How republican is France’s Fifth Republic, being launched under the presidency of General Charles de Gaulle?
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The bookseller was fondling a stack of bile-yellow paperbacks devoted to the “Jewish problem.” They dated from the period 1937-1943 and he had just bought them secondhand from the widow of a local Vichyite. I told him that if he could let me have them cheap I’d buy them to light my garden bonfire. He was shocked. “They are not frivolous books, Monsieur,” he said. “Take this one, for example. Its author is a serious thinker—and a brilliant writer.”
“A writer may be brilliant,” I said tritely, to draw him out, “and still propagate evil ideas.” I tapped the shelf above the anti-Semites. “This man—Léon Daudet—for instance.”
He stiffened indignantly. “But Monsieur, I have the highest admiration for Léon Daudet!” By this time three or four browsers had crowded round. Two of them turned out, like the bookseller, to be admirers of Daudet fils, Maurras, and an idealized Action française. Neither was old enough to have played an active part in the movement but they had mastered its idiom. “England,” said one, “failed to subdue us by military means so took her revenge by exporting to us her poisonous parliamentary democracy.”
I asked their opinion of the de Gaulle constitution. “Excellent—it is, of course, a monarchist constitution. It permits the head of state to choose his prime minister, instead of having one foisted on him by parliament, and to govern as well as reign—with a minimum of parliamentary interference. As you must know, de Gaulle is a monarchist. Before the war he was a sympathizer of the Action française. You will have read his letter to the Comte de Paris in 1957 on the occasion of Prince Henri’s marriage.”
I had. (The Comte de Paris is the Orleanist pretender to the French throne; Prince Henri is his son.) De Gaulle wrote: “Everything associated with you is exemplary for the nation; and your future, that of Prince Henri, and indeed of all your family are bound up with the hopes of France.”
But how explain de Gaulle’s present scrupulous republicanism? My monarchists laughed. “There is a classic maneuver in French politics, Monsieur, called la levée de l’hypothèque. Its commonest use is to demonstrate that a popular policy, of which the minister or official responsible disapproves, is unworkable. The minister appears to swallow his misgivings, applies the policy ostentatiously, but in such a manner that its former advocates are soon stampeding to dissociate themselves from it. The minister says: ‘Well, you wanted it, not I’; and proceeds to do what he wanted to do in the first place. Despite the powers the new constitution gives him, de Gaulle will allow the politicians to play their game almost to the bitter end. It is a game bound to end in crisis—if only because there is no possible political successor to de Gaulle. If de Gaulle were struck by lightning tomorrow the deadlock would be one only another military coup could arbitrate. Before de Gaulle is due to retire he will propose that the problem be resolved finally by making the headship of the state hereditary—in other words, by restoring the monarchy. Public opinion is not ripe for that yet; but it is ripening fast.”
De Gaulle’s return to power has brought the monarchists their brightest hopes in years, and they are getting a good deal of support from leading illustrated weeklies which publicize the Comte de Paris at every opportunity. But other unrepublican forces, too, beside which the monarchists appear relatively moderate, are jubilant over the current trend of French politics—notably the neo-fascist right, two characteristic representatives of which are Maître Jean-Baptiste Biaggi, founder of the strong-arm Patriotic Revolutionary party, now integrated with Jacques Soustelle’s victorious Union for the New Republic (UNR), and Pierre Lagaillarde, whose hysterical student following and “poor-white” goon squads were the advance guard of the May 13 riots in Algiers which deflated the Fourth Republic. “Only a dictatorship,” Lagaillarde said recently, “can save France.” Like Biaggi, he is now a member of the National Assembly, the head of his own army-supported group and informally allied to the UNR.
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Soustelle, chief organizer of the UNR and principal coordinator of the intrigues that touched off the May explosion, is perhaps the most influential man in the country after de Gaulle. With antlike industriousness he is quietly manipulating the powerful propaganda machine his stint as Minister of Information enabled him to construct, tightening his links with the army and the business groups in France and Algeria which supplied the bulk of UNR’s funds, extending his influence in the police services (which regard him as their champion against left-wing attacks), yet avoiding any ostentatious accretion of power. What his ultimate aims are no one quite knows (his kinder critics say he doesn’t know himself but goes on intriguing through force of habit). His recent past is far from reassuring. He was present when the Algiers “Public Safety” committee swore its famous oath to work “till death” to achieve total integration of Algeria and the Sahara with France and the establishment of a “government of Public Safety” from which all “old-gang” politicians would be excluded. Friends of his in the same committee later secured the passage of a resolution (accepted by General Salan) urging the disappearance of political parties and the establishment of a corporative regime based on “family, work, province, and fatherland” (Vichy’s slogan, too, was Travail, Famille, Patrie). In November he blocked the election of a number of liberal Gaullists, wartime companions of de Gaulle whom the General had wished to see in parliament, by presenting UNR men against them or supporting their “Independent” (ultra-conservative) rivals. Roger Barberot, for example, to whom de Gaulle had written what amounted to an electoral testimonial, was tagged by Soustelle, in a widely circulated leaflet, “a crypto-Communist and defamer of the army.” As one group of these authentic Compagnons de la Libération pointed out: “Such is Soustelle’s adroitness, it is a mistake to speak of a Gaullist victory. The real victors are Soustellists.”
The Communists, although far from jubilant, are deriving a certain wry satisfaction from the perspectives opened by the Fifth Republic. Their chief loss is financial (since Communist deputies contribute two-thirds of their salaries to party funds) rather than political. The unvarying negativity of the 145 Communist members of the last National Assembly had begun to discredit the party, and politically it had reached a dead end. The constitutional crisis came as a relief, enabling Communist militants to sport that air of crusading martyrdom they find so becoming. “Reactionary regimes always begin by eliminating the Communists. . . . One UNR deputy represents only 22,000 electors; one Communist deputy represents nearly 400,000. . . .” The collapse of the Mendès-France liberals’ and the France-Observateur socialists’ efforts to build up a non-Communist left is naturally gratifying to them, and the discredit they expect the admittedly dismal Guy Mollet Socialists to fall into when the pendulum swings against the regime is a source of immense anticipatory delight. The commentators who naively wrote the French Communists off on the morrow of the elections were wide of the mark. They remain the country’s biggest organized party, and will probably have little difficulty in recouping on the labor front the nuisance value they have lost in parliament. And their elimination from parliament is cold comfort for France’s allies: the new Assembly will be far more truculently anti-American and anti-British than the old.
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The average Frenchman who voted oui on September 28 and for the UNR and its “Independent” allies at the end of November was not concerned with the long-term calculations of monarchists, neo-fascist or Communist tacticians. Nor was he really voting for the new constitution: fewer than 10 per cent of the electorate bothered to read it. While saying “yes” to de Gaulle he was saying “no” to the perennial crises of the last thirty years, and to the corruption and nepotism with which French public life had become riddled. He was also, less admirably, fleeing before a menacing backlog of problems he had made little rational effort to understand, and casting out the Fourth Republic (for whose parties and personalities he had continued to vote up to as recently as last spring) as a scapegoat for his own civic shortcomings—appalled by the discovery that in a democracy an electorate tends to get the sort of government it deserves. It was only by the luckiest of flukes that the homme providentiel on whom he was now relying to clear up the mess was a man as upright as Charles de Gaulle.
Paris-based correspondents, French as well as foreign, are often tempted to regard the two or three square miles political and artistic ferment produced by the fantastic centralization of French administrative and intellectual life1 as a microcosm of France as a whole—a France of vigorous discussion and constant concern for principles and ideas. Even Jacques Fauvet of Le Monde, one of France’s shrewdest parliamentary commentators, has described the French electorate as preoccupied with “ideological quarrels” and “pure ideas” and inclined to “elevate even the most banal discussions to the dignity of philosophical controversies.” Unhappily, such generalizations are ludicrously remote from reality. It would be more accurate to say that there are few democratic countries in whose political life “pure ideas” and doctrinal discussion are less important. In recent years the members of the French National Assembly have devoted less time to the discussion of major issues, and have been more enslaved by parochial preoccupations and xenophobic reflexes, than the parliamentarians of any other Western democracy. Even the prosaic British Labor party, with its continual discussion of Afro-Asian problems, colonial emancipation, economic priorities, and the ethics of nuclear rearmament, is a beacon of idealism compared with its French opposite number, Guy Mollet’s Socialist party, which covered the use of torture in Algeria when last in office and tried to muzzle the press. The “Republican Radical and Radical-Socialist” party has not had an “ideology” or even a coherent short-term program for nearly half a century, and is in fact little more than a coalition of provincial business and administrative clans linked together for purposes of mutual aid. The influential “Independents” are a comparable business-agrarian coalition situated further to the right. The “Popular Republican” movement (MRP) exists primarily to weigh down the ecclesiastical side of the church-state seesaw and minimize unemployment among Catholic politicians. “Christian Democracy” is a splinter of the MRP chipped off by M. Georges Bidault. The UNR’s platform is “fidelity to the national and social philosophy of Gaullism,” but its spokesmen tend to dismiss requests for an outline of this “philosophy” as “premature.” “Our aim is just to be the government party,” its secretary-general said, with unusual candor, before the elections, “and to be able to balance between right and left”—which is what the Radicals have been doing for forty years.
Many factors have contributed to the making of this political desert: the unhealed wounds of past social upheavals (a substantial section of the bourgeoisie is no more eager to see a success made of parliamentary democracy than the Communist party); the complexes arising from the impact on an assertive military tradition, bolstered by a century and a half of conscription, of humiliations such as 1940 and Dien Bien Phu, as a result of which the average middle-class Frenchman is pathetically vulnerable to chauvinistic sloganeering; certain religious influences and habits of thought; a bureaucratized, dogmatic educational system, desperately short of funds, which lays stress on rote-learning and exam-passing and minimizes (even at university level) debate and discussion. Discussion groups, free libraries, and reading-rooms are surprisingly scarce in France, while books and current-affairs periodicals are relatively expensive (a paperback on a current topic costs between three and five dollars—5 per cent of the average Frenchman’s monthly earnings). But the major villain is undoubtedly excessive centralization. The French provinces contribute a ruinous subsidy to their capital’s sophistication. They are bled of intellectual and administrative talent and bereft even of the right to take an initiative.2 Local administration, so valuable a civic nursery in America and Britain, is a barren, frustrating field; and the gap between private citizens—nous—and government—eux—is wider than in any other democratic state I know. Of a cross section of conscripts polled just over a year ago, 70 per cent were unable to name the Prime Minister, 97 per cent could not name one of their local parliamentary representatives, and 90 per cent did not even know how many houses parliament had. There is a belief that elections are held for the government’s and deputies’ benefit, not for the people’s: “Ils nous embêtent avec leurs élections,” a schoolteacher told me recently.
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The current wave of anti-parliamentarianism in France was first exploited by the Poujadists in 1955-56. It was they who first called for a Fifth Republic and popularized such slogans as Les députés à la Seine and the pejorative use of the word système (meaning the party system). They helped launch the catchphrase Algérie française and much of their financial backing came from Algerian sources. Although M. Poujade’s original anti-tax revolt was spontaneous, there are indications that his movement was used in the 1956 election as a trial balloon, to see if French opinion was ripe for a major lurch to the right, by the interests which later financed USRAF3 and UNR.
“Le système est mort!” proclaimed UNR leaders after the recent elections. But in some respects the new “system” looks uncannily like the old, and in others it has already drooped lower than the old. Some of the most influential men in the new National Assembly will be those who provoked most of the crises in the last one, resisted rational discussion of North-African problems, and led France to the brink of civil war. Paradoxically, the few men who have consistently proposed positive solutions to France’s problems and campaigned to clean up French political life, have been repudiated by the electorate. Pierre Mendès-France fell victim, in a constituency he has represented for twenty-six years, to a vicious campaign of abuse whose main theme was that he had sold out Indochina, Morocco, Tunisia, and India (sic) to “Anglo-American Judaeocracy.” The Gaullist weekly Carre-four distributed posters gloating: “mendès beaten—defeatism swept away.”
In broad outline, the new Assembly is an adequate reflection of the national mood, but many of its members owe their election to crude electoral cookery and gerrymandering. The right-wing Europeans of Algeria possess one deputy for 48,000 of their number, whereas in France one deputy represents 93,000 constituents; the Algerian Moslems were allotted one deputy for 200,000 electors. Towns thought to be anti-Gaullist were chopped into constituencies which were then tacked onto Catholic rural areas so as to favor right-wing candidates. (Similarly, the electoral colleges that elect Senators and the President of the Republic are dominated by the representatives of right-wing rural areas.) One successful Gaullist candidate distributed cards to his supporters entitling them to cut prices at certain stores. Others distributed free packets of cigarettes bearing de Gaulle’s photo. The “ban” on the electoral use of de Gaulle’s name was applied wholly to M. Soustelle’s benefit: his UNR proclaimed on its posters: “Voter UNR c’est voter de Gaulle!” Newscasters on the state radio (controlled by Soustelle) applied the adjective “Gaullist” to the UNR.
Generals Salan, Massu and their friends have so far shown as little respect for de Gaulle’s authority as for his predecessors’. In defiance of his orders, army officers continued to attend meetings of the self-appointed “Public Safety” committees and took an active part in “conditioning” the electorate and selecting candidates. Salan and Massu even sponsored candidates in France. In order to ensure that officers read his directive condemning military intervention in the elections, which Salan had failed to circulate, de Gaulle had to have it published in the press. The votes of more than two million Moslems whose cartes d’électeurs had been retained by the army to avoid their falling into rebel hands, were on tap for use as political officers desired. The revelations of certain unsuccessful European candidates who made what they took to be watertight arrangements with one military commander, only to discover that their rivals had made more efficacious arrangements with another, make fascinating reading. Socialists at Bougie called such irregularities to de Gaulle’s personal attention: he took no action.
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The last few governments of the Fourth Republic earned the strictures of the International Press Institute for suppressing critical newspapers and arresting their editors (there were forty such cases in the first half of 1957 alone). After an interlude of toleration during the election campaign, the liberal Express was again seized in December. Worse, during the summer and fall General de Gaulle allowed M. Soustelle, as Minister of Information, to clamp a strait-jacket reminiscent of the Pétain era on the state radio, television, and news agency monopolies; senior officials suspected of undue loyalty to France’s parliamentary institutions were removed, and the Radiodiffusion-Télèvision française and Agence France-Presse transformed into crude instruments of government propaganda.
Justice is apt to be as erratic as in the days of the old “system” when political issues are involved. In November a former Defense Minister and latter-day Gaullist, M. André Morice, brought a libel action against an editor who had accused him of collaborating in the building of Hitler’s “Atlantic Wall.” A French law excludes from libel suits reference to events that have taken place more than ten years earlier, and the court invoked it to prevent the defendant from producing the evidence that would have substantiated his charges; but it permitted M. Morice’s lawyer to refer at length to the fourteen-year-old facts in a speech refuting the charges, and on the strength of this one-sided hearing gave the plaintiff satisfaction! Also in the fall, a military court was convened to liquidate the 1957 “bazooka plot,” organized by well-protected, right-wing extremists, to murder General Salan and have him replaced by a “tougher” C-in-C. (Until he underwrote the May 13 coup Salan was suspected by the friends of MM. Soustelle and Bidault of harboring liberal thoughts.) The bazooka shells and other materials were supplied to the chief active plotter, a man named Kovacs, through the intermediary of a certain Pierre Joly, by a Captain Despuech on orders reportedly given him by the Deuxième Bureau (Intelligence) of Salan’s own headquarters. Joly and Despuech were arrested “by accident” by over-zealous investigators and released on orders from the Ministry of the Interior without being interrogated; Kovacs was released on bail without being required to give evidence and allowed to go to Spain, where he has remained; only minor conspirators, unfamiliar with the politics of the affair, have been sentenced.
At a marathon pre-referendum press conference, General de Gaulle’s first Minister of Information, André Malraux, announced the early creation of a “pilot county” in Algeria on TVA lines to exemplify future development; the end of the torture of Algerian prisoners and suspects; the dispatch of three leading French writers to Algeria to investigate torture allegations; and the imminent release of Lieutenant Rahmani, a Moslem officer of the French army who had been jailed after writing to President Coty of the anguish the Algerian war was causing him. Malraux declared the army-organized demonstrations of Moslems carrying banners inscribed Algérie française to be “without doubt one of the two most important historical movements of our time” (the other—on the same level!—being the “resurrection of China”), and much else in similar surrealistic vein. The transcript of his press conference is treasured by students of political mores. Nothing more has been heard of the “pilot county” (“You weren’t really taken in by that, were you?” officials ask); Catholic dignitaries have backed liberal charges that torture is still resorted to, even in France; no literary or other independent mission has been sent to Algeria (of the three writers Malraux named, two were quite unable to go and the third, having been promised a a rough reception by the army, was understandably unenthusiastic); and M. Soustelle and his Algerian friends lost no time in vetoing the release of Lieutenant Rahmani. Last spring M. Malraux helped launch a petition asking the government of the day to raise the ban on Henri Alleg’s anti-torture book The Question. He has been one of the ministers responsible for such matters for the last six months, but the book is still banned. Plus ça change. . . ?
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The fundamental weakness of the new regime lies in the disagreement between the general and his rank-and-file followers as to the nature of Gaullism. De Gaulle’s conception of his own role is monarchical: he sees himself as a symbol of the nation, its representative on certain occasions when major issues are at stake, but aloof from day-to-day administration and politics, descending into the arena only to arbitrate between contradictory theses. For this reason the presidency is more congenial to him than the premiership, though even as Premier he put his concept into practice. For example, when his Finance Minister, M. Pinay, tried to engage him or the cabinet as a whole in overall policy discussions, he said impatiently: “But I’ve given you Finance”—intervening only at his ministers’ request to settle their claims on the budget (he increased military and froze educational credits).
He genuinely wanted the November elections to produce a representative spectrum of non-Communist opinion, from the center of which he might choose a competent, respected Premier—he himself graduating to the presidency—and on which he could base a conciliatory national policy. Soustelle understood this—and the importance, therefore, of ensuring the election of a majority responsive to his guidance as a means of exerting pressure on de Gaulle. But most rank-and-file Gaullists believe the converse to be true: that de Gaulle will produce his own solutions to all France’s problems out of a hat, as by magic, irrespective of the political conjuncture, and requires of them only unquestioning support.
In the recent elections few candidates dared formulate any specific proposals of their own for dealing with Algeria and other major questions for fear of being left out on a limb when de Gaulle revealed his intentions. Most fought the elections on personal and local issues of the Clochemerle type (literally in Haute-Garonne, where the construction of a urinoir on the edge of a cemetery at Villefranche-de-Lauragais was a major topic), canvassed Catholic votes by associating themselves wtih the Church’s campaign for a bigger slice of the educational pie (this was safe because eight years ago de Gaulle did likewise), undertook vaguely to “defend French Algeria,” and whipped up a maximum of chauvinistic nationalism directed primarily against the United States and Britain.
Only a tiny minority of candidates made anti-Communism their major theme. (The leader of this school was M. Jean Baylot, a former prefect of police, whose vote-catching recipe is a skillful blend of the Red and Yellow perils. A Guy Mollet socialist until a few weeks ago, when he jumped aboard the Soustelle bandwagon, he warned of the imminence of an Asian onslaught on Europe, and probably had his electors looking under their beds for Mongols and Turks [sic] for weeks afterwards.) At a majority of right-wing and more or less “moderate” meetings the peril was an “Anglo-Saxon” one. America was accused of stirring up the Algerian Moslems against France in order to secure Saharan oilfields, and Britain of making off with France’s central African colonies. At one Gaullist meeting I attended, the anti-American hysteria was so extreme that a rival Communist campaigner took the microphone to warn the audience that the French ruling classes were trying to blame the Americans for the Algerian war to hide their own responsibility for it; he was howled down. Candidates praised what they described as de Gaulle’s efforts to create a strong Franco-German association to resist Anglo-American and Soviet intrigues (at many meetings a visitor from Mars would have assumed that it was the Germans who had recently liberated France from an Anglo-American occupation). Senator André Méric (another Mollet socialist), for example, explained that the economic aims of the Common Market (France, Germany, Italy, Benelux) were secondary to its political purpose of establishing a neutral bloc in Europe to hold the balance between the “Anglo-American” and Soviet camps. He, too, said the United States and Britain were “actively aiding the Algerian rebels,” and /?/ good measure accused them of trying to prevent other peoples from mastering the peaceful exploitation of atomic energy so as to impose their will on the energy-starved nations.
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Parish-Pump demagogy and xenophobia are pathetic substitutes for the hard thinking and moral courage needed to put France’s affairs in order, and many former critics of de Gaulle are now grateful to him for curbing the Assembly’s powers. It is to sit for only six months of the year (its first ordinary session is not until April, which gives de Gaulle a useful breathing space), it can be deadlocked by the Senate, and the President can dissolve it if it annoys him. But it can still provoke a crisis by forcing the resignation of the Prime Minister; and as the Prime Minister will be little more than the Chief of State’s business manager, deputies will be able to attack de Gaulle’s policy through him without incurring charges of disloyalty to the general.
M. Soustelle and other victorious UNR candidates have already given a preview of the tactics they intend to employ to rein in de Gaulle. “The electorate has voted against any kind of contact with the FLN [Algerian rebels],” they say. “After such a vote negotiations with the FLN are unthinkable.” As most informed Frenchmen realize, this is oblique criticism of de Gaulle’s attempt to open cease-fire negotiations with the FLN in October.4
Nevertheless, while unenthusiastic about the new National Assembly, de Gaulle is less dismayed by it than some of his liberal admirers have tried to make out. He is, after all, a man of the right, more at home in nationalist than internationalist company. The UNR and “Independents” will follow him so long as he talks about grandeur, avoids an autonomist solution in Algeria, and works for the edification in continental Europe and Africa of counterweights to British and American influence. They will certainly vote him all the military and A-bomb credits he requires. Should an uncooperative majority emerge when the bills come in, or a hard decision have to be taken in Algeria, de Gaulle’s intention would appear to be to lean more directly on unorganized public opinion and the army and tell the politicians to go to blazes. Last October he said: “If, unhappily, the parliament of tomorrow were unwilling to settle down in its allotted role, the parliamentary institution would be swept aside for a long time.”
Unfortunately, French public opinion is a fragile reed. It has a built-in bias against any government which has been in power more than eighteen months. It approves of prestige expenditure but not of paying taxes. Its usefulness to de Gaulle will therefore be least when he needs it most. And the army, despite the credits and flattery now being lavished upon it, is likely to disagree with de Gaulle on the same topics as the right-wing extremists in the Assembly.
I have already written in COMMENTARY (July 1958) of the obsession of its more “activist” officers with the need to break the sequence of humiliations and—as they see it—political betrayals that have dogged them in recent years. One senses this thirst for justification, for a victory the world will recognize, in a recent order of the day to the army in Algeria: “You have won a victory of the most sweeping significance. All your efforts and sacrifices have now proved their efficacy. . . . The success which has crowned your enterprise is ample proof of your versatility, your courage, and your intelligence. . . . At last, in the eyes of the world. . .,” etc. The subject of the order of the day was not an epic military campaign but the success of the constitutional referendum! Even this satisfaction has been tarnished, apparently, by suspicions of political betrayal. La Vie Française has published this declaration by a general in Algeria: “We won a great victory on May 13 [date of the Algiers coup] but a month later we were stabbed in the back. We won another victory on September 28 [the referendum] but ten days later we were stabbed in the back again by [General de Gaulle’s unsuccessful attempt to persuade the army to allow free elections].”
Before de Gaulle arrived in Algiers in December, General Salan called Algeria’s seventy-one new deputies to his residence to advise them on their political line. His friends let it be known that in accepting promotion to the post of Inspector-General of the armed forces he was not abandoning his special interest in Algeria: on the contrary, he was eager to go to Paris so as to keep an eye on the orientation of the new “system”; he would also have control of all promotions and transfers. From special officers’ training centers in southwest France, meanwhile, reports leaked out of pep-talks and political indoctrination of which the leitmotif was the need to carry on the “national revolution” begun in Algiers.
Charles de Gaulle, aloof on his own pinnacle of history, securely buttressed by his own past achievement, no longer seemed to speak the same language as the officers of the new French army, haunted by the specter of Dien Bien Phu and preoccupied with psychological warfare gimmicks and translations of Mao Tse-tung. Thanks to him they were no longer in a state of mutiny. Nor, however, were they wholly reconciled to the republican regime. It was beginning to look as if they might turn out to be its arbiters, not he.
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The medium-term prospect in French politics as 1958 closed was gloomy. Yet some of the noblest and most generous words ever spoken by a French statesman in Algeria had just been broadcast there by General de Gaulle; and the mass of the French people, for all their political apathy, were not totally unaware that the parliamentary democracy it was now fashionable to despise had brought them unprecedented prosperity. The one certainty in French affairs has long been uncertainty. The parliament that gave birth to the Front populaire ended its days groveling before Laval and Pétain. Pétain, who would have had a 90 per cent majority had he organized a plebiscite in 1941-42, was an /?/ four years later. The 1956 Mollet government, elected to make peace in Algeria, intensified the war there. The new regime, too, may well confound a great many hopes . . . and forebodings.
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1 One example of this: nearly one half of all French students of university or roughly equivalent level are in Paris.
2 I know one municipality that has been waiting nearly three years for Paris's authorization to open a camping site. It is an electoral asset for the mayor of a small town in the south of France to have a job in Paris: his ability to lobby the central bureaucracy in quest of permits and credits outweighs the inconvenience of his absence from the town hall.
3 See “The Fourth Republic Abdicates,” by the writer, COMMENTARY, July 1958.
4 His attempt failed partly because pressure from his right-wing supporters obliged him to insist that the FLN leaders come to Paris (they wanted talks in a neutral capital) and to make a statement which gave the impression that he was angling for their surrender.
