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Not until 55 days after the 1951 elections was the Assembly able even to agree on a new cabinet, and then it was stuffed with men who had been rejected once, twice, or three times before. With rare exceptions, French politics is a machinery of blocs, not individuals, of party regulars more interested in Gallic theories than in Spartan responsibilities.
Weekend Reflection. Antoine Pinay walked into this domain of canny tacticians and dialectical dancing masters with a misleading double-gait. In the eyes of the public, he was no politician, but to the Assembly he proved to be as wily a one as had come along since the war. He put his proposals to the country as fast as he put them to the Assembly, then calmly told the Deputies: here it is; approve it, or give the responsibility to someone else. The reaction from back home suddenly sounded louder & clearer than the Parisian sidewalk café arguments so dear to French politicians.
Pinay capitalized on the rule that a demand for votes of confidence must be followed by a 24-hour intermission. He usually asked for votes on Friday, so the votes would generally fall on Tuesdays, when the Deputies would have had a weekend to learn that the folks back home liked Pinay's proposals. He won vote after vote, ten of them in one day.
The Missing Element. After the first enthusiasm of "the Pinay Experiment" wore off, his critics began to say that his remedy was essentially a set of short-term fiscal manipulations that soothed the skin but did not reach to the disease.
Physically, France is sound—as sound as a dollar and sounder than the franc. Unlike Britain, France can feed herself, and well. With a fertile country, a smiling climate and 42 million intelligent and reasonably hard-working people, France should be able to earn her own fat living. French industrial output is running 13% ahead of the record year 1929.
Yet civilized France is an unhappy, frustrated country; the whole is less than the sum of its parts, and the nation is more in need of a psychiatrist than a physician. In their moments of candor, the French recognize the missing element in themselves: it is civisme, a sense of community responsibility. Divisions are as old and as deep as the French Revolution. At the root is a profound lack of faith in government, an individualism carried almost to the point of anarchy.
This corrosive individualism expresses itself politically in a multiplicity of little parties, huddles of special interests. It shows itself in the big industrialists and businessmen who resist alike the productive imagination of U.S. capitalism and the legitimate aspirations of labor, and prudently send their capital out of the country. And the resultant despair shows in the 5,000,000 Frenchmen, 25% of the electorate, who voted Communist (a survey by France's FORTUNE-like Réaltiés showed that most were "seeking an energetic and dependable champion who would improve their material lot . . . The U.S.S.R., despite a vague sympathy, gets on their nerves a little . . ."). The Frenchman who spends some 60% of his income for food, and lives four in a room because neither government nor business will build him houses, cannot quite get his heart into La Marseillaise when he comes to the line: "The day of glory has arrived."