France

On the World Today

ON June 18 of this year there occurred one of those providential events which from as far back as the rescue of Orleans by Joan of Are right down to the taxicab victory of the Marne in 1914 have periodically come to save France when her national destinies have seemed at their lowest ebb. This was the investiture of Pierre Mendès-France as the Fourth Republic’s nineteenth Premier after one of the most memorable debates in the National Assembly in years. By a strange coincidence it occurred on the fourteenth anniversary of a date that has become a landmark in modern French history — the 18th of June, 1940, when General Charles de Gaulle appealed to his countrymen to carry on the struggle with the memorable words: “France has lost a battle, but France has not lost the war.”

Probably never since the Liberation had France been confronted with more formidable problems. The situation in Indochina had grown desperate. In North Africa the increasing powerlessness of the Paris government to control the arbitrary actions of colonial administrators on the spot had allowed Arab-French relations to reach an all-time low and terrorism to become a savage feature of daily life.

Added to this was a growing crisis in the French army, which now found itself called upon not only to hold the disintegrating front in the Far East and to guard the approaches to the Rhine, but to maintain order in Tunisia and Morocco as well, and all of this on the strength of a compulsory military service of eighteen months.

Thanks to the continuing demagogy of an Assembly which would do anything rather than demand unpopular sacrifices of the country, total officer casualties in the war in Indochina for the two years prior to Dienbienphu had been the equivalent of three graduating classes at Saint-Cyr, France’s West Point. At Dienbienphu the equivalent of two more classes were either killed or captured by the enemy. That means five full classes in little more than two years. At that rate, in another five years there would be nothing left of the flower of France’s army.

In the face of this decimation, the upper-class families of France, who have traditionally supplied the army with its officers and who have had to bear the full brunt of these terrible losses, had long since begun discouraging their sons from following in the footsteps of their fathers. Combined with a critical military housing shortage and insufficient pay for officers in comparison with the remuneration of other goverment employees, the result has been a steady deterioration in the quality of those choosing the military profession as a career.

With each passing year the French Military Academy has been having increasing difficulty filling its annual quota of cadets. Nor is this all. The famed École Polytechnique, for example, which before the war used to provide the French army with from 100 to 150 engineers and artillery officers every year, last year furnished exactly eleven.

Government by evasion

Elsewhere in the national picture the situation was hardly brighter. Thanks to a hermetic system of protection which has pampered French industry and discouraged the introduction of more rational and efficient methods of production, the cost of most French goods is so high as to make them incapable of meeting competition on the international market. The result of this has been a chronic deficit in foreign trade.

In addition, the budgetary deficit was reaching an all-time high. Last year it was 727 billion francs, or about 20 per cent of the budget. This year, despite the efforts of Finance Minister Edgar Faure to bring it down to 650 billions, it is expected to exceed 850 billion francs. In part this was due to the increase in credits needed to strengthen France’s army in the Far East after the setbacks of last spring. But only in part. Equally responsible was the unwillingness of Premier Joseph Laniel, for fear of treading on too many toes, to grant Faure the budgetary compressions that he demanded.

In this Laniel was acting true to form. Not in a long time has France had a government less capable of governing effectively or more amenable to the diverse pressures of butchers, bakers, millers, winegrowers, distillers, farmers, beet-root refiners, and other lobbyists. Insignificant as an orator, Laniel will be remembered more for his unusual silences than for his interventions. In forty-nine weeks in office this stubborn Norman linen manufacturer seems to have had one idée fixe —to outdo the record for ministerial longevity set in 1948 and 1949 by Henri Queuille. But even here he failed — by a margin of six weeks.

Under his uninspired leadership French government became more disjointed and chaotic than ever, with the inevitable corresponding increase of bureaucratic tyranny in the administrative departments. In just short of one year of office its only achievements were tergiversations, postponements, and catastrophic compromises on all major political issues in France.

It is little wonder, therefore, that for such a government Marshal Juin, that enfant terrible, should have shown open disrespect and that François Maurinc, the dean of French Catholic writers, should have started a polemical offensive against it in the columns of the Paris weekly, L’Express, which has become the mouthpiece for the new generation in France who want to see a change.

Beuve-Méry, the editor of the influential Le Monde, wrote at the time of the “Juin crisis" in early April: “It is from the inexperience and disorder of democracies that dictatorships are born. . . .” Predicting that the inevitable “renovation" of the French nation would one day be accomplished, either by an upsurge in the democratic system or by the installation of a dictatorship, he concluded that, whatever happened, “the French will soon have to change their style of life.”

Lone wolf of French politics

It was to bring about the longawaited and necessary change in the style of life of his countrymen that Pierre Mendès-France assumed the heavy responsibilities of office on June 18 of this year. For such an Opportunity this lone wolf of French politics had spent nine years in ministerial exile, refusing, ever since he left De Gaulle’s Cabinet in April, 1945, to accept a post in any of the successive postwar governments that have systematically preferred policies of facility to the solutions of austerity demanded by Mendès-France to put the nation on its feet again.

The first thing he did was to present President Coty with the list of a new, streamlined Cabinet of sixteen Ministers and thirteen Secretaries of State, a reduction of nine from the previous ministry. This was the youngest Cabinet to have been formed since the war. Its average age was exactly that of the new Prime Minister himself— forty-seven.

It was a characteristic act of a man whose whole life has been a bit that of an infant prodigy. He was the youngest man in France to have joined the Paris bar when he started law practice; the youngest deputy to have been elected to the Chamber of Deputies when he entered the French Parliament as a Radical Socialist in May, 1932; and the youngest member of the government when he became Undersecretary of State for the Treasury in the second Cabinet of Léon Blum in March, 1938. Mendès-France just missed being the youngest Premier of 1 he Fourth Republic — an honor held by his party colleague, Edgar Faure, who was forty-three when he became Premier in 1952.

The appeal to the people

Well aware of the fact that his strength lies, not in the ranks of the seasoned, lobby-pressured politicians of the Assembly, but in the undisciplined, inchoate masses of the country, Mendès-France lost no time in addressing himself to the nation over the heads of his fellow Assemblymen. On the very evening of his investiture, he went on the air with the first of a series of Saturday night broadcasts which are as revolutionary an innovation in French politics as were Franklin Roosevelt’s “fireside chats" some twenty years ago.

Simultaneously, to keep abreast of the tortuous negotiations in Geneva in his newly assumed role of Foreign Minister, he ignored the traditional home of French Premiers at the Hôtel Matignon in the fashionable Faubourg St. Germain, and moved himself and a flock of bustling young advisers into the normally staid and placid offices of the Quai d’Orsay.

While all these moves testified to the new Premier’s determination to galvanize the stifled energies of the nation, it was obvious from the start that he could not afford to break completely with the traditions of the past and still hope to keep his place before an easily dissatisfied and “ungovernable" Assembly. Mendès-France was therefore careful to emphasize that his long-talked-of plan for renovating the national economy would need some time to bring its first effects, and should not be considered an immediate panacea to all of France’s economic ills.

In giving himself four weeks to negotiate peace in Indochina, he was not just taking a colossal gamble. He was showing himself an astute political realist. He wanted thereby to repeat the maneuver successfully pulled off on June 10 by Anthony Eden when he extracted the first concessions out of the Communists at Geneva by abruptly announcing that the participating parties might as well pack their bags and go home, if no one was prepared to make further sacrifices on the altar of peace.

In effect Mendès-France was telling Moscow and Peiping that here was their chance, but that if they deliberately dragged out the negotiations, the French people would be awakened to their duplicity and public opinion would solidify behind a right-wing government which would no longer be prepared to meet them halfway and which would openly seek the intervention of the United States in the Indochinese conflict.

Furthermore, by promising to resign if he could not obtain the peace he sought, he was protecting himself in advance against having to accept responsibility for carrying on a war that, as vociferously as any deputy in France, he has denounced for years.

Compromise on EDC

It was political realism again which dictated his bold announcement that he would seek a compromise on the controversial issue of the European Defense Community, which more than anything else has poisoned the atmosphere of contemporary French politics. For the fact is that a proEDC majority in France had ceased to exist in April, when 59 out of 106 Socialist deputies and all 6 of the Radical Socialist Ministers in the Laniel government had come out against EDC.

In seeking a compromise, MendèsFrance was out to avoid an outright rejection of EDC, which would prove a catastrophe for France, for Europe, and for the world. By making General Koenig his Defense Minister, he succeeded in astutely lining up behind him the majority of the Gaullists, who have long suspected him of being an appeaser. At the same time, in promptly consulting Marshal Juin, he got the professional opinion of the army in order to browbeat the Socialists and the Popular Republicans into accepting the lightening of the topheavy parliamentary control of the original EDC project.

But Mendès-France was under no illusions as to the difficulties such a policy faced. Shortly before his accession to office, a Communist deputy had defined them clearly in the corridors of the Assembly: “We are counting on the French Nationalists to reject the odious amalgam of EDC, and once this risk is averted, we are counting on the reasonable men of the center to reject the unilateral rearmament of Germany.”Mendès-France’s tremendous task was to pilot an amended EDC project between the Seylla of French ultranationalism and the Charybdis of anti-German Europeanism.

But Mendès-France’s greatest challenge was presented by the link connecting the war in Indochina and EDC in Europe. For the past year Russia’s Ambassador in Paris, Sergei Vinogradov, and members of his staff had been intimating obliquely to the French that “we shall help you to get peace in Indochina, if you agree to kill EDC.”

At Berlin, Georges Bidault denounced this diabolic “planetary bargain” as one that he would have no part of. In this stand he was warmly supported by Mendès-France in the great debate on Indochina which took place on March 9. But now, having stepped into Bidault’s shoes, MendèsFrance found himself facing the same terrible dilemma: How could he get peace in Indochina without throwing the EDC overboard?

Just twelve days after his assumption of office, the Communist Humanité sounded an ominously significant note. The Communists, wrote Pierre Courtade, had cast their votes for Mendès-France to make peace in Indochina and also to scuttle the EDC. “The fact is,” he wrote, “that France does not need the ‘authorization’ of Mr. Dulles to conclude peace in Indochina, and that she can, by displaying a resolute opposition to the renaissance of a revengeful Wehrmacht in any form, impose a complete revision of Anglo-American policy in Western Europe.”

Mendès-France gambles

In making the trip to Berne to talk things over with Chou En Lai soon after assuming power, Mendès-France was banking on a divergence of aims between Moscow and Peiping. This was the really great gamble he was making. Inasmuch as Soviet Russia can intervene in Indochina only through the intermediary of China, it was the task of French diplomacy to try to persuade Chou En Lai that it was to China’s interest to have peace in Indochina.

An endless prolongation of the conflict, Mendès-France argued, can only be the interest of Russia, which desires to keep France’s army bogged down in the jungles and rice fields of the Orient, in order to hinder her military build-up in Europe. Is it not, after all, in the interest of China, he reasoned, that Russia should find herself preoccupied on her European front, so as to be less disposed to intervene in Asiatic affairs?

It is a subtle argument, and the Chinese are subtle diplomats. Behind the bland impassivity of Peiping’s representatives at Geneva the diplomats of the Quai d’Orsay hoped to detect faint signs of a secret sympathy for this suggestion. All the more so inasmuch as peace in Indochina, followed soon by nation-wide elections, would certainly hand that country over to the Vietminh.

In France’s present desperate fix, the price of strength in Europe is withdrawal in the Far East. This has been the issue all along. No one in France has understood it better than Pierre Mendès-France. “To govern,”he has often said, “is to choose.” It was his hard lot, in finally assuming office, to have to choose between two incompatible alternatives: strength in the Far East or strength in Europe. Most Frenchmen feel that it will continue to be an impossible choice for any French government, until Washington understands that America can expect France to be a pillar of strength in Europe only by assuming ihe burdens France can no longer shoulder in the Far East.