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Late in the morning the stocky man stirs in the old-fashioned featherbed, and demands his café au lait. He dumps in three lumps of sugar, shrugs into an old bathrobe, then sprawls on the bed again as he scans the morning papers. Soon he is dictating orders, directives and notes to his black-haired wife, her typewriter propped on a suitcase beside the bed. Before he is dressed, cars come honking down a narrow street usually disturbed only by the clump of a cart or a delivery boy's whistle, and men in leather coats and caps, or in ill-fitting tradesmen's suits, knock on the door of the big red brick house. A grocer who is now a Deputy of France lets them in, where they find their leader munching on a breakfast of bread and a tangerine.
This house in Ablon, a quiet backwater seven miles outside Paris, is the headquarters of Pierre Poujade, the cocky, handsome ex-bookseller who at 35 is the most talked about political figure in France today.
From this house, lent by an admirer and crammed with marble cherubs, potted palms and framed needlepoint, this brash young man directs a dedicated army of 800,000 followers from Calais to Algiers. By lifting a phone, he can organize a rally in a provincial town 400 miles away, have the region plastered with posters in 48 hours, dispatch two, ten or 20 Assembly Deputies there as if they were errand boys. Every day, new memberships pour into his new offices in downtown Paris, new readers subscribe to his two newspapers.
Politics of Protest. The power of Pierre Poujade has grown monstrous in the short two months since he parlayed a taxpayers' strike into 2,600,000 votes and 53 Deputies sworn to do his bidding. Then, a senior politician dismissed him as "an episode." Last week, getting stronger all the time, Poujade boasted: "New elections—next month, next week, tomorrow—would give me five to six million votes, and perhaps 200 Deputies."
The newly elected French Assembly already seems as bad as the old, and nearly as bad as Poujade said it was. The new government of Socialist Guy Mollet started with high hopes, but bogged down into immobilism even faster than most of its predecessors. The Assembly's attempt to bar Poujade Deputies on flimsy, legalistic grounds outraged even some of Poujade's critics and created a wave of sympathy for him and fresh disgust at the Assembly's petty men.
Pierre Poujade. with his kinetic oratory and his toilet-wall slang, has better than anyone else harnessed the French citizen's growing discontent with the Fourth Republic. He seized attention by his fight against taxes, but his popularity reflects a deeper discord in the France of 1956. That discontent became hurtful with the loss of Dienbienphu. agonizing with the rebellions in Tunisia and Morocco. Now, confronted with the crisis in Algeria, the Fourth Republic faces a crisis in the existence of the parliamentary system itself.