France slowly picked up the pieces and dug out from under the debris of revolt. In Paris' elegant Tuileries Gardens, sanitation workers plucked beer bottles and litter from the multicolored flower beds. On the capital's broad boulevards, road crews shoveled steaming asphalt into the gaps where paving stones had been pried up to build barricades. Blue-uniformed mailmen made their appointed rounds for the first time in weeks. Trains and subways rumbled once more; the whine of jetliners echoed again at the airports. By the millions, French workers trooped back to their factories. Though there were still some pockets of holdouts, notably the university students and the strikers at the state-owned radio and television stations and the Renault auto plants, France last week was returning to normal after a month of economic paralysis and chaotic civil disorder.
It was none too soon for France's badly shaken economy. French economists reckoned that the tie-ups had cost France's industries some $6 billion in lost production. Much of that amount could be made up by accelerated output in the months ahead, but the loss of exports and the flight of francs had already forced the government to spend $307 million of its $6 billion in cash and gold reserves. As a result, for the first time since 1959, the French drew $745 million from the International Monetary Fund to help tide the country over the present crisis.
Five Slates. France's politicians were preparing for the shortest and probably the most hotly contested campaign in the country's postwar history. The first round of elections was scheduled for June 23; the final run-off round for June 30. The voters of France will have a choice among five major-party slates of candidates.
On the left, there are three groupings: the Communists; the Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left, led by 1965 Presidential Runner-Up François Mitterrand; and the Unified Socialist Party, a doctrinaire faction whose prime asset is its most illustrious member, Fourth Republic Premier Pierre Mendès-France, 61. It seems likely that Mitterrand's party and the Communists will each enter a full slate of competing first-round candidates in France's 487 electoral districts. But they are likely to combine forces and throw their votes in the final round to the strongest candidate from either party in each district, the other candidate withdrawing—a maneuver that the leftists and Communists used with great effectiveness in the 1967 national elections.
In the middle is the confederation of centrist parties that is led by Jacques Duhamel, 43. Since there is a feeling among many French politicians that the right and left may fight to a standoff, the importance of the centrists has been greatly enhanced. They hope to add at least 20 new seats to the 40 that they held in the old Assembly, thus holding the effective balance of power between the two groups.
Forcing a Polarization. On the center-right is De Gaulle's party, the Union for the Defense of the Republic. Once again, it is allied with the Independent Republicans of former Gaullist Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, and on the first ballot, the two parties will support the same candidate in most—though not all —constituencies.