Outside, newspaper headlines proclaimed the moment décisif. Long lines of Communist demonstrators stood stolidly in the fog and rain, and in distant capitals, statesmen kept anxious watch. Inside the Palais Bourbon, Premier Pierre Mendes-France wrestled grimly with the French Assembly, trying to drag France back into the ranks of the Atlantic Alliance from which these same Deputies had all but resigned the week before.
The Deputies seemed somewhat sobered by the world's reaction to their 280-259 rejection of German admission to the Western European Union. The moderates, a 115-man group of splinter-party Deputies, met and decided to "dose" the vote:...
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