(4 of 10)
The Eleventh Hour. For a few hours it appeared that perhaps Pflimlin and Coty had turned the trick that easily. The first response to their appeals was hopeful: General Massu acknowledged General Salan's authority. But then, in a speech of masterful ambiguity, Salan acknowledged himself in authority but finished off with the rallying cry of the French colons in Algeria: "Vive De Gaulle!" On top of that came De Gaulle's "I am ready" statements from Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, neither endorsing nor disavowing Massu's coup -a fact sure to put new heart into the insurgents in Algiers, who were still refusing to submit to any authority save De Gaulle.
Now, at the eleventh hour, the "republicans" buried their ancient, obscure quarrels. Socialist Guy Mollet, who for a month had been proclaiming his party's unwillingness to participate in any conceivable government, hastily agreed to serve as Pflimlin's Vice Premier, and said he would even be willing to serve as Under Secretary of Beaux-Arts. In the Assembly, Pflimlin demanded emergency powers -the right to hold suspects without trial, to make searches at any hour, to deport citizens from troubled areas, to impose full censorship and to close movies, theaters and cafes. Working with unprecedented speed, the Deputies gave him the powers he wanted within the day -and did so by one of the biggest majorities (462 to 112) accorded any French Premier since World War II. Pflimlin brought in as Minister of the Interior 65-year-old Socialist Jules Moch, who won fame in an earlier cold war stint in the Interior Ministry as a merciless cop.
Without a Head. To listen to Pflimlin's new-found admirers -including the Communist Deputies who supported the emergency-powers bill -the issue before France was a matter of black and white; there existed, as Pflimlin said, "a plot against the republic," and anyone who believed in democracy must be ready "to take all necessary measures to maintain republican liberties." Unhappily, like most other attempts to reduce French political issues to black and white, this proposition was founded on a fallacy. In this case, the fallacy was the assumption that the existing French political system constitutes a working democracy.
The sad truth is that the republic which Pflimlin sought to preserve from civil war is in itself a kind of permanent, institutionalized civil war. Since the fall of Napoleon III in 1870, France has solved the political conflicts among its citizens by settling for a government without a head -a government in which no single group could ever acquire enough power and responsibility to carry out a consistent long-term national policy. The bourgeois and petty bourgeois "republicans," who believed that the supreme end of social life was the self-gratification of the individual citizen, were left free to evade their taxes and pursue their pleasures. Yearners after glory and national prestige -mostly nostalgic royalists -were left free to expand the French empire and carry out France's "civilizing mission" among the Annamese, Tonkinese, Tunisians, Algerians, Moroccans, Togolanders and Tahitians. But neither of these groups -nor any other -was allowed to impose its vision of the good society on France as a whole.