Catholic Vote in France

...Thus, when people talk about the historic borders that must be returned to, they are talking about borders that existed for eight years, as compared to .the present actual borders which, give a little take a little here and there, have existed for ten...

...One is struck by the important gains made by the Left in traditionally Catholic areas, like the East and especially the West (Normandy and Brittany, for example, where the opposition won such towns as Alengon, Rennes, Angers, Nantes, Brest, Saint Malo and Cherbourg, plus 27 towns of less than 30,000 inhabitants...

...And clearly they have a case...

...When it comes to parliamentary as opposed to local elections, the uncommitted middleof-the-roaders--many of whom voted for the Left mainly to voice their displeasure at the way the country is being run at present will think twice before taking the plunge into the unknown...

...FRANK GETLEIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 MUNICIPAL ELECTIONS CA THOLIC VOTE IN FRANCE The French electorate has shown, without a shadow of a doubt, that it is ready to flirt with "collectivism" rather than celebrate its golden wedding with immobilism...

...not only in justice, but also in common sense: they are the sort of people the country depends on to make the kinds of thing Britain has to make to live...

...led by Jacques Chirac and the various groups supporting Valfry Giscard d'Estaing's Independent Republicans---continued their bitter feuds, which cost them many a vote, except in Paris...

...I don't pretend to give them in any order except as they come into my head as I write...

...In the 1971 municipal elections, for example, the contender for the mayorship of Clermont Ferrand was soundly beaten...

...It is to be doubted, however, whether the new Christian Left will succeed in persuading the mass of apathetic Catholics, still largely conservative, to follow its dynamic example...

...An extremist minority of these Catholics have espoused the marxist cause to the extent of joining the Communist Party or one of the many fringe groups of Maoists, Trotskyites, or "Christian-Marxists," who are trying, without much success, to drew up a common platform from which to launch a French branch of the international movement "Christians for Socialism...

...The dichotomy is partly the product of the bourgeois anti-clericalism and socialist free-thinking of the last century, but since 1936, hands have been proffered to Christians from the Left, with a growing measure of success...

...If it is true that these municipal elections are, to a certain extent, a trial run for the legislative elections to be held next year, it is also true--as the majority in power never tires of pointing out---tha.t the French were not voting for a change of society, this time...

...This new political awareness is the fruit of a lengthy 29 April 1977:262 process: left-wing Catholics have come a long way from the social Catholicism preached by Rerum Novarum...

...But the main tactical error made by the parties in power, apart from their divisive internecine strife, was to underestimate the strength and unity of the Left...

...Thus for a period of almost ten years, the Arab states could have peacefully established an independent Palestinian state...

...The real test will come next year, with the parliamentary elections and the choice of a next National Assembly...

...This greatly weakens President Giscard's position, summed up by his slogan: "La France sera gouvern~e au centre" (France will be governed from the center...

...ALAIN WOODROW (Alain Woodrow is Commonweai's regular correspondent in France...

...The followers of such moderates as Jean Lecanuet or Jean-Jacques ServanSchreiber have largely abandoned their leaders in favor of the Left...

...If the middle-class Catholics, who form an important component of the electorate, do not follow these committed left-wing Christians, then the latter's impact will be negligible...

...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 FROM BRITAIN O u SPRING Everyone knows that the British economy is in a fairly bad way: but I think that just now (I write this in Lent, so it seems appropriate to say something gloomy) we are in for a pretty big crisis...

...Under the present policy of strictly controlling incomes, they aren't getting paid any more for their skills (and the years of training undergone to acquire them) than many of their unskilled colleagues: and they are clearly determined at the present time to get that situation changed...

...They haven't been in a serious dispute for years and their grouse now is very simple...

...Especially since it tends to despise the existing political structures and to reject "popular religion" as a form of class collaboration...

...The Zionists for generations before the state of Israel brought scientific agriculture, the foundation of any society, to the region that had invented it in the first place and then forgotten it...

...the right-wing opposition, within the government, to the President's reforming zeal...

...The domestic economy of Israel has presented, from the first, indeed for some generations prior to the formal foundation of the state, the first signs of hope for self-sufficiency in a region dismal and doomed by centuries of misery accepted with a perhaps edifying resignation to the will of God, but with no evident will to take action against misery, to ameliorate, to raise up, to improve...

...The increased polarization resulting from the elections, which have accentuated the division of the country into two blocs--51 percent of the votes went to the Left, 47 percent to the majority --has led to the virtual eclipse of the centrist forces...

...The Left would be foolish, however, to count its chickens before they are hatched...

...They were more or less fixed by the cease-fire lines of the 1948-49 war, the Israelis having successfully held the invading Arab armies to those lines...

...Consider some of the current issues...

...And the Catholic vote will count...

...Even the leaders of their own union are against them: but they are unabashed...

...Reasons are not lacking to explain the majority's defeat: the wear and tear of a party continually in power for the last twenty years...

...Thus, when Sadat and others talk about an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, they are talking about an independent Palestinian state that was fully within the power of Jordan and Egypt to create all by themselves anytime they wanted to between 1949 and 1967...

...the rejection of the "Plan Barre," the Prime Minister's austerity program, etc...

...As I write, they have decided to go on with their strike...

...For over a century, France has offered two contradictory images of herself: one, right-wing and Catholic, the other, left-wing and lay...

...even the old stanfby of the statistics of religious practice is no longer a meaningful guide...

...The Zionists-Israelis could have been, should have been and may yet be, the best hope for a region in which malnutrition, infant death, disease and misery have been built in for centuries...

...Those borders, which could have been between Israel and a Palestinian state were, in fact, between Israel and the surrounding Arab states, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon...

...Historically, Catholics have always voted to the Right...

...Last June, Georges Marchais, General Secretary of the French Communist Party, launched a solemn appeal to the Christians of France to collaborate more closely with the Communists in the building of a more just society...

...The borders remained that way until the Six-Day War in 1967...

...The second ballot of the municipal elections, held on March 20th, confirmed the sweeping victory of the combined Socialist and Communist forces...

...Their itinerary often began in the various Catholic Action movements and in the leftist C.F.D.T...

...This is true of the Middle East no less than of Middle Europe, where Germany, having lost at force lost, too, whole states and principalities taken by the victims as insurance against future German attacks...

...Their incomes too have gone down (in relation to costs) because of the incomes policy...

...The gains were impressive, for the Left now controls 158 of the 221 towns with a population of over 30,000 inhabitants, wresting 55 from the hands of majority...

...I don't mean anything terribly dramatic: but merely that there is a combination of problems either with us or about to hit us which, taken together amount to a major turning point of British capitalism...

...Another factor that should be taken into account when assessing the victory of the Left is the contribution of the Catholic vote...

...Not only did the governing coalition lose seven major cities with a population of over 100,000 to the opposition (Saint-Etienne, Montpellier, Rennes, Nantes, Le Commonweal: 261 Mans, Villeurbanne and Turcoing, which already held Lille, Marseilles, Aix-en-Provence and Grenoble), and only retained the ten following: Paris, Lyons, Nice, Toulouse, Toulon, Metz, Nancy, Orleans, Perpignan and Mulhouse, but, more humiliating still, seven members of the government were beaten, most of whom are staunch supporters of Valfry Giscard d'Estaing...

...The Israelis did all those things...

...The essential question is whether it is possible to "manage" a mixed economy in a society which has inherited the sorts of difficulty that Britain faces...

...As against that possibility, the Arab states set out to destroy that sign of hope and have gone on for three decades now trying to destroy what they ought to emulate, take lessons from...

...dissatisfaction with the belated attempts to come to grips with the economic crisis, inflation and unemployment...

...As most commentators pointed out, the two main winners of the contest were Jacques Chirac, who will become the first mayor of the capital for a century, and the united forces of the Left, who now control seven out of ten of the major towns throughout the country...

...Another highly significant development is the current pressure by the police for better pay...

...That they did not suggests powerfully that the existence of such a state was never the be-all and end-all of Arab policy it is now purported to be...

...The best .thing about Sadat's recent visit was that, in addition to asking for the arms he had to ask for--and, it is much to be hoped, will not get--he also asked for economic assistance...

...In spite of inevitable tensions and rivalry between Socialists and Communists, their "common program of government" has found increasing favor with the electorate, their alliance, unique in Europe, has grown steadily stronger with give-and-take on both sides and, above all, the Communist bogey no longer frightens anyone-especially since the de-Stalinization process adopted by the French Communist Party at its last congress, triggered off by the dropping of the sacrosanct dogma of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the shaping of a new doctrine of 'Eurocommunism," independent of Moscow...

...Ultimately, of course, history is made by other things, too, especially the energy and ingenuity nations bring to the eternal task of feeding and housing themselves, extending what help they can to less fortunate neighbors...

...Generally speaking, the marked swing towards the Left, observed among Christians, both clerical and lay, has meant that the "Catholic vote" has increasingly aroused the desires of the leftwing parties...

...The most significant thing about this problem is that police are now campaigning for the right to strike in support of their demands: which is to say, they want a change in the law...

...It is not easy, however, to assess the Catholic vote, not because they refuse to stand up and be counted, but because the definition of who is a Catholic or not is no longer clearly defined...

...The spectacular swing to the Left in the recent elections of such Catholic strongholds as the West country and, to a lesser extent, Alsace and Lorraine shows clearly that Christians are not only abandoning their traditional suspicion of politics--up until now they preferred social to political commitment but they are no longer afraid to vote Socialist, or even Communist...

...It is in this aspect of history that the .tragedy of the Arab assaults on Israel comes into the highest relief...

...The awful truth is that history is made largely by force and it is not repealed by the wishes of those whose efforts to make it by force have failed...

...trades union, which was Christian in origin, and which has served as an alternative to a strictly political commitment...

...On .the contrary, the absence of such establishment, indeed of any smallest gesture toward such establishment, by the Arab states then in control of those parts of what had been British Palestine, suggests that had the Arab states succeeded in 1948-49 in their avowed aim of driving the Jews into the sea, the states themselves--Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq--would simply have divided the spoils, more or less amicably, and allowed the Palestinians to continue living under foreign occupation as they had from time immemorial: Ottoman Turks, Brits, Byzantines, Romans, Greeks, Babylonians, even the Crusaders from time to time...

...These examples are just two out of many which reveal the weaknesses of trying to control incomes by Commonweal: 263...

...The coalition of the Left--Socialists, Communists and left-wing radicals----exercised great discipline, on the second ballot, with regard to the choice and support of the best-placed candidates--to the advantage of the Communists who now govern 72 municipal councils as against 79 for the Socialists--whereas the warring factions within the majority~the "Rassemblement pour la Rfpublique" (R.P.R...

...But to judge by the results of the municipal elections, more and more disgruntled middle-of-theroad voters, including Christians, are being seduced by the Socialist sirens...

...They really have made the desert bloom, and the Middle East has an awful lot of desert that needs to bloom if the people are ever to live productive, rewarding lives...

...The strikers are the firm's toolmakers: among the most highly skilled, but also the most "co-operative" and trouble-free sections of the workforce...

...But the majority of leftist Christians have gone to swell the ranks of the Socialist Party---encouraged by the famous declaration of the bishops in 1972, "For a Christian approach to politics," on the legitimacy of political pluralism and on the need for Catholics to square their political ideals with the Gospel, which, declared the bishops, "is not neutral...

...Their specific corrtribution to the French political scene is probably the creation of a Christian and humanist current within the mainstream of Socialism that provides a viable alternative to the rigid marxist dogmatism put forward by the Communist Party...

...This tradition stems partly from the utopian heritage of Proudhon, enriched by the contributions of such theologians and thinkers as Emmanuel Mounier and Jiirgen Moltmann...

...This did not seem to mar his future career, however, for he was none other than Valfry Giscard d'Estaing...

...Garbage collectors are better paid now than they are, largely because the police were caught by bad luck when the pay policy first came in...

...There is a very important strike at British Leyland--the country's biggest motor manufacturer, and biggest earner of export earnings--which is very far from being just another of those "wildcat" affairs we used to be told about so much...

...for that matter, those states and the other Arab states could very easily have helped ~o establish an independent Palestinian state on pretty much the teEritory now spoken of between the UN Partition Mandate and Israel's declaration of existence, the end of November, 1947 to the middle of May, 1948...

...But the government says (roughly) that nothing can be done because the income policy prevents it...