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The nation which once reached for the sun at Austerlitz would settle now for a world which would leave France alone— though it knows that this cannot be. The dream of 1789—"Liberté, égalité, fraternité"—has given way to a less stirring one: "Sécurité, stabilité, tranquillité."
Voice of France. Abroad, the France of 1952 is represented by—and often mistakenly epitomized in—Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, with his dedicated internationalism, his willingness to join cause with the despised Boche, his gentle spirit of compromise. But France is far more the country of Antoine Pinay, the methodical, untraveled provincial. Schuman is a liability to the Premier, who keeps him in the cabinet only because to fire him would lose Pinay the vital support of Schuman's colleagues of the M.R.P. party.
Pinay is in many ways the Stanley Baldwin of his generation, little tutored— and even less interested—in foreign affairs. A practical man, not an idealist, Pinay would like to pull France out of the costly mire of Indo-China if only there were a way to do it without visiting chaos on the whole democratic alliance and shame on France. He is dragging his feet on French ratification of the European army treaty which would rearm Germany. He ordered the adamant French boycott of U.N. discussion of the troubles in French Morocco and Tunisia.
To attribute all these impulses to mere political expediency would be to miss the point: this is the way most Frenchmen want it. This truth is not lost on American diplomats who have to deal with France. "Our feeling," explained a State Department official, "is that anyone who represents the way the French feel is the kind of official with whom to deal. Pinay represents something in France. Robert Schuman sees eye to eye with us—but he does not represent typical French opinion."
"Yours—Ropes!" When Antoine Pinay stood before the Assembly last week, willing to carry on but not begging to, the inevitable fate of every postwar French Premier stared him in the face. Ahead of him lay interminable wrangles, and tense votes of confidence on that traditional trouble spot of Premiers—the year's budget. A lot of the sheen of promise had rubbed off the Premier's fiscal program—some prices were down a bit, but others had risen. The black-market price for the franc had helpfully fallen (from 480 to 400), but there was still far too little gold with which to plate the currency printing presses. Businessmen were complaining of a recession. Actually, Pinay's nine months could be classified as a definite success—for the first time since the war, a government had kept France's sickness from getting any worse, and had brightened up the hospital room immensely. But even success was a handicap, for it made others eager to aspire to the Premier's quarters in the Hôtel Matignon.