chanel made her long-awaited re-entry last March into the closed world of la haute couture with a disastrous display of dresses reminiscent of Edwardian rococo, which made the critical Parisians shake their heads. Anri today as yesterday, Christian Dior and Jacques Fath lead the field.

The Parisian theater

Humor continues to preside over the Parisian stage, where those two indefatigable writers of dramatic comedy, Jean de Letraz (with a play called Le Plaisir d’Aimer) and André Roussin (with a sparkling adaptation of John Erskine’s Helen of Troy) nightly keep their audiences in an uproar.

The Opera, under the direction of the enterprising Maurice Lehmann and with the aid of Georges Wakhevitch, the designer, and Serge Lifar, the choreographer, has recently enriched its well-worn repertoire with Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes and Weber’s Obéron — two of the most sumptuous scenic spectacles to have been seen in Europe for years.

And what other city in the world can boast three first-rate classical repertory theaters, ready to carry the literary prestige of France beyond the gates of Paris to the four corners of the earth? Recently returned from a triumphal month’s visit to Moscow, the Comédie Française remains the traditional guardian of the Classical purity of Corneille and Racine. Once again Jean Vilar’s Théâtre National Populaire, which has just returned from a tour through Belgium and Germany, is about to take to the road to bring Molière and Shakespeare to the provincial audiences of France, while Jean-Louis Barrault and his company are off on a long tour of South America.

In one thing these last ten troubled years have brought no change. Paris remains what, with hardly an intermission, it has been since the days of Louis XIV—the artistic and cultural capital of the Continent.

A torrent of arguments

But, for those who wish to look beyond the glittering décor of its cultural splendor, never since the war has France had to undergo such exasperated criticism as in the last few months, and never since the war has the future seemed so black.

One would have to go back into French history, probably as far back as the Dreyfus Case at the turn of the century, to find an event in French politics that has aroused the controversial passion stirred up by the present project for the European Defense Community. With the single exception of the Communists, there is not a party in France that has not been split over this proposal.

To foreigners it has been a source of amazement to see how an issue, seemingly so clear-cut and simple, could generate such hesitations and unleash such a torrent of arguments and counterarguments. The three and a half million dollars that French heavy industry is alleged to have paid out in a massive campaign to sink the EDC actually count for very little; for even in France, where editors can easily be bought, no way has yet been found of buying a Parliament, or even half of one. And it is in the French Parliament that argument has been piled on argument, speech on speech, to the point where the debate has reached monumental proportions.

For months now the influential Le Monde has been running a column two or three times a week called Libres Opinions, where parliamentarians of different party groups have been invited to express their views on the EDC. Day after day, week after week, month after month, the temperature has mounted, and rational arguments have been abandoned in favor of passionate and blind convictions. More and more, as the tension has risen, partisans and adversaries of the European Army have resorted to exaggeration and abuse.

In fact, the whole question of German rearmament, presented as it has been, has done more to envenom Franco-German relations than anything else since the war. Whether the project is finally ratified by the French Parliament or not, Western Europe will bear the scars of this passionate debate for years. Today French rejection of the EDC would be interpreted in Germany as a vote of no confidence and would destroy all hope of a genuine Franco-German entente.

French ratification of the EDC, however, will not leave things much better off. For it will now have to be implemented in a climate of almost neurotic fear and suspicion of Germany which can easily be exploited for years to come, to the detriment of future Franco-German amity.

French resentment

For this unfortunate development Frenchmen who used to be sympathetic to the United States consider that Washington bears a heavy responsibility. One thing that has irritated the French has been Washington’s increasing readiness to point an accusing finger at Paris for being solely responsible for the holding up of the EDC, at a time when Rome was just as dilatory and when London was more than reluctant to have anything to do with it. Another has been the Eisenhower Administration’s growing tendency to put pressure on America’s allies abroad.

The rearmament of German divisions is the most bitter political pill that the French can be asked to swallow. What right, the French ask, has Washington to insist that the government in Paris force a reluctant Assembly to swallow this bitter pill, when it does not ask the American people to accept comparable sacrifices; when, to curry favor with public opinion, it proceeds to cut taxes, to reduce America’s military effort(while expecting France to maintain hers), and even goes as far as to suggest that the day may be approaching when American troops can be brought home?

Many Frenchmen have come to the conclusion that the best way of keeping American troops in Europe (and the French are overwhelmingly in favor of their staying) would be to reject the rearmament of Western Germany.

The drain Indochina

What has made the French hesitate most of all before voting to rearm German divisions has been the fact that the professional core of the army — 40,000 officers and men — are stuck out in the jungles and rice fields of Indochina in a grinding war that can be neither won nor ended. Because of this interminable Far Eastern struggle France to this day has been unable to make ready more than five fullstrength divisions on the continent of Europe, with nine more that are on a half-strength reserve basis.

In these circumstances many Frenchmen feel — and the feeling is shared by Marshal Juin — that the Germans should not be allowed to arm more full-strength divisions than the French are able to muster in Europe. In effect this involves a radical modification in the timetable of the EDC, which now calls for the preparation of twelve German divisions in the space of twenty-four months.

The endless struggle in Indochina has had another consequence, however, which has had an equally paralyzing effect on France in her relations with Germany. So far the French have been forced to spend on the costs of that war one and a half times as much as the total funds they have received from the United States in the form of Marshall Aid.

Progress in coal and steel

It is a tribute to the energy which the French people still possess, and which these days is not. often recognized, that they have been able to modernize their coal and steel industries to the point where they can today compete with their German rivals. In fact, wherever the government has helped French industry modernize itself through loans or state investment, the results have been impressive.

Last November man-hour production in the French coal mines exceeded that of the Ruhr coal mines for the first time in this century. Today the French railroads run the fastest trains in Europe, and many French aircraft factories are ahead of the Italian and British, and are on a level with the best in the United States.

But these are only a part of the French industrial apparatus, which on the whole remains hopelessly antiquated and seriously behind the German. The second part of the Monnet Plan, which is still under discussion in Paris, is intended to extend the essential work of modernization. The plan has been delayed for two years — for lack of funds that have had to go to the French Expeditionary Forces in Indochina. This accounts in no small measure for the considerable advance that Germany has been able to make on French industry.

Today the Indochinese war, which the politicians in Paris have tried for years to brush off as a mere “rebellion,” has brought to light the full drama of France’s dangerous position. For years France has been striving to assume the role and the responsibilities of a great power while her economic capacity no longer permitted her to play the part.

Grandeur vs. austerity

The great conflict at present dominating the French scene is dramatized by the struggle between two men in the French Assembly. One is Georges Bidault, formerly De Gaulle’s close collaborator, who still believes, like De Gaulle, in the “Grandeur de la France,” which in practical terms means the preservation of the French Union. The other is Pierre MendèsFrance, the “lone wolf” of French politics, who for years has preached a gospel of austerity based on the principle that France must put her own economic and social house in order before she tries to adopt the flamboyant gestures of a great power. Otherwise she will be menaced with bankruptcy and social chaos at home.

So far the opinion which has consistently dominated French post-war politics has been that represented by Georges Bidault. But the country’s increasing financial difficulties and the stagnant economic situation, which led to the massive strike wave of last August, have recently lent growing support to Mendès-France’s thesis.

For those with a vivid historical memory there exists a dramatic precedent for this conflict in the eighteenthcentury controversy between Vergennes and Turgot at the time of the American Revolution. No American can have cause to regret that in that epic duel it was Vergennes who won. For it was France’s intervention in the war against England, which Vergennes engineered, that permitted our ancestors to win their independence.

But the price which France had to pay for the costly continuation of her colonial wars—the price that Turgot predicted she would have to pay — was state bankruptcy and, following immediately on its footsteps, the French Revolution.

Is history about to repeat itself? Is France at present on the verge of a major social upheaval at home because of the serious overextension of her international commitments? In Washington no less than in Paris it should be food for sober reflection that today such a question could reasonably be raised.