(6 of 10)
For eight months, Mendès worked in the underground, adopting a pipe and a mustache as a disguise, then made his way to London to join De Gaulle's Free French. He immediately applied to fly again, was trained as a navigator in the Free French bomber group. "He turned all colors before going on missions, but he always went and he volunteered when he could," says a friend. Mendès fretted about bombing France, finally concluded that if he did not do it, others would, and perhaps not aim so carefully.
In London, Mendès stayed coldly aloof from those fellow exiles who jostled and intrigued for Cabinet positions in De Gaulle's'phantom government. "They are not bad men," he confided to a friend, "but they scurry around. They scurry so much they forget France."
Unheeded Man. In time, Mendès himself became De Gaulle's Minister of National Economy, and worked out an austerity plan for the economic reconstruction of postwar France, including such severe anti-inflation measures as freezing all large bank deposits. But at a Cabinet meeting in January 1945, a majority led by Finance Minister Rene Pleven vigorously objected. After five years of occupation, the French people would not stand for a new period of austerity, they argued. "You see, my dear Mendès," said De Gaulle, "the Minister of Finance and all the experts are against you." "I remember," answered Mendès sadly, "when all the military experts were against a certain Colonel de Gaulle." Three months later, Mendès resigned.
From that day in 1945, Mendès-France remained in political isolation. Lacking political power, he served in technical positions. He represented France on the International Monetary Fund and on the U.N. Economic and Social Council. In the National Assembly, he was chairman of the finance committee. Always, in speech after speech, he warned France that the day of reckoning would come.
He cried for more investment, more production, less military spending, more housing, control of inflation. He castigated the unenlightened selfishness of French capitalists, pleaded for a French "New Deal" (he has been searching for an effective French equivalent phrase). "We are in 1788," he warned.
He also warned that if France did not give its colonial people more independence and quickly, they would take it themselves. The Indo-China war could have been avoided by granting Indo-China greater independence, he charged, and the same lesson is going unheeded in Tunisia and Morocco: "The 19th century colonial regime has had its day."
As early as 1949 he was telling the Assembly: "One day you will be forced to call on French conscripts to win the war in Indo-China. By the time you do it, it will be too late to win the war. You will also be forced to negotiate the settlement with Ho Chi Minh's Communists, but by that time it will be too late, too."