From Paris, where France was in its fourth week without a government, TIME Correspondent Godfrey Blunden cabled:
PRESIDENT Reneé Coty's black Renault drives up the Champs-Elyseées between lightly foliaged plane trees to the Arc de Triomphe. The crowd, thinly hugging the barriers, applauds mildly. The Republic is still worth a handclap, and 76-year-old President Coty, typifying today's worried "ordinary Frenchman," is worth several.
But what is that other noise? Jeering whistles, faint calls of "Vive De Gaulle!" It is the first time such sounds have fallen on the ears of the respected Coty in the course of his official duties. Are the citizens impatient with Reneé Pleven's 16-day effort to form a government? Never fear. M. Pleven has finally named his Cabinet this morning, and the National Assembly has been convoked to pass upon it. Calmly, Coty lays a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, below the chiseled names of battles won long ago.
Afterward, brass bands come down the Champs-Elysees, the solemn Garde reépublicaine wondrously blowing trumpets and tubas from atop their dancing horses; they are followed by the cantering, cloaked Spahis. In the crowd, a man dressed in a shabby, purple-striped coat shakes a collection box, and the crowd remembers the day of which this is the 13th anniversary—that happy day in 1945 when Germany surrendered, when returning deportees, still wearing the purple-striped clothing issued them by the Nazis, danced in the streets of Paris, and ecstatic women in wooden shoes rode behind the Gardes Republicans as they trotted down the quais.
The glory that is being celebrated is not of this day, but of some more remote time. President Coty does not have long to savor it. Along with the President's luncheon coffee at the Elysee Palace arrives gaunt Rene Pleven, to announce that he cannot form a government after all because the Radicals refuse to support his choice of Andreé Morice, a "tough-line" man on Algeria, as Minister of Defense. With a sigh President Coty folds his napkin. Nothing for it but to send out telegrams canceling the Assembly meeting—something that has never before occurred under the Fourth Republic—and to call on someone else to try and form a government.
Next-to-Last Straw. In the evening, hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen who have chosen to devote the day to a pique-nique in the woods, eating off little tables set out under the beech trees and gathering bunches of bluebells are home again, relaxing before their TV sets. There, against the frame of Coty's doorway, they can see and hear how each of the three potential Radical Premiers called by the President greets this honor.
First there is balding ex-Education Minister Reneé Billèeres, saying, "Sooner another than me." Then comes 36-year-old Maurice Faure ("I am too young"), then cod-eyed Senator Jean Berthoin, conscious of the desperation that led Coty for the first time to call on a Senator. Berthoin insists: "It must be a Deputy." Finally, half an hour before midnight, Popular Republican Pierre Pflimlin, a thin, silvery and incisive Alsatian reluctantly agrees to try and become Premier of France.