Nine times in his eight months in office Premier Robert Schuman, the lean, leaning tower of French politics, had tottered on the brink of failure. Nine times he survived a vote of confidence by margins as small as 33, 23 and 16 Assembly votes.
Last week he survived another crisis, the civil servants' strike, and then this week he crashed, a victim of the law of averages and of the almost mathematical perfection of the Socialist Party's stupidity.
For a while the civil servants' strike looked serious to everyone except Finance Minister René Mayer, in whose department it started, and who had...
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