France

LAST July, several weeks after Colonel Boumedienne’s coup d’etat and the collapse of the abortive Algiers conference, a French cabinet minister was asked if Ahmed Ben Bella was alive or dead. “He’s like the Common Market — fiftyfifty" was the reply.

The cynicism of this answer is characteristic of the climate now prevailing in Paris. Three weeks after the June 30 meeting in Brussels which put the European Common Market into temporary cold storage, Pierre Charpy, the political editor of the Gaullist daily Paris-Presse, wrote: “ The Common Market will stay six months on the cupboard shelf. General de Gaulle has put the key in his pocket and will not take it out again until after his re-election — this being today taken for granted by nine persons out often (the tenth being Guy Mollet).”

This last affirmation was a typical piece of Gaullist exaggeration. For when Charpy wrote these lines on July 23, neither he nor anyone in De Gaulle’s entourage knew whether he was going to run for re-election in December. De Gaulle deliberately contributed to the confusion by officially postponing his decision on his presidential plans until October.

Further, he allowed his Prime Minister, Georges Pompidou, to replace him in a carefully rehearsed “fireside interview” which was given a big play over the state-controlled radio and television network. The talk, a typically suave and soapy performance, contained some glib promises for the future, several barbs for the Common Market, and a crown of thorns for Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (not one of Pompidou’s favorites), whose “stabilization program” was implicitly held responsible for the recession that has overtaken French industry within the last year.

Who will succeed De Gaulle?

Political soothsayers in Paris immediately concluded that Pompidou was beyond any shadow of doubt the General’s chosen successor. But observers of the French political scene were inclined to see in this mark of favor as much a trap as a trial balloon. Within days of Pompidou’s fireside interview, the Paris opposition paper Combat published two violent diatribes against him written by Frenchmen known to be sympathetic to the Comte de Paris. Though he officially renounced all claims to the throne of France years ago, the Comte de Paris (a descendant of Louis Philippe) has kept his linger in the political pie by editing a fortnightly commentary on French affairs.

But the speculation suddenly aroused by what looked like Pompidou’s candidacy for the presidency was promptly overshadowed by the revelation that the real inspirer of the articles damning Pompidou as a future “gravedigger of Gaullism” was his predecessor in office, former Prime Minister Michel Debré. De Gaulle had not yet laid down his mantle, but the fight for the purple had already begun.

No recent happening has made a deeper impression on De Gaulle than the almost total eclipse which overtook his friend Konrad Adenauer from the moment that he was forced to turn over the reins to Ludwig Erhard. The idea of succumbing to a similar fate is more than the General can face. He is also aware that any premature retirement on his part could fatally jeopardize the future of the hodgepodge of policies which goes under the name of Gaullism. Pompidou may harbor some illusions about his own vote-getting talents, but they are apparently not shared by De Gaulle. A private poll undertaken last spring at the General’s request through the ninety-odd prefects of the French departments indicated that Antoine Pinay — popular with the bourgeoisie and the peasantry because he “twice saved the franc”— remains a formidable unknown quantity whom some observers estimate could get as many as seven million votes on a first ballot.

Pompidou’s three and half years of service as De Gaulle’s Prime Minister have not yet sufficed to efface the stigma of his earlier association with the House of Rothschild, an association which endears him as little to the Communist and socialist left as it does to the ultranationalist right.

The supreme sin of the Rothschilds—for those who like to indulge in this kind of phobia — is not simply their enormous wealth but their international connections and non-French character. The first of the two Combat articles of last July actually expressed a sense of outrage at the idea of seeking a successor to General de Gaulle from the House of Rothschild rather than from the House of France.

There is considerable irony in the fact that Debré, who masterminded this anti-Pompidou campaign, is himself the grandson of a rabbi: and even more in the fact that the ultimate weapon used, superpatriotism, is the one which Charles de Gaulle has done more than any other Frenchman to exalt. Thus the weapon ruthlessly exploited by De Gaulle to bring himself to power is now being used by one of his supporters to cut another down to size.

Common Market gains

It is against this background that the Common Market crisis of last July should be judged. Foreign Minister Couve de Murville’s abrupt breakup of the negotiations on the financing of a common agricultural policy and the subsequent “empty chair” policy pursued by France surprised those who doubled that with a presidential election coming up, De Gaulle could risk provoking the farmers. Last year France’s Common Market partners took one quarter of its grain and one third of its total agricultural exports.

Though France’s increasingly large wheat surpluses can no longer be absorbed by the Common Market — French soft wheat being unsuitable for the pasta eaten by the Italians or the longer-keeping bread favored by the Germans — the prospects for greater meat exports arc virtually unlimited, and for this reason alone the Market has become a symbol of prosperity to the farmers of France.

Quitting the Common Market would impose an awful wrench on the French economy for other reasons. Of France’s total trade, 39 percent is now with its Common Market partners, as opposed to 22 percent in 1958. Of the $640 million which France accumulated last year in a favorable balance of payments, $550 million arc estimated to have been due to the inflow of foreign investments, attracted to France only because it is a member of an economic community embracing nearly two hundred million people. France’s “real’" margin of trade surplus was thus under $100 million at a time when the annual income from the tourist business is now more than offset by the steadily higher sums spent by Frenchmen and their families traveling abroad.

A dramatic exit from the Common Market would be virtually certain to frighten away foreign capital and to induce a contrary process of disinvestment, further depressing the sluggish state of the Paris stock market, which last summer hit its lowest point since 1959. From there it might be only a short step to a headlong “flight from the franc” comparable to the “flight from the pound” which is afflicting Britain.

These are facts and figures which De Gaulle, who has never had any taste for economics, must nonetheless respect. In fact, the terms in which the Brussels crisis was presented to the French people in the Gaullist press made it clear that the fundamental issue at stake was not so much economic as political, though the dividing line between the two is not always easy to define. “We cannot,'' Prime Minister Pompidou declared in his television talk of July 26, “leave to a committee without political vocation the job of deciding the standard of living of the French.”

Stripped of its Gaullist verbiage, this means that the Paris government, so long as it is dominated by the General, cannot easily reconcile itself to the increasingly central role of the nine-man commission which runs the Common Market in Brussels. Though its functions, as foreseen in the Treaty of Rome, were essentially those of coordination, it has been driven, by the sheer dynamics of the Common Market, to become an essentially executive body.

When the foreign or other interested ministers of the member countries meet, it is invariably to discuss problems which have been studied and formulated by the commission and its 1500-man secretariat in Brussels. The ministers act in effect as a miniature legislature, which deliberates measures proposed by an executive. For De Gaulle, who has never had much use for legislatures, including the French legislature, and whose obsessive concern has always been the maximum exercise of executive prerogatives, this is an intolerable situation.

The Common Market crisis, which De Gaulle engineered in June and maintained throughout the summer, can be taken to mark the opening round in a campaign aimed at conditioning the French people for “the important events of the autumn” — these being either the General’s re-election for another sevenyear term or the extension of his present mandate from seven to nine or even ten years through the use of a snap referendum.

Apostle of peace

Ever since Valerian Zorin, the number-three man in the Soviet Foreign Office, replaced Sergei Vinogradov as ambassador in Paris, the French capital has buzzed with speculation that some dramatic Franco-Russian deal was in the offing. In a short-term sense, nothing could better sent De Gaulle’s autumn plans than a sudden “crisis" in Berlin, which the Russians could turn on as fast as they could turn it off, and which, while it lasted, could allow the General to assume his cherished role as “mediator” before the French public.

André Malraux’s visit to Peking in August contributed nicely to a subtle propaganda campaign designed to build up De Gaulle’s image at home as an apostle of peace who may save not only France but the world from the holocaust of a third World war.

This elaborate image-building has as its natural corollary the simultaneous casting of the United States as the villain in the piece. Uncle Sam wherever possible must be presented to the French as a swaggering bully puffed up with selfsatisfaction at its own colossal power. The state-controlled radio and television network, which now extends over all of France, has been particularly adept in playing up the horrors of the Indochina war and in portraying the Viet Cong not as ruthless terrorists, but as tireless underdogs working to overthrow a corrupt oligarchy which only the massive aid of a foreign power maintains in office.

Not only SEATO, but CENTO, NATO, and all other American-inspired pacts have thus come to be delineated, in the Gaullist world outlook, as peace-endangering, if not actually war-mongering, institutions.

Secretary of Defense McNamara’s proposal for a European Common Market for Arms — something which is years overdue — was rejected out of hand in Paris as though unworthy of being discussed. When Secretary of the Treasury Fowler came forward with his suggestion for an international conference on money, a suggestion which effectively met earlier French complaints against the “hegemony" of the dollar, France’s Finance Minister, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, rejected this proposal, saying that the moment was inopportune. “Giscard Says No!” headlined the Gaullist daily Paris-Presse, as though this brusque negative were a new Declaration of Independence.

De Gaulle’s anti-Americanism

In recent months, this anti-American bias has become almost pathologically apparent, despite periodic reassurances to the contrary. When President Johnson ordered the Marines and the paratroopers into Santo Domingo, De Gaulle, conveniently forgetting his earlier sarcasms against the United Nations’ “meddling” in the Congo, proceeded to pour vinegar on the Organization of American States and to intimate that the UN should be given the job of supervising the situation. He came within an ace of recognizing Colonel Caamaño’s rebel government and was dissuaded only when the French envoy on the spot filed a report counseling a wait-and-see attitude.

Only in a hothouse climate of cultivated anti-Americanism could a trifling incident like the overflight of the Pierrelatte atomic plant by an American Voodoo photo-reconnaissance plane have been blown up to such lurid proportions. The antiGaullist weekly Minute had a field day publishing a reproduction of a public relations pamphlet put out by the French Atomic Energy Commissariat which has been a best seller since its appearance last October. It quotes the General as saying, when news was first brought to him of the Allied landings in North Africa in November of 1942 (landings of which he knew nothing): “I hope they [the Vichy French] will throw them [the British and Americans] into the sea.”

The two principal focuses of antiAmerican sentiment in France are located in the extreme left (for ideological reasons) and the extreme right (for imperialist or colonialist reasons). De Gaulle’s antiAmericanism tends to ingratiate him with the Communists, whom he has been carefully wooing in view of the electoral or plebiscitary tests ahead.

The right, however, is torn between its hatred of De Gaulle, its memories of Suez (by no means dead) and its resentment against American anticolonialist policies, and its belated satisfaction at seeing the United States at last assuming die “struggle against Communism in Indochina,” which the French had to wage single-handedly from 1945 to 1954. In any showdown between these warring sentiments, hatred of De Gaulle, the Empire-smasher par excellence, emerges an easy victor, as has been shown by the campaign speeches of the right wing’s leading spokesman, presidential candidate Jean-Louis TixierVignancour, who has had nothing but praise for the tough resolution of President Johnson.

The American presence

The American Embassy in this uncertain situation is resigned to sitting out the bad weather, aware that there is little prospect of a change so long as De Gaulle and his vociferous superpatriots are in the saddle. The U.S. Information Service feels that it is fighting a losing battle, if only because its influence in the French provinces has been reduced to next to nothing through successive budget cuts which have forced it to close the branch offices in Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Lille, and Tours.

The one significant cultural “manifestation” it was able to stage last April in Montpellier was, however, a surprising success, due not only to the cooperation of performers like violinist Isaac Stern but also to the forensic talents displayed in an impromptu give-and-take debate between American Ambassador Charles E. Bohlen and the students of Montpellier University.

“Chip" Bolden is an old hand at diplomacy and a master of the French language. His great merit has been to recognize that no one, except, possibly, André Malraux, can influence De Gaulle, and that the best thing under the circumstances is not to try. The substitution of Harlan Cleveland for Thomas Finletter as American NATO representative is little likely to alter Gaullist policy toward the North Atlantic alliance, which the General has all but openly boycotted.

With NATO as with almost everything else, De Gaulle is faced with the fundamental dilemma posed by the contradictions of his international policies. His overtures to Latin America have not got him very far simply because he is not an American. The Afro-Asian world is not prepared to elect him its leader if only because he is neither Asian nor African. France, significantly, was not even invited to the abortive Algiers conference of last June. De Gaulle is forced willy-nilly to remain a European, a member of a jealous consortium of countries which show no signs of wanting to crown him king or emperor.

He has, under the circumstances, virtually no place to go, though he must give his people the impression that he is accomplishing great things. It is an extraordinary performance. Europe, thanks to the stiff-necked stubbornness of one man, will be forced to mark time and to watch with bated breath as a half-mesmerized nation responds to the virtuoso solicitations of a formidable political conjurer who is happy only when the spotlight is upon him.