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"Along the walls four long red, white and blue banners were stretched. One said simply, 'Dissolution!' (an invitation to the National Assembly). The second said, 'Union around a strong state!' The third, 'Bar the way to the Separatists!' The fourth, 'De Gaulle to power!' Three speakers took the platform, each for about 20 minutes. The crowd did little more than applaud politely, but there was no mistaking their rapt attention. They seemed like people who were half won over but still wanted to be convinced that this De Gaulle business was really serious.
"Afterward I walked a block with Henri Millet, who operates an electric saw in a children's toy plant. He said:
" 'I don't think De Gaulle wants to be a dictator—surely he could have seized power long ago if he had wanted—but I am not sure about the men who support him. It seems to me that the old Petain-ists, who loved themselves more than their country, are backing him too strongly, and they are no good for the Republic. But when De Gaulle speaks about France I feel in my heart—my old heart of a soldier of Verdun—that he is sincere. He is a real Frenchman, taking orders from no one.' "
TIME Correspondent Henry Tanner had his hair cut in the Hotel Crillon. Said his barber, 44-year-old René Gustave Duval: "I voted for De Gaulle because I was tired. Que voulez-vous?—we have had four years of occupation, and three years of disillusion. And we don't forgive those who let the Germans in, nor those who made promises and didn't keep them. De Gaulle always keeps his promises."
TIME Correspondent Fred Klein found two elderly ladies gathering firewood in the Vincennes forest. One was a retired schoolteacher, the other the widow of a French Army colonel. On their meager pensions they could not buy coal. They both voted for De Gaulle. They said: "De Gaulle is an honest man. He saved us once; he will save us again."
The Alternatives. After the municipal elections, there was a new, uncertain, rather livid light over France. Frenchmen wondered whether it was the dawn of a new, stronger, better and more comfortable nation—or whether it was the zero hour for battle.
French Communists Maurice Thorez and Laurent Casanova had flown to Moscow, ostensibly to help celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Revolution (see Russia), more probably to thrash out the differences between them and to get a decision from the Soviet policymakers on the French problem.
Thorez is the conciliator. At a Central Committee meeting in Paris, before taking off for Moscow, he said: "France is a bourgeois country, and unless and until we control the police and the Army, only bourgeois methods will succeed here." So far, Comrade Thorez' bourgeois methods —that is, attempting to win power at the ballot box—have failed. And his chances are slimmer now than they were six months ago when De Gaulle emerged from retirement to mobilize the R.P.F.