For a man who had just lost 40 seats in the National Assembly, President Charles de Gaulle was in remarkably good spirits. Summoning his Cabinet to the Elysee Palace less than 72 hours after the close of last week's elections, the great man greeted his ministers with friendly compassion instead of the outsize wrath he has displayed on former occasions when his team let him down.
He even asked each of the Cabinet's 28 members to give a blow-by-blow account of his own electoral battles, delivered a wryly appropriate quote from Vergil when Veterans' Affairs Minister Alexandre Sanguinetti found it hard to talk about his defeat by 166 votes. "Infandum, regina, iubes reno-vare dolorem,"-murmured De Gaulle —"Unspeakable is the pain, O Queen, that you command me to relive."
De Gaulle's own pain was obviously far from unspeakable. Almost cheerfully, he pointed out that many of his losing candidates had been defeated only by the narrowest of margins. Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Mur-ville, for example, came within 235 votes of victory—and Couve had hardly been a dynamic campaigner. All in all, according to De Gaulle's calculations, a shift of 10,000 votes in the right places would have turned 35 Gaullist losers into winners. "That's not seri- ous," he told his Cabinet. "It is a situation that will redress itself."
Besides, it was not as if the Fifth Republic had lost the election. Despite their unexpectedly poor showing, the Gaullists had still captured at least 244 of the Assembly's 487 seats, and could count on the support of a handful of Deputies who had won as independent moderates. De Gaulle's majority had been reduced to a minimum, but it was still very much intact. The opposition might be stronger, but it was still the minority. As in the previous Assembly, it could oppose the government but not replace it. "It's always the same verbalism from the left," said De Gaulle.
Common Positions? The general's leftist opposition, however, had certainly done far better than anyone expected. Voting together for the first time in three decades, French Communists and Socialists pooled their forces against Gaullist candidates in last week's runoff elections and found that the alliance paid off handsomely. The Communists pulled their usual 20% of the vote but nearly doubled their parliamentary strength, from 41 to 73. Francois Mitterrand's Federation of the Democratic Socialist Left gained 25 seats, for a total of 116.
Not surprisingly, both parties immediately started talking of extending the leftist alliance beyond the elections. At a meeting of Socialist leaders, Mitterrand put through a resolution calling for the "immediate creation of a permanent delegation of the left" to work out parliamentary tactics with the Communists. Waldeck Rochet, the balding boss of the French Communists, went even farther. The party's aim, he declared, was that "all groups and Deputies of the left reach common positions on the essential questions, national and international."