A little over a year ago in the outskirts of a small southern French town I stopped my car beside a group of four men and a woman to ask a direction. It was a few minutes after ten in the evening. At once fists were clenched, cudgels appeared, and lights were flashed into the car. When they saw I was alone and the car foreign, they relaxed. Apologetically, they told me they were Communists awaiting a delivery of anti-Gaullist leaflets which they intended to spend the rest of the night distributing. They had thought the car contained a band of fascist provocateurs. (A few weeks earlier a clash between Communists and right-wing bill-stickers in Toulouse had ended in a fatal shooting.) The woman and her husband were in their late fifties, grandparents, and owned a comfortable business. “This is the anti-fascist struggle of the 30’s all over again,” they said. “Within a year France will be a police state, but at least we’ll have our self-respect: we’ll be able to answer our grandchildren’s questions without blushing—which is more than Guy Mollet can say.”
Some French Communists do come near to blushing, nevertheless, when one talks politics with them today: for, in October 1959 (after a meeting with Soviet theoreticians in East Germany), their party boss Maurice Thorez suddenly discovered unsuspected merits in Charles de Gaulle, and the party press switched its fire to the “monopolies and trusts operating in de Gaulle’s shadow.” The General had just offered the Algerians self-determination, and subsequently he invited Nikita Khrushchev to France, approved an agreement with the Soviet government for a direct Paris-Moscow railroad link, and won more Communist cheers by proclaiming his mistrust of the “Anglosaxon” nuclear strategists (capable either of devastating Europe or of cynically agreeing with the Russians to “partition” the world) and declaring that “it is the people of Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, who will decide the future of the world.” In the third volume of his memoirs, published in November, he paid a warmer tribute to Maurice Thorez than to any leader of the right or center. Hitherto dejected Gaullistes de gauche began dropping hints that a Franco-Soviet friendship pact is on the diplomatic agenda and that de Gaulle is preparing to lean on the left in anticipation of a showdown with the ultras over Algeria. A fellow-traveling editor declared that, if de Gaulle did pick a fight with the ultras, leftists would be on his side of the barricades.
As the left has reconciled itself to de Gaulle, the ardor of many of his right-wing supporters has cooled. His critics now include his one time foreign minister Georges Bidault, rabble-rouser Pierre Lagaillarde (pace-setter of the Algiers riot of May 13, 1958), veteran plotters Salvatore Biaggi and Leon Delbecque (who gave the Algiers uprising its Gaullist orientation), Pascal Arrighi (coordinator of the Algiers-organized Corsican coup of 1958), Marshal Alfonse Juin, General Lionel Chassin (who was to have led a “march on Paris” had the Fourth Republic refused to capitulate to de Gaulle), General Maxime Weygand, Colonel “Leathernose” Thomazo and the more militant ex-servicemen’s leaders, as well as the usual fascists, corporativists, and nostalgic imperialists. But de Gaulle’s ministerial team has clung together. The present government’s stability is, indeed, its main justification in the eyes of a majority of Frenchmen who are divided on Algeria and upset by rising prices but still appalled by the memory of the twenty governmental crises (in eleven years) of the Fourth Republic.
Anglo-American observers, less easily impressed than the French by stability for stability’s sake, would cite as the Gaullist regime’s principal achievements its positive approach to the over-all problem of decolonization (the danger, vivid up to eighteen months ago, that Paris would repeat its Indo-Chinese and Algerian follies in Madagascar and West Africa has now receded), and M. Antoine Pinay’s successful treatment of the country’s economic disorders. The budget deficit has been kept within manageable bounds, gold and dollar reserves have grown, a healthy export-import balance has been established, the franc has been devalued to a realistic rate, trade has been liberalized, and inflationary subsidies and pork-barrel handouts have been reduced. Government planners say industrial investment will increase by 7.5 per cent and industrial output by 5.5 per cent in 1960, though they omit to point out that the foundations of this progress were laid during the last few years of the Fourth Republic.
But M. Pinay’s orthodox right-wing views on finance are a dubious political asset in socially stratified France, where the cleavage between working class and bourgeoisie is as deep as in pre-war Britain. While cutting taxes on companies, practically abolishing those on inherited property, and allowing the bourgeoisie to tie its savings to the value of gold, he has increased the tax burden borne by wage earners. The French consumer was already, under the Fourth Republic, the most heavily taxed in Western Europe, and in the last year devaluation and the suppression of certain subsidies have reduced the purchasing power of the average working-class family by 10 per cent (left-wing economists say 12 per cent). House-building for private ownership is subsidized by the government, however opulent the owner may be, but insufficient low-rental housing is going up even to keep pace with working-class marriage and birth rates, let alone make large-scale slum clearance possible: in four French towns out of five, drains, flushable toilets, and bathrooms are still rather remote luxuries for the majority of wage earners. For the housewife whose first daily chore is to dispose of the contents of her family’s ironically named seau hygiénique, government radio propaganda about grandeur, nuclear armaments, and France’s mission in Africa has a mocking ring.
The boulevarding correspondents who used to write about the prosperity of Franco’s Madrid, and before that of Farouk’s Cairo, are presently dazzled by the gloss of Paris, and it is true that sales of cars, TV sets, and building sites are booming; but in the narrow leprous streets beyond the boulevards there is hardship and discontent, and but for the three-way Communist-Socialist-Catholic split in the labor unions—for which de Gaulle can be grateful to the politicians of the Fourth Republic—industrial unrest would be stealing headlines from Algeria.
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Whether he knows it or not, Khrushchev will be conferring two diplomas on Charles de Gaulle: the diploma of Artisan of Peace and Détente, for left-wing contemplation, and that of Diplomatic Grandeur for the admiration of the French right. The right, while anti-Communist in internal policies, is no more anti-Soviet than anti-American in its approach to international affairs. (When Khrushchev referred last November to the “historic link” between France and Algeria right-wingers rejoiced that “the Russians wish us to stay in North Africa to block American penetration there.”) The right wants de Gaulle to use the threat of a Franco-Soviet rapprochement to lever nuclear and strategic concessions out of Washington, failing which he should negotiate a pact with Khrushchev that, in the words of a Gaullist leader at Bordeaux, “would establish France’s primacy in Western Europe and transform the diplomatic scene.”
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But before de Gaulle can assert himself positively on the international scene—before he can move toward the creation of that neutralist Eurafrican bloc both left and right here would like to see—he must extricate France from her Algerian embarrassment. Naturally, he does not want to lose Algeria: its loss would almost certainly bring the Fifth Republic to as inglorious an end as the Fourth, and the wheels of the Eurafrican complex are to be lubricated with Algerian oil. He hopes to exorcise the demon of Algerian nationalism by holding a referendum to decide the country’s future four years after the cessation of military operations. As an inducement to the FLN (National Liberation Front) to agree to a ceasefire he has informed its leaders that they will be allowed to resume political activities in Algeria. He is confident that by stepping up industrial development and expenditure on public works, housing, and education, and by conducting a vigorous propaganda drive during the four decisive years—the radio will continue to be a government monopoly—his representatives in Algiers will succeed in obtaining a majority favorable to some form of federal association with France.
General de Gaulle himself probably wants a free vote (though not necessarily a free campaign: he has never dissociated himself from the methods used to sway the voting in the 1958 referendum and election, and it is hard to imagine him authorizing the FLN to broadcast or publish a newspaper). But the men who brought him to power are less ambiguous. General Jacques Massu and other officers have shrugged off self-determination as “a formula necessary for foreign consumption.” Prime Minister Michel Debré says: “What we must do is take all necessary measures to insure that the choice of secession is ruled out.” General Paul Ely has asserted that “there can be no question of contemplating a withdrawal of the French army from Algeria in any humanly forseeable future.” De Gaulle’s personal representative in Algeria, M. Paul Delouvrier, head of the administration there, has adopted the settlers’ slogan—avoided by the general—“Algérie française”; and the Cinquième bureau (psychological warfare) of the army is still plastering walls with Algérie française posters. General Fernand Gambiez has assured Algerian ultras that the army’s aim is still to keep Algeria French.
De Gaulle has withdrawn his original demand for an FLN surrender and he has allowed the “liberal” section of his entourage to assure the French left and the Tunisian and Moroccan governments that FLN emissaries will be received in Paris with dignity and that a ceasefire will not be exploited by the French authorities as amounting to a rebel surrender; but he has also allowed MM. Debré and Delouvrier and senior army officers to stress that in the government’s view the FLN would be surrendering and acknowledging “the victory of French arms” if it agreed to a ceasefire (“De Gaulle lui-même me l’a dit,” says M. Delouvrier: “De Gaulle himself told me so”).
Thus, despite the clarity of General de Gaulle’s statements of September 16 and November 10, a powder trail of equivocation is being laid which seems bound to touch off a fresh explosion within the next four or five years: in France if right-wing illusions are brusquely shattered, in North Africa if the Algerians are given cause to suspect that they are being “conditioned” for another prefabricated referendum. M. Debré and Jacques Soustelle (Minister for the Sahara) would already have plotted the downfall of any other leader proposing so perilous a policy: they and their friends brought down Premiers Bourgès-Maunoury, Gaillard, and Pflimlin, and organized a vicious campaign against Mendès-France, for far less. The very success of their conspiracy in the spring of 1958, which depended for its ratification on the genuine popularity of the man they brought to power, has to some extent made them de Gaulle’s prisoners; and Debré cut loose from the more impulsive right-wing extremists last October on discovering that some of them were now plotting against himself. But the Premier’s own past involvements and indiscretions have left a vulnerable hostage in the extremists’ hands1; and Soustelle is still the acknowledged leader of the right-wing diehards of the Union for the New Republic, the biggest party in the National Assembly.
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The UNR, Gaullist in ritual but Soustellist in spirit, has institutionalized the equivocation on which the regime is based. It has few rank-and-file members, no national organization at the grass-roots level, and no program. Its deputies owe their election to Soustelle’s success in putting over the slogan “To vote UNR is to vote de Gaulle.” They are committed to only one article of faith, but an all-embracing one: fidelity to de Gaulle. Recruited on the classical right, most of them deplore, privately, the offer of self-determination to Algeria. But they know that if de Gaulle sent them packing and ordered fresh elections they would stand little chance of reelection. They are obliged therefore to accept the party leadership de Gaulle recommends, and to butter their speeches with flattery of de Gaulle, while hoping that Soustelle, burrowing mole-like within the administration, will somehow redress the situation.
The lobbies of the recent UNR congress (its first) at Bordeaux resounded with rebellious talk. The party leadership was said to have allowed “loyalist” branch organizers in the Paris region to inflate their membership figures by 300 per cent and accredit a disproportionate number of delegates so as to swamp the Soustellists from the provinces and Algeria; and several deputies alleged that ballot boxes had been tampered with to avoid the election of party officials unacceptable to de Gaulle. But inside the congress hall, whenever (as Le Monde put it) the brouhaha became excessive and the leadership found itself in a tight corner, it was generally sufficient for loyalists to chant “Vive de Gaulle” to bring the dissidents to heel.
The average UNR deputy’s fear of facing the electorate without de Gaulle’s endorsement frees the General from the sniping which brought down Bourgès-Maunoury and so many others, and even permits him to conscript the leading snipers in his service. But he himself is circumscribed by his dependence on the UNR. Elections would register a swing to the left—one voter in four would again, almost certainly, vote Communist—and, although parliament now has little power, a left-inclined parliament, backed by the unions, could not be disregarded as lightly as de Gaulle disregards the present one. He must also consider the army, which has been conditioned to regard everyone to the left of the UNR as a potential traitor. Its leaders understand de Gaulle’s need to toss occasional scraps of comfort to the left in the interests of industrial peace, and like the idea of a diplomatic rapprochement with the Soviet Union that would “strengthen” France vis-à-vis the United States; but they would consider any leftward shift of the center of gravity of France’s internal politics a betrayal of the 1958 coup. De Gaulle must therefore keep the UNR disciplined without making his discipline so harsh as to split the party, drive the Soustellists into alliance with the wilder men on the extreme right, and precipitate a general election; and he must continue humoring and flattering the army—and lavishing credits on it—while, very gently, prising loose its somewhat proprietary grip on Algeria.
My personal view is that unless the Algerian situation gets out of hand he will retain both the loyalty of the army and the nominal fealty of Soustelle—who has his eyes on the succession to de Gaulle and requires a broader political base than the right-wing extremists can provide. But a great many thoughtful Frenchmen disagree, fearing that as the fateful date for Algerian self-determination approaches many of the government’s supporters—military and civil—will have second thoughts. Significantly or not, the problem of de Gaulle’s succession is now being raised in public for the first time, though discussion of it is generally avoided. Maurice Duverger concluded a front page article in the cautious conformist Monde on November 21: “Who will fill the bottomless void of the new regime on the disappearance of the Président-Soleil, from whom all authority proceeds and on whom all depends?” The same week the general secretary of the docile Catholic-conservative MRP urged the government to solidify the regime by giving more power to parliament: “otherwise everything the government achieves will be insecure, dependent on the survival of one man, and destined to disappear with him.”
In short, thanks to de Gaulle, the French have satisfied their yearning for a stable government—but at the price of landing themselves with an extraordinarily precarious regime.
“If only that were the whole price,” said a French journalist with whom I discussed this point. “We’ve lost the habit of looking ahead more than a few months at a time in politics, so a precarious regime wouldn’t normally worry me. But there’s only one kind of regime can succeed the present one. The nicely stage-managed emotionalism of de Gaulle’s provincial tours, with all their attendant flag-waving and nationalist symbolism, the conditioning the army is receiving, and such things as the new stress in schools on national songs and the tone of the press and radio—all that fits into a familiar pattern. The RTF [Radiodiffusion-Television française—state radio and TV] has got so bad one must listen to Switzerland, Radio Tunis, or the BBC’s short-wave French program for a civilized news service. The nationalistic hysteria of some RTF commentators is something that hasn’t been heard in Western Europe, outside Spain, since 1945.”
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Nationalism is, of course, one of the most venerable skeletons in the closet of French republicanism. The beneficiaries of the profoundly conservative society which emerged from the Revolution exploited it to fill the moral gap left by the erosion of traditional values and sanctions, to help preserve national unity menaced by royalist-and Catholic-inspired regionalism, and to help the lower orders forget their claim to a share of the fruits of the new regime. It acquired respectability among Catholic thinkers to whom the idea that nations, like species, are divinely ordained and immutable was more congenial than evolutionary theories. It was dragged across the political arena time and again to head off reformist movements or divert attention from scandals.
But, in the long run, it is an unsettling influence. Normally intelligent folk who are told repeatedly, from primary school up, that they are “inherently superior to all other nations” (variants of this phrase recur frequently in books, periodicals, and speeches) are apt, ultimately, to ask why so many of the inferior nations manage their affairs more competently and more democratically, and possess a more responsible press, better social conditions, and such comforts as habeas corpus. Why does France fail where even tiny New Zealand succeeds? If our cultural superiority is so marked, how come the British have so many more public libraries and why are three-quarters of our population incapable of writing correct French? In reply, the myth-mongers give the nationalist screw another turn: it is all the fault of a tentacular monster named the Anti-France, which the more febrile Catholic publicists identify as the twin brother of the anti-Christ, and which holds in thrall such journals as L’Express and Le Monde and such leaders as Pierre Mendès-France. The reader should not smile. The Anti-France is a reality, a scaly green-blooded factor in the mental universe of—on his own proud confession—no less a dignitary than the present Prime Minister, M. Debré.
The defeats of 1940, 1941 (Syria), and 1954 (Dien-Bien-Phu), the memory that most of its officers backed the wrong horse in 1940—43, and “humiliations” in Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria, have riddled the French army with the kind of complexes fascism feeds on. (The atmosphere in military and right-wing circles in 1957—58 was uncannily like that in Damascus and Cairo after Israel’s defeat of the Arab League.) Similar complexes in civilian breasts have taken a specifically anti-“Anglosaxon” turn. One important section of the bourgeoisie has never forgiven the British for continuing the war in 1940 and thus wrecking the “divine surprise”; another, including many Gaullists, has never reconciled itself to the fact that France’s liberation and postwar rehabilitation should have depended in so “humiliating” a measure on the unmilitary, heretical “Anglosaxons.”
A typical history book used in primary schools recounts General de Gaulle’s wartime exploit without even mentioning that Britain, too, was at war with Germany. An RTF commentator referred a few months ago to de Gaulle and Churchill as “the men on whom the destiny of the free world depended” during the war years. A group of lycée students, asked what their reading had taught them about France’s wartime allies, were unanimous that Russia had saved Western Europe: the “Anglosaxons” concentrated on bombing industrial areas in the occupied countries so as to wipe out postwar competition. Eighty per cent of the Frenchmen with whom I have discussed postwar U. S. aid have either dismissed it as insignificant or said that the Americans “got back more than they gave” (in the form of commercial advantages, concessions, and bases).
Furthermore, both the French press and radio have repeatedly stressed that France’s aid to other countries surpasses America’s, and General de Gaulle has cried: “We owe nothing to anyone!” What I saw of the “good-offices” mission of Messrs. Robert Murphy and Harold Beeley after the French army’s bombardment of Sakyet gave me the impression that they genuinely desired to reconcile France and Tunisia and spare France condemnation by the Security Council: most French papers presented them as scheming to oust France from North Africa, and bons offices is still a dirty phrase in French.
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General de Gaulle’s contributions to nationalist lore sound more outlandish in modern English than in his rather precious, slightly archaic, not infrequently woolly French, and are mild stuff by comparison with the French public’s normal intake of emotional toxins: they will do no lasting harm. André Malraux, Minister for Cultural Affairs, seems content to give an articulate take-off of Major Salah Salem. But Premier Debré clearly believes that just as nationalist tub-thumping got him to power, nationalist chest-thumping will keep him there. Criticized for seizing liberal weeklies, he cries: “Name me any other country which permits an opposition press to appear as we do!” When his education budget is termed inadequate he declares: “No other country does as much for education as France!” Accused by his former die-hard pals of deserting the Algérie française campaign, he attacks the perfidy of France’s allies. And day after day the state radio, TV, and news-agency monopolies keep up the “conditioning” that is carrying France steadily further from democratic health and vigor and nearer the kind of setup M. Soustelle and the Cinquième bureau of the army would apparently like to see.
It was Soustelle who got the “conditioning” process under way in the fall of 1958, having fired several RTF officials suspected of undue loyalty to liberal republicanism. Directives now instruct senior editors how to handle the main news stories. Their general aim is to whip up nationalistic fervor, deflate domestic critics of the government (who may be subjected to severe attack by official RTF commentators but are given no air time to reply), and discredit liberal institutions of the “Anglosaxon” type. No serious criticism of the government’s handling of foreign affairs, Algeria, or defense must be reported on radio and TV, and disagreeable news which might reflect on the government must not only be played down but, if possible, balanced by a comment pointing out that conditions in the same sphere in other countries are worse than in France.
Thus, an apparent miscarriage of justice in the United States, a nitwitted debate in the House of Lords, and racial discrimination in the Deep South will be reported at length while news items indicative of the efficient working of Anglo-American democracy are suppressed or truncated. During the British elections, AFP (Agence France-Presse) coverage for the provincial press played down the political issues and concentrated on the “strong chances of success” of Sinn Fein candidates (in Northern Ireland!) who would not, however, AFP stressed, be allowed to occupy their seats in parliament. When, six months ago, the number of unemployed in Britain dropped from about 600,000 to 480,000, the RTF reported that it had risen to 800,000: the raison d’être of this item became clear when, a little later, a commentator tried to demonstrate that in France there were only 25,000 unemployed and not 400,000, as the opposition claimed.
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M. Roger Frey, Minister of Information, has announced his intention of establishing an “order of journalists” (an institution deriving from fascist Italy) whose purpose would be to tighten his control of the press. But most of the press is already dependent on the official AFP for the bulk of its foreign news and diplomatic comment, and so contagious is the “conditioning” campaign that even normally liberal papers are joining in.
In 1958, under the Fourth Republic, Le Monde stressed the power and effectiveness of the opposition within the British parliamentary system; in November 1959, under the Fifth, it reported that the opposition in the House of Commons has no more power than that in the present French Assembly. The Canard Enchaîné, on which a majority of French schoolteachers depend for their understanding of current affairs, is nominally liberal, anti-conformist, and critical of the Gaullist regime (its explanation of the birth of the Fifth Republic was that the May 13 riot in Algiers and de Gaulle’s return to power were organized by British petroleum interests to steal a march on their American rivals), but in the last year it has taken to competing with the ultra press in the fabrication of crudely xenophobic falsehoods.
Day after day, week after week, the steady drip of poison, prejudice, and illusion continues; and more and more Frenchmen are led to believe in the existence of a vast international conspiracy against their nation. It is now fashionable to speak of l’Anti-France in gatherings that scoffed at the notion two years ago. The Abbé Carteron, a Lyons priest famous—in some circles infamous—for his welfare work among the French and North African poor, has noted the upsurge of “chauvinism and racism” among the workers of his diocese, for which he lays most of the blame on the daily press. At present the Algerian war provides a focus and an outlet for this feeling. But what will happen when the Algerian war is over? The liberal Catholic review Esprit warns: “Then, inexorably, anti-Semitism will break out. The Jews are the only people who are not expecting it.”2
Esprit urges the republicans who resigned themselves to acceptance of Gaullist rule as the price of peace in Algeria to think again about the bargain they struck. Not only is Algeria still a problem but de Gaulle’s method of government is increasingly dependent on “authoritarianism and the resignation of the public will. . . . His regime of secrecy and surprise confounds and chloroforms public opinion.” The French are being conditioned to abandon all intelligent concern for public affairs, to adopt the attitude: “The General knows best.” The political salute of the Fifth Republic is the shrug. The RTF and the press worked overtime on the American TV scandal, but most French journalists would admit in private that similar revelations here would not have aroused one-tenth of the uproar. In the course of just six weeks, in the fall of 1959, the French public learned that thousands were starving in army “regroupment camps” for Algerian Moslem civilians; that a parachutist captain had tortured and strangled a leftist professor at a military interrogation center; that no action had been taken against the murderer and the senior officers who covered him; that secret police units exist in Algeria specialized in the use of methods of interrogation beside which (in the words of La Croix) “the parachutists’ ‘electrical torture’ appears like a childish game”; that in the attack on Mitterand the government was more eager to discredit Mitterand than to inculpate Pesquet; and that a conversation between MM. Soustelle and Delbecque had been reported to the police in the course of which one allegedly said to the other: “Now that Baylet3 is dead the next most important one to get rid of is Mitterand. . . .” Not one of these revelations raised more than a few ripples of comment outside professional political circles and newspaper offices.
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On the other hand, there are in the French nation vast reserves of common sense and fundamental decency that not all the Debrés, Soustelles, and parachutist colonels on both sides of the Mediterranean will ever be able to drain dry. Hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen are deliberately limiting their intake of RTF propaganda to a minimum. Private conversation rarely reflects the nationalism and xenophobia of the radio and press. The files of Catholic and Protestant organizations are thick with letters from chaplains, pastors, and priests reporting resistance to “conditioning” in the army, especially among conscripts.4 A vigorous new middle class is taking shape, centered on the cadres of the expanding modernized sector of French industry (private and nationalized) who are on the whole impatient of the old nationalist and militarist dogmas, inclined toward economic liberalism and European in outlook. The democratic political parties still appear somnolent and self-righteous, but (thanks to de Gaulle) they are being given ample time to digest the lessons of the collapse of the Fourth Republic and rediscover the basic principles they lost sight of in the postwar scramble for slices of the administrative cake.
Many Frenchmen believe that when a reinvigoration of French democracy comes it will bypass the traditional parties. The new middle class has recently discovered James Burnham and is intrigued by the idea of a “managerial democracy.” The monarchists believe that they will wake up one morning to find themselves at the head of a mass movement, and many socialists say that rather than see Soustelle or an army man succeed de Gaulle they would support the Comte de Paris. In many provincial towns, the schoolteachers’ unions have taken the initiative in setting up an anti-clerical front with the aim of resisting the Catholic hierarchy’s efforts to obtain a bigger share of the educational budget and the government’s undoubted desire to give Catholicism a privileged position in the state. The quarrel is not a violent one—it is largely over outward forms and cash subsidies—and no one is likely to get hurt. It may do more good than harm, in the short run, if it stirs up discussion of public affairs and shakes some of the cobwebs off non-extremist politics. But it is making many Gaullists uneasy.
Robert Escarpit, writing in La Dépêche du Midi, recently reported a conversation with a young army officer. “And what about this Republic of yours?” the officer asked. “We don’t hear very much about her these days.”
“She’s hibernating,” Escarpit replied.
Which just about sums the situation up. It is a reassuring summing up in that hibernation does, after all, hold out hope of regeneration, of a renewal of health and vigor. The only snag is that hibernation can prove fatal if it goes on too long.
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1 Vide his constant concern to play down the significance, and thereby reduce the efficacy, of de Gaulle's Algerian initiatives, and his handling of the Pesquet scandal in November. Pesquet, a former right-wing deputy, was employed by the organizers of the 1957 bazooka attack on General Salan to lure Senator Mitterand into a phony ambush which he would later accuse Mitterand of having organized with the aim of winning cheap kudos. The plotters wished to discredit Mitterand because, as Garde des Sceaux, he had had access to the now suppressed official file on the bazooka affair and, as a leftist, he might one day be tempted to publish what he knew. Premier Debré and his Minister of Justice withheld from the magistrate examining Pesquet the information that Pesquet had earlier tried to organize a similar coup against a former Radical minister, M. Bourgès-Maunoury. Pesquet was finally arrested on a charge of setting off a bomb in the parliament building in 1958, a lone wolf exploit from which no trail led to the bazooka plotters—with whom Debré had been closely connected.
2 Jewish organizations have protested against the inclusion in the latest edition of the Petit Larousse dictionary of three anti-Jewish epithets—justified the publishers say, by their increased frequency in the language. (They were not included in pre-war editions.) The biographical section of this same edition overlooks the fact that Dreyfus was rehabilitated, contains rather blithe notes on Hitler, Himmler, and other Nazi leaders (who “preferred death to defeat”), and includes an anti-Jewish gibe in its entry on Léon Blum: this last impertinence is to be omitted from future printings as a result of representations by ex-President Vincent Auriol and other former colleagues of Blum's.
3 M. Jean Baylet was the owner and editor of La Dépêche du Midi, the only non-Communist daily which urged its readers to vote against the Gaullist constitution. He was killed in a car crash.
4 Occasionally the evidence comes from Arab sources as in this statement by an FLN suspect to a prison chaplain: “X ordered Y to keep me kneeling for two hours, naked, holding a chair above my head and to whip me if I lowered it. But while X was out of the room, after about an hour, Y told me I could put the chair down and rest, but to pick it up at once if I heard the other one coming back.”
