(2 of 3)
Now it is time to bring out all the old jokes, time for some radio clown to pose the 75 million-franc question: "Name all the French Premiers since 1947," and for the cocktail-party gag, "Do you think the Algerians will get a government before we do?" Some Frenchmen, it is true, seem to regard the crisis as the next-to-last straw. Thunders Editor Pierre Brisson in Figaro: "It is no longer a Parliament, but a monstrous jamming enterprise. The conclusion is to reform or disappear. The margin for the Assembly is only a thread's width." But, unhappily for M. Brisson, his readers can remember that only two days ago a Figaro photographer, sent out to photograph Reneé Pleven at his hour of decision, found a more interesting subject in a game of boules being played by a group of taxi drivers, and that his picture made four columns on Figaro's front page.
To Live in France. Like Figaro, all France displays a curious ambivalence—a mixture of apparent political apathy and of passionate disgust for present parliamentary procedures. Ostensibly, the French dilemma hinges on Algeria: it was the suspicion that he was moving toward negotiations with the rebels that toppled Felix Gaillard after 5½ months in office. But the Algerian problem could long ago have been resolved were it not for the unreconstructed imperialist who skulks within the breast of so many Frenchmen. Cynical about government, about grandeur and glory, Frenchmen nonetheless are vulnerable to exhortations that France must rank high among the nations and be respected. ("Respect?" wrote one wag in Paris' Canard Enchaineé last week. "I don't want to respect France. I only want to sleep with her.")
Capitalizing on these archaic dreams, the French right has shown itself increasingly contemptuous of democratic procedures. To live in France today is to enjoy the riches of her museums and the misty shapes of Paris under the soft archery of summer showers, to feel the quick, cool darkness under the blossom-laden chestnut trees, and to smell the grass falling to the mower on lawns snow-powdered with tiny daisies called pâaquerettes.
It is also to become accustomed to hearing of newspapers being seized by police, to seeing politically controversial books being sold under the counter, to seeing anti-Semitic slogans (A bas les juifs!) scrawled on walls. To live in France today is, in some neighborhoods, to take the rafle (police dragnet) for granted, to pass quickly by when the black wagons swing into the curb and the burly cops close in on a cafeé and tap each customer for his papers. It is to read, in the influential Le Monde, Editor Beuve-Meéry's melancholy series Simple Thoughts for Has-Beens "enclosed by a past which can no longer be sustained."
Out of the Swim. For some the answer is De Gaulle. The morning after Pleven's failure to form a government, Paris is plastered with posters declaring: "Call De Gaulle and France will be France!" Newspapers proclaim that a Colonel Barberot has convoked a meeting of the "Companions of the Liberation" because "13 years have sufficed to show that all we fought for has been lost," and that "in the service of our country we must use the capital represented by General de Gaulle."