Paris

on the World Today

FRANCE at present is a nation on the defensive — an uncomfortable posture which it has enjoyed off and on for the last ten years. An American visiting Paris today may be ruffled to hear certain Frenchmen declare, both in the Assembly and outside it, that the American position toward North Africa is more harmful to France than the Bolshevik menace. He may, if he is a stout Republican, be irked to see Dulles described in a French newspaper article as “the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” of Western diplomacy. He may even be chagrined to be suddenly confronted with “À bas Christophe Colombe — Down with Christopher Columbus” scrawled on the wall of a hotel.

But these expressions of anti-American feeling are the inevitable reactions of a people who are locked in a struggle with the most baffling political phenomenon of the twentieth century: the relentless march of a not always enlightened and often fanatical nationalism.

It is probably fair to say that anti-Americanism, wherever it has occurred, has been as much a symptom of weakness as a sign of critical acumen. This is certainly true of France, where, ever since Suez, the country has been suffering from a mounting feeling of national frustration. The United States has undoubtedly contributed to this sentiment, by the unpredictable zigzags of Dulles’ diplomatic intuitions and by the American readiness, on occasion, to brush aside French interests in its desire to ingratiate itself with the Arab world. But if the feeling is rife in France today, it is above all because in the last three years no French government has been able to do anything effective to halt the continuing war in Algeria.

In this vital respect the short-lived Gaillard government was as spectacularly unsuccessful as its predecessors. Its fall in mid-April did not particularly surprise those who had been echoing Charles de Gaulle’s caustic New Year prophecy: “The question is not whether the Gaillard government will put an end to the war in Algeria, but whether the war in Algeria will put an end to the Gaillard government.” The General was here raising a question which now hangs like a noose over the future of the Fourth Republic: whether any French government, in the existing state of parliamentary chaos, can find a way out of the bloody impasse in North Africa.

The veneration of age

For those automatically prepared to equate youth with energy and vigor, the Gaillard ministry last November gave promise of introducing the spectacular initiatives that everyone was waiting for. Whether or not these illusions were shared by the young French Premier it is difficult to say. There are some who think he accepted the thankless task of heading a new government after five weeks of parliamentary crisis out of a sense of public duty. Others are convinced he did so because he is a quick-witted and ambitious opportunist who could not resist the temptation of becoming the youngest French Premier since the establishment of the Third Republic. The truth probably lies somewhere between these two interpretations.

Félix Gaillard’s very youthfulness proved to be a mixed blessing in a country still cursed by what has been called an “old-age complex.” Ever since the heyday of that bearded patriarch, Victor Hugo, a good many Frenchmen have tended to think that wisdom in a man comes only with the advent of white hair.

This veneration for the sagacity of old age is, of course, characteristic of old cultures —it was pronounced in ancient China — but in France it has sometimes been pushed to extremes, as, for example, in the aura of prestige which to this day envelops the forty “Immortals” of the French Academy. Only recently, Albert Camus was subjected to vituperative attacks in several French literary publications because it was felt that a writer of forty-four was intolerably young to be receiving a Nobel Prize. in varying degrees; but only two have tried to go further and rule with something resembling Napoleonic energy —Charles de Gaulle and Pierre Mendès-France. As a result they are today the men most dreaded in the headstrong French Assembly.

To avoid a similar fate Gaillard decided to proceed more prudently when he took office last November. He deliberately passed up the psychological opportunity offered by his youthful popularity to break out of the Algerian impasse, a fiveweek government crisis, and an unchecked flow of foreign reserves. To do so effectively he would have had to fire Robert Lacoste, the resident minister of Algeria, shake up the local administration, and accept the mediation of Tunisia and Morocco in negotiating an end to the war.

Inevitably Félix Gaillard presented a standing challenge to this widespread gerontophilia. He had barely been in office a month before Georges Bidault and certain other political old-timers were letting it be known in the corridors of the Assembly that it was grotesque for an old country like France to be ruled by such a young man and that it was time to return power to the skilled hands of the veterans.

A little later another former Premier, Antoine Pinay, described the Gaillard ministry as a “government of boy scouts” — a barbed tribute to the fact that in addition to a thirty-eight-year-old Premier, it had a minister of the interior (BourgèsMaunoury) who was a vigorous forty-three, a minister of defense (Chaban-Delmas) who was a hale and hearty forty-two, and a deputy foreign minister (Maurice Faure) who was thirty-six.

Such backstage mutterings are traditional in an Assembly made up of “six hundred anarchists,” as a French writer recently described what is probably the most hypercritical parliamentary body in the world. But what surprised Felix Gaillard’s admirers was the ease with which, on taking office, the stubborn finance minister of yesterday was transformed into a supple Premier.

The challenge of the premiership

No other cabinet job, of course, is exactly comparable to that of the premiership. It is far easier for a French cabinet minister to fight like a lion for the interests of his particular department than it is for a Premier to hold together a coalition of mutually suspicious rivals. The first requires a minimum of political courage, the second a maximum of diplomacy and the combined talents of a Machiavelli and a Micawber.

The seventeen different Premiers that France has had since the war have exercised these talents

Such a course would undoubtedly have run great risks. Replacing the Socialist Lacoste with someone like Jacques Chevallier, the liberal mayor of Algiers, might well have alienated a majority of the Socialists, whose 96 members constitute the largest non-Communist group in the 595-man Assembly. Seeking the mediation of Tunisia and Morocco would have risked alienating the rightwing Independents and so-called “Moderate Republicans,” who have grown steadily more intransigent in declaring — in the face of every evidence — that “Algeria is a purely French problem.”

The young Premier might also have been confronted with a mass resignation of Algerian mayors and a threat of disobedience from Army officers in the North African High Command. Rather than run these risks, he decided to limit himself to the maximum allowed by the iron laws of parliamentary arithmetic, on the theory that a government which survives, no matter how impotently, is better than no government at all.

Caution has its price

There is no doubt that Gaillard had to pay heavily from the beginning for the dubious privilege of remaining in office. He had to conceal his private feelings (that Algeria is not France and that negotiations will one day be inevitable) behind a rhetorical smoke screen of tough-sounding reassurances that Algeria is and always will be French and that the “framework law,” once applied, would suffice to undermine the rebellion.

He was driven to arbitrary seizures of critical Paris weeklies, simply to reassure his restive rightwing supporters (including six cabinet ministers) that his government would stand no nonsense from the “traitors” and “apostles of abandonment” who were urging a sellout in Algeria. He adopted these opportunistic tactics in the hope that if France could be eased over its most immediate crisis — the loss of foreign exchange — time and patience would take care of the North African problem.

This hope, as events were soon to prove, was overoptimistic. For it assumed that the application of the “framework law” (which was not finally passed through both Assembly and Senate until after Christmas) would keep the Algerian situation from deteriorating further.

At the time Jean Monnet went to Washington in late January to plead for a loan, the Algerian rebellion had entered a momentary lull. A bombplanting terrorist group had been broken up in Algiers, and Lacoste had been able to stroll around its boulevards on New Year’s Eve to the peaceful popping of champagne corks. The French ground forces in Algeria had been reduced to 330,000, and it seemed to the optimistic that the rebellion’s “last quarter of an hour” was indeed at hand.

The spring offensive

The lull, however, was illusory. It was not caused by a slackening in the ardor of the rebels, but by their retreat into Tunisia to retrain and re-equip their harassed bands for a spring offensive. When this offensive was finally launched — in the form of mass infiltrations of increasingly well-armed fellah bands — the French High Command discovered that the Eastern front and the electrified Morice Line were seriously undermanned and that it was now faced with an elusive enemy able to retreat at will into the “privileged sanctuary” of Tunisia.

Its reaction to this new situation was to stage a retaliatory raid of Sakhiet-Sidi-Youssef, rush a few crack parachute battalions to the area, and request the Defense Ministry for 40,000 more men for Algeria. The request was granted, but only after a stiff, intercabinet battle between Jacques Chaban-Delmas, the energetic defense minister who authorized the Sakhiet raid, and Pierre Pfimlin, the finance minister, a hardheaded Alsatian who has long favored a more liberal policy in North Africa.

Pfimlin’s plans for controlling the increasing inflation in France had been carefully based on the need to keep the budget deficit down to 600 billion francs, which in turn was dependent on holding the ground forces in Algeria to 330,000 men.

Thus within a few weeks of Monnet’s trip to Washington, the Gaillard government was forced by the situation in North Africa to break its pledge to hold the budget deficit to a limit of $1.4 billion.

Washington’s loan backfires

The other hope on which Gaillard based his policy proved to be no less illusory: that time and patient pressure would suffice to modify the bellicose intransigency of the rightwing ultranationalists on whose support he depended. Washington’s S650 million loan, in fact, accomplished precisely the opposite result.

Barely ten weeks after the loan was granted, the French right-wing Independents and Moderates expressed their gratitude by torpedoing the Gaillard government, which had obtained it. Gailiard’s crime was to have accepted a letter from President Eisenhower urging continued faith in Robert Murphy’s “good offices.” This was considered by the parliamentary right wing as tantamount to dictation to the French government. Pathological as the reaction may seem, it does not excuse Washington’s lack of foresight and finesse in trying to compensate for its imprudent generosity in January with an ill-timed admonition in April.

The neurotic anti-Americanism and xenophobia which brought on the downfall of the Gaillard government are perhaps the most alarming developments in France today. They have infected public debates with an clement of irrational passion and blind chauvinism which bears a disturbing resemblance to our own McCarthyist hysteria. Above all, they have reduced French parliamentary life to a state of virtual paralysis.