FRANCE last week seemed all too normal. In keeping with his holiday habits, President Charles de Gaulle was at his country home in the quiet village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises in eastern France. His Premier, Maurice Couve de Murville, was on the Riviera, trying to extract some warmth from the pale Mediterranean sun. Brigitte Bardot was in the Alps, along with thousands of other French women and men who had trooped to the ski slopes in record numbers. Le tout Paris was caught up in a frenzied swirl of parties and balls that surprised even veteran socialites. “I have never seen such a social season,” the Duke of Windsor told friends. “We have been going nonstop for weeks, and there is no sign of a letup.”
The glitter and the gaiety were deceptive—or perhaps slightly manic. Six months after the riots that rattled the foundations of De Gaulle’s Fifth Republic and five weeks after a monetary crisis that threatened to bring down the franc, France remains troubled and uneasy. Prices are rising. So are taxes, as a part of De Gaulle’s new austerity program. Unrest continues to ripple across France’s universities and factories, the centers of last spring’s upheavals. All over the country, Frenchmen are worried that fresh economic crises or new disorders may break out. Some questioned the ability of De Gaulle and Premier Couve de Murville to cope with a new onset of troubles. The uneasiness extends into the top echelons of De Gaulle’s party. Says Gaullist Secretary-General Robert Poujade: “France is sailing between anarchy and fascism.”
Things are probably not quite that bad; the French have a taste for hyperbole. But the big Bordeaux daily SudOuest found that 66.2% of its readers polled were pessimistic about how France and its people would fare in 1969. Sensing the country’s disquiet, De Gaulle conceded to his ministers at a recent Cabinet meeting that “the atmosphere in France is melancholic.”
Effective at Mystifying. To a large degree, De Gaulle has only himself to blame. In June’s national elections, French voters gave Gaullists the first absolute majority granted any French party in the National Assembly in nearly a century. However, as former Finance Minister Valery Giscard d’Estaing last week put it, “The results of the elections did not show an expression of confidence but a need for confidence.” De Gaulle, now 78, has of late seemed to lose his ability to provide the forceful leadership France requires. “In the country of Louis XIV, to be governed means to have a father,” wrote L’Express, adding, “France has discovered that it has only a grandfather.”
Part of the problem rests with De Gaulle’s choice of Premiers. Shortly after the election landslide, De Gaulle summarily replaced his longtime Premier, Georges Pompidou, whose air of solidity and jovial good sense appealed to French voters. His replacement, former Foreign Minister Couve de Murville, was highly effective at mystifying and icily putting down foreign diplomats. He is far less effective at reassuring French voters. Couve is, in fact, what one of his rivals calls “too Anglo-Saxon.” In other words, the Premier, who is a member of France’s Protestant minority, is too austere, cool and reserved to inspire much sense of confidence in the French people. At De Gaulle’s behest, Couve went on the radio last month to try to cheer the French. The most encouraging thing that the elegant aristocrat could offer was that “things really aren’t all that bad.”
Star of David. Though last spring’s disorders revealed the depth of France’s discontent, De Gaulle and his ministers have failed since then to find fundamental solutions. The government, in fact, has not produced a single new law that effectively gets at the roots of the inequities in French society. As the National Assembly’s fall term came to an end, Pierre Lelong, a Gaullist Deputy from Brittany, complained, “I have to tell my voters what we have accomplished, but I don’t know what to say. We haven’t done anything.”
De Gaulle promised France’s restive students a voice in the administration of the universities and a complete overhaul of the archaic curriculum. Education Minister Edgar Faure has produced a reform law so vague that many educators doubt that it ever will be put into practice. The students remain angry and distrustful. Disturbances of varying intensity have erupted this fall at dozens of French universities and high schools. Last month, after riot police were stationed on the campus at Nanterre, where the spring disorders began, militant students pinned to their clothes the Star of David, just as the Jews of Nazi Germany had been forced to do, and taunted the helmeted police with cries of “We are all undesirables!”
Similarly, De Gaulle held out to France’s workers the vision of a new economic order. In it they would share in both the management and profits of their plants. That scheme, which De Gaulle calls participation, remains nothing more than a promise, partly because neither workers nor their patrons think it a very sound idea. Meanwhile, the workers have seen the raises they won as a result of last spring’s strikes largely consumed by inflation.
Despite the dissatisfaction among students and workers, there actually is little likelihood of any new outbreak of disorders on the scale of those in May and June. For one thing, the students lack leadership. Daniel (“Danny the Red”) Cohn-Bendit, their principal leader last spring, has been banished from France, and no one has taken his place. The students are now badly splintered into rival groups. When 1,000 militant students met last week in Marseille to form a common front against De Gaulle, they squabbled so badly that they could agree only on one motion—to adjourn. For their part, the workers lack both the will and the funds to go out on strike any time soon.
Twofold Malaise. In the more formal arenas of politics, France’s opposition parties have failed to exploit the Gaullist shortcomings. Reduced by the Gaullist landslide to numerical insignificance in the National Assembly, the parties have turned inward on themselves instead of ganging up on the Gaullists. Split over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Communists are preoccupied by internal feuds. The Socialists, who are still in shock from their election drubbing, seem psychologically incapable of regaining their old fire. Declares Francois Mitterrand, president of the Federation of the Democratic Socialist Left: “The Federation is more a victim of itself than it was of the elections.” Last week, seizing on a drastic remedy, the Socialists disbanded their present party. In the spring, they hope to begin the organization of a new and more vital one.
Perhaps the Socialists, who only six years ago commanded 15% of all French votes, will rise again. The practical effect of the opposition’s collapse, however, is the demise of any remaining parliamentary democracy in France, at least for the moment. That development alarms France’s Centrist Party, whose leaders feel that the opposition’s impotency reflects a deeper ill. As they see it, French society is losing its cohesion and direction. The Centrist publication Facts and Causes, for example, writes that “in reality, the malaise is twofold.” Its reasoning: “The failure of the government has caused a political crisis. But the attitude of the opposition is indicative of a crisis of civilization.”
On a more mundane level, France’s political malaise has had direct economic consequences. At the moment, France is seized by a giant buying spree. Fearing an eventual devaluation of the franc, Frenchmen are sinking their savings into goods. Two months ago, there were 10,000 color-television sets in all of France; now there are 70,000. Washing machines, record players and other appliances are being snapped up at a similar pace. Peugeot is receiving 500 orders a day for its most expensive ($3,000) model, the new 504, even though it can produce only 200 a day.
Actually, the French economy is not as sick as many Frenchmen seem to suspect. Owing to tight currency controls, the huge speculative outflow of francs has been stopped. Some $500 million in francs has returned to France in the past month. Furthermore, despite the franc’s recent weakness, France still possesses some $3.5 billion in gold and foreign currency reserves plus nearly $4 billion in standby credits from the International Monetary Fund and her Western trading partners. Even so, the nagging worry remains either that the austerity program will bring on a recession or that runaway prices will force a devaluation to keep French goods competitive on the world market.
However the economy goes, the sources of France’s malaise are mainly psychological. As Charles de Gaulle this week makes his annual New Year’s Day television address to the French people, he will very likely attempt to conjure France out of her melancholy. It will be a difficult task, since many disgruntled Frenchmen at present feel that the avuncular oracle finally has lost his touch, his matchless rhetoric its meaning. But as he has often displayed in the past, De Gaulle, the politician of catastrophe, can be at his best when France is at her worst.
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