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Sensing the Frenchman's mounting impatience with inconvenience and inertia, Gaullists have ambitious schemes for rural development ("gardening the national territory"), urban improvement, school construction to redeem what one minister calls "our terrible rendezvous with youth." The nation's administrative structure, which has wheezed along with little change since Napoleon's time, will be modernized. Gaullist technicians are already planning to overhaul Paris. Though 18% of the entire population is concentrated in the capital and growing by 100,000 a year, officialdom seems more concerned with preserving old houses than providing new ones. Says one minister: "We're going to take Paris out of the age of the fiacre."
Frontier-on-Seine. If some of Charles de Gaulle's dreams of European leadership seem at times more suited to the age of Charlemagne, he has nevertheless surrounded himself with imaginative, superbly trained ministers whose eyes are fixed firmly on the future. Seasoned civil servants of intellect, shrewdness and long acquaintance, notably Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville and Louis Joxe, who handles Algeria, still hold the most exposed and sensitive jobs in his government.
And in place of professional politicians (before De Gaulle, all ministers had to have seats in the Assembly) De Gaulle has brought into his Cabinet a new covey of experts, many of them young (five are 40 or under), whose versatility and expertise constitute a Seine-side New Frontier. Many have survived the rigorous 28-month course at the Ecole Nationale d' Administration (ENA), a blue-chip finishing school for civil service comers that was founded by De Gaulle in 1945 to supply the government with resourceful, apolitical technocrats. Others are lawyers, economists, businessmen, bankers.
No. 2 in De Gaulle's administration is Banker-Professor Georges Jean Raymond Pompidou, 51, a bushy-browed bear of a man who grows roses and has written books on French writers from Racine to Cabinet Colleague André Malraux. Premier in the Cabinet that was overthrown in October, and now Premier-designate, Pompidou is probably closer to the President than any other minister. He was a schoolteacher and Resistance fighter before joining De Gaulle as a consultant on education in 1944, later became director of the Rothschild bank. De Gaulle, who does not relax easily, is soothed by Pompidou's roguish self-assurance, and even permitted him to help edit his Memoirs. A middle-road liberal, Pompidou is the likeliest choice to head the Gaullist party after De Gaulle leaves the scene.
Republic of Engineers. Another close confidant of De Gaulle is Olivier Guichard, 42, who was Pompidou's administrative assistant before he caught the President's eye. A baron who maintains informal liaison with the left wing, Guichard is De Gaulle's traveling companion, troubleshooter and one-man intelligence network.
The new Cabinet, to be announced when Parliament reconvenes this week, will include most of the top, trusted Gaullists who were ministers in the last government.
Among them: