France

EMERGING from the November 21 cabinet meeting in the Elysée Palace, at which he had heard President Charles de Gaulle comment on the results of the first electoral runoff, France’s 36-yearold Finance Minister, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, is reported to have said, “Yesterday the trouble was an ungovernable Chamber. From now on it’s going to be an ungovernable General.”

It would be hard to sum up France’s present predicament more succinctly than this. Last October’s referendum and, even more, De Gaulle’s sweeping electoral triumph in November consummated one of those shifts which have been a characteristic feature of French politics ever since the Revolution of 1789. The vexations of parliamentary irresponsibility and misrule, which were the curses of the Third and Fourth Republics, are being replaced, under the Fifth, by an executive omnipotence which has already begun to assume the proportions of a one-man dictatorship.

Dramatic proof of this was offered in the arbitrary manner in which De Gaulle chose to unleash his antiparty and antiparliamentary campaign of last autumn. The idea of reforming the Constitution of 1958 so as to have the President of the Republic elected by popular national vote rather than by an elite group of some 60,000 notables was by no means new; it had been making the rounds of the Elysée Palace for a year or two at least before it was revived with particular insistence last summer.

At that time De Gaulle was understood to be contemplating not only a reform of the presidential election system but also the introduction of a vice presidency to provide for an automatic succession should anything happen to him. The virtues of such an innovation, after last August’s assassination attempt at Petit-Clamart, were obvious; but when the General finally unveiled his grand design in September, the idea of a vice presidency had quietly evaporated.

It is as though George Washington, a bare four years after taking office in 1789, had decided to modify the American Constitution so as to allow for a seven-year presidential term and had deliberately bypassed Congress and taken the issue straight to the country. Had Washington chosen to act in this way, every politician in the country would have denounced him as a demagogue.

De Gaulle’s steamroller

All written constitutions are imprecise and at times even self-contradictory, but the Constitution of the Fifth Republic happens to be unusually so. Article 11, which is the one De Gaulle invoked to justify his initiative, states that the President of the Republic can, on the recommendation of the government, submit to a popular referendum any measure concerning the “organization of public powers.” This formula was obviously ambiguous, and De Gaulle, by a specious interpretation of Article 11, proceeded to nullify Article 89 of his own Constitution, which specified that any amendment to the Constitution must first be voted through by the National Assembly and the Senate. He acted in the face of the openly expressed reservations of several prominent members of the tenman Constitutional Council.

The referendum proposal had to be rammed down the throats of De Gaulle’s unhappy ministers at a special Cabinet meeting held in mid-September. Only one of them had enough backbone to emit a frankly unfavorable opinion, which carried with it his resignation. He was Pierre Sudreau, the former Minister of Construction and the only Frenchman within recent memory who seems to have been able to instill a bit of steam into a backward and inefficient building industry. De Gaulle thus lost the services of one of the few really able administrators he has been able to get to work for him.

Token resistance

This warning was underlined a week or two later in the most dramatic fashion by the Conseil d’Etat, France’s highest administrative court and one of Napoleon’s greatest contributions to orderly administrative practice. Meeting in full session on October 1, all but one of its 60 plenary members solemnly declared De Gaulle’s utilization of Article 11 to be illegal and unconstitutional.

Encouraged by this authoritative juridical verdict, the French National Assembly was suddenly galvanized to action. Egged on by Gaston Monnerville, a Negro from Martinique who has been President of the Senate for the past fifteen years, and by former Premier Paul Reynaud, the opposition parties closed ranks and toppled the Pompidou government on October 5 by a majority vote of censure of 280 out of 480 deputies. The National Assembly was promptly dissolved. De Gaulle blandly piled one unconstitutional irregularity on the others and fixed the referendum date for October 28.

Propaganda barrage

What subsequently happened is now history, but it is worth recapitulating to bring out the ominous potentialities for the future it revealed. The Gaullist propaganda machine now went into action with Christian Fouchet, nicknamed “the French Goebbels,” at the controls. It has been estimated that the two previous referenda of January, 1961, and April, 1962, each cost around $5 million in government advertising, presents distributed to sympathetic or hesitant newspaper publishers and writers, and state-controlled radio and television programs.

This time, however, all previous records were shattered, both qualitatively and quantitatively. The campaign reached its shrill crescendo with the dramatic announcement that President Kennedy had invited Charles de Gaulle to Washington, presumably because the “young man in the White House,”as he is now familiarly referred to in Elysée circles, was in desperate need of guidance from Europe’s greatest elder statesman. Though the news was promptly denied in Washington, the French television wizards, led by propaganda chief Fouchet, were quite content with the impression produced on the minds of their gullible audiences.

By the time the voting was over on October 28 it was revealed that the northern half of France, the richest in cars, refrigerators, and television sets, had voted pretty solidly for the referendum amendment, whereas the fifteen departments which had “No” majorities were all well south of the Loire — those backward and underdeveloped areas, that is, where television sets are few and far between and people still have to rely on newspapers to find out what is going on in the world.

The 62 percent of the voters 46 percent of the electorate — who voted for the new amendment were not quite as dazzling a national majority as the General had hoped, but he swallowed this half victory with good grace, consenting to return the next day to the Elysée Palace from his country retreat at Colombey-les-Deux-Églises.

The General takes charge

On November 7 the General took personal charge of the campaign with an order of the day of Napoleonic brevity. The speech, heaping new fire and brimstone on the parties of the Fourth Republic (which, as a matter of strict historical fact, were the architects of France’s present economic upsurge, as they were of the European Common Market), contained not the slightest inkling of what De Gaulle’s program would be. His televiewers — Françaises, Français! — were simply asked to vote for those who had agreed to follow in the unerring footsteps of the “guide” — a word which has increasingly crept into the General’s recent speeches.

On the first electoral round on November 18, the Gaullist UNR (Union pour la Nouvelle République) was way ahead of the field with 50 Assembly seats, a lead which was transformed the following Sunday into a narrow parliamentary majority of 229 out of 465 on the basis of about 32 percent of the initial vote.

Between the two electoral runoffs a good many constituencies were left to choose between a Gaullist and a Communist candidate, a situation which Guy Mollet publicly deplored as signifying the confrontation of two species of “unconditionals,” or, as he later termed them, “invertebrates" — those who do not know where Khrushchev is headed but vote the Kremlin line no matter what, and those who have not the faintest idea what De Gaulle is going to do next but vote for him with closed eyes.

The UNR, in trying to put up valid candidates in almost every constituency in France, used a number of Gaullist bodyguards, tub thumpers, and G-men, like the notorious Alexandre Sanguinetti, the Corsican boss of the barbouzes — the “bearded ones” — secret Gaullist policemen who tried to discredit the OAS last spring by developing their own program of violence and attributing it to OAS agitators.

When challenged, during an electoral rally, to say just what he stood for, Sanguinetti came up with this rhetorical gem: “People say: you have no program. But all the parties have had programs which they failed to apply. We don’t have one because we are pragmatists; Gaullism is the reconciliation of the people and the state to remake the nation.”

Free hand for De Gaulle

Just where this mystic reconciliation is likely to lead France and the French is a question. The idea that French parliamentarians no longer need to offer programs but only unswerving obedience to the chief of state is an innovation in French politics. Since his new supporters in the Assembly were elected on no program save their unswerving fidelity to De Gaulle, he can lead them in any direction he chooses: toward a supersocialistic welfare state as much as to a postmortem revival of the pet Gaullist notion of the association of labor and capital in the management of enterprises; toward the abolition of the Senate or its transformation into some kind of corporative upper chamber; toward the liquidation of the Conseil d’Etat, which has defied him on a number of occasions; toward the quiet downgrading of the NATO Alliance, culminating, perhaps, in an eventual alliance with the Soviet Union against the “yellow peril” in the East.

No light was shed on De Gaulle’s immediate intentions by the message he addressed to the new National Assembly when it convened on December 11 or by the speech delivered several days later by Georges Pompidou, the docile Prime Minister whom De Gaulle immediately reinstated after the November elections.

Dc Gaulle’s intentions

There was a flurry of speculation that De Gaulle was at last going to unveil that ambitious left-wing program of increases in pay and social security which had been expected ever since Pompidou became Prime Minister last April. Such a program would threaten France’s presently stable balance of payments. Over the last twelve months the French price index has risen by 5 percent, further cutting down the benefits which accrued from the 25 percent devaluation of the franc in 1958.

Last August and September the danger signals went up again, for the first time in more than a year, when French exports failed to cover imports, and though October more than made up for the deficit, the total export surplus for the first ten months of last year was down to $67 million, as compared with $473 million for the corresponding period of 1961.

The decline of the Senate

No such built-in obstacle confronts the General in his plans for the transformation of the Senate, a project which was already in the blueprint stage as early as last October. Indeed, according to inside reports emanating directly from the Elysée Palace, De Gaulle would have lost no time putting the project into effect if his October referendum had obtained 70 percent of the vote.

The transformation of the Senate into a corporative body, including representatives of industries, professions, and unions, would accelerate a process of gradual decline which has been going on for several decades. It would further increase the imbalance of power which is now the salient feature of French political life. It would consummate the final triumph of the city over the provinces in a country of 47 million with a rapidly expanding urban population, of which one citizen in five still stubbornly votes the Marxist ticket.

Most serious of all, it would once again furnish De Gaulle with a pretext for taking a major issue directly to the country in a plebiscite of the kind he engineered so skillfully last October. The General has made no bones about this to his intimates, going so far as to declare on a number of occasions: “I know that 80 percent of the cadres [civil servants, fiscal agents, lawyers, magistrates, doctors, officer corps] are against me, but if necessary, I shall rule with the mass.”

France and the Common Market

When Konrad Adenauer relinquishes the reins next autumn, Charles de Gaulle will be far and away the dominating figure in Western Europe, even if Britain succeeds in joining the Common Market. If he had had a completely free hand, the General would almost certainly have tried to exclude England from the outset, if only because Britain is, as he put it in his Memoirs, a marine and not a land power. But just as he had to let the Common Market take its natural course, even though he had denounced its creation bitterly before returning to power in 1958, so he has had to leave it to his Foreign and Agriculture Ministers to determine the exact terms on which England could be admitted.

Unquestionably, however, De Gaulle has tacitly encouraged his negotiating ministers to be as tough as possible. Economically, this attitude can be justified. It is in the agricultural domain that the French have gained least from the Common Market. The West Germans, who have the highest wheat prices of the Six, have been more than reluctant to lower them to meet the French, who have the lowest.

The French have therefore argued that any additional concessions to Britain and the Commonwealth in the agricultural field would mean diluting the original intentions of the Common Market to the point where they would become meaningless. French farmers, like farmers the world over, want markets for their products; and they have shown more than once in the last couple of years that they will resort to violence to make their grievances heard.