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For 22 years Pinay has been St. diamond's mayor, while also going to the legislature of the Loire Department (1934), to the Chamber of Deputies (1936) and to a seat in the French Senate (1938). For a short while, right after the war, he was out of office—kicked out by the newly dominant Resistance because he was one of 225 Senators who voted state powers to Petain in 1940. Pinay had not joined the Resistance; it offended his conservative sense of law & order. But villagers have since related that as mayor during the occupation, he hid Jews and issued false papers to Frenchmen hunted by the Gestapo. Shortly he was back in the Assembly, and within two years was mayor again.
Message on the Train. Ever the provincial, he orders his clothes not in Paris, but from "the best tailor in Lyon"; in his occasional travels he chooses not the first-but the second-class hotel. When cabinets fell, he always got on a train for St. Chamond instead of staying in Paris with the perennial hopefuls who clustered around the President's palace in the hope that, by chance or default, they might be tapped to form a government. He was a second-echelon minister—Economic Affairs—in the Queuille cabinet; in four successive cabinets he was Minister of Public Works, Transport and Tourism.
When the Faure cabinet fell last February, Pinay trotted off as usual to the Gare de Lyon. He was on the way back from St. Chamond a few days later when a messenger clambered into his compartment at Dijon with President Auriol's invitation to take a fling at forming a government. He had the brashness to try.
A Rainbow of Chaos. The National Assembly ranks with pousse cafe as a peculiarly French concoction. The pousse café is one of the most unnecessary drinks in the bartender's manual—a frivolous combination of liqueurs and cognacs, one poured gingerly atop the other to avoid blending them together. Each ingredient forms one bar in a rainbow of alcoholic chaos, each flavor nullifying the taste of the next, all falling into murky disarray if jiggled by a shaky hand. The Assembly is the pousse café of parliament.
More than a dozen parties fan across the fancy red horseshoe of the Assembly in dogmatic disorder. On the left sit the 97 Communists, the second largest bloc in the Assembly; they do not even believe in parliamentary democracy, and are interested only in killing it. Next sit 104 Socialists, the largest bloc. To the far right sit the 85 followers of embittered Charles de Gaulle (there were 29 more until they splintered off this year), who have long been under orders from the general to cooperate with no government until the French people vote themselves a new constitution. Between the Communists and Gaullists (both sworn enemies of the Fourth Republic) sit the Socialists and 330 Deputies of the center and conservative parties, which range from the moderate leftist Catholic M.R.P. to the 45 Deputies of Pinay's own Independent Republicans to the horny-handed shellbacks of the Peasant Party. Under a constitution which breeds too many parties and entrusts all power to the Assembly, this was the mishmash which French voters sent to Paris shortly after the war, and. with few shifts, returned in 1951.