EVEN before France's voters went to the polls for this week's final runoff, the hotly contested election for a new National Assembly had already had a powerful impact on French politics. After 15 years of aloof, Olympian and, some would say, arrogant rule, President Georges Pompidou's Gaullists seemed visibly chastened by the surge of the Socialist-Communist opposition in the first-round voting. When the results showed the Gaullists and their allies trailing in the popular vote tally by an expected but still humiliating eight percentage points, government spokesmen began sounding unaccustomed notes...
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