'New Deal' Cabinet Next for France?
TAS, SAL
'NEW DEAL' CABINET NEXT FOR FRANCE? Socialists and Mendes-France Radicals plan emergency government to stave off new Communist-Poujadist threat to democracy By Sal Tas Paris The January 2...
...The workers refuse to follow their directives inside and outside the unions...
...The 400 deputies of the two democratic fronts, which fought each other bitterly during the campaign, must now outmaneuver one another with one eye on the 200 anti-democratic deputies, who will seize any opportunity to bring them down...
...it is not a dynamic force...
...Socialists and Mendes-France Radicals plan emergency government to stave off new Communist-Poujadist threat to democracy By Sal Tas Paris The January 2 election, wrote Le Monde, gave us a true portrait of France...
...This Boy Scout approach may serve Poujade if he is clever and firm...
...Paradoxically, the Communist vote reflects some of the same protests...
...the workers forced them to approve...
...The semi-fascist Poujadists, with 55 seats...
...As expected, the French divided themselves into four blocs: -The Communists, with 145 seats from metropolitan France...
...Faure, who hoped to confirm the conservative majority in the National Assembly, succeeded in undermining the Assembly as a whole...
...The Republican Front did well at the polls, and the Socialists did even better than Mendes-France...
...It is a malady bred not so much by poverty (for poverty is slowly diminishing without an appreciable effect on the Communist vote) as by disrespect for public authority, or for any authority...
...The Government front of Faure-Pinay-Teitgen, with 183...
...it is a vote of non-confidence in the French state and the French nation, a vote for capitulation in a future war...
...It may be that the Poujadist deputies will ultimately become contaminated by parliamentary uses and abuses and dissolve as the Gaullists did...
...De Gaulle himself had abandoned the Gaullist bloc in the Assembly and did not even bother to vote...
...It is a parasitical mental process, therefore almost indestructible...
...From the movements of Napoleon III and Boulanger through those unleashed by the Dreyfus case down to the Stavisky affair and Vichy, we see the same anti-parliamentary minority generation after generation...
...Such an alliance with the conservatives would undoubtedly weaken the rising popular support for the Socialists and Mendesistes...
...Recently, there was a striking example of this when the Renault plant offered its workers a contract that was clearly inspired by that of the UAW-CIO...
...Nevertheless, they vote Communist...
...that was perhaps its only merit...
...The Communist vote is another sign of monstrous conservatism...
...A national front, based on all-diluting compromises, would be powerless to act...
...The majority of the Poujade group consists of small shopkeepers, small butchers, grocers, etc., who have promised in writing to obey Poujade at the price of physical punishment —even of hanging...
...Is it a vote for decadence...
...But an underdeveloped country can develop...
...This government will introduce an emergency program: Algeria first, economic and tax reform second, electoral reform next...
...On the other hand, the Communists, who have been campaigning loudly for a Popular Front, may succeed in disrupting the unity of the Socialist Assembly group...
...the Poujadists cannot reject economic reforms without disappointing their own followers...
...Neither the Republican Front nor the conservative bloc can govern without at least the tolerance of the other...
...The Poujadist vote is largely the vote of those who supported de Gaulle in 1951, and who even then opposed parliamentary democracy...
...Two-thirds of the voters had rejected the policies of the conservative government...
...And so the anti-parliamentary voters sought something new and unspoiled, and found the Poujadists...
...It was a remarkable turn of affairs, but not so strange or revolutionary as many think...
...This will be a frustrating phase in French parliamentary history...
...The 18th-century part of France—e.g., its Napoleonic system of distribution —protests against modernization, and you have the Poujadist vote...
...Part of France is 20th-century, but part of it is at least a full century behind...
...The same thing happened in other auto plants, in the metal industry, and (just before the elections) in the mines, where it affected hundreds of thousands of workers...
...as is said here, fully imbibed the joys of the parliamentary system and had become quite conventional conservatives...
...In each case, the Communist leaders had to be forced to sign the contract by their own members...
...This contempt for the state has re-doubled since the capitulation of 1940, and that is understandable to some extent...
...Fundamentally, that explains the Communist vote in France, too...
...The Republican Front, with 161 seats...
...They confirm the basic conservatism of the French people...
...The fact remains that after the election the Communists are as unable as before to organize strikes of any importance...
...Increased living standards do not affect it...
...The conservatives tried to use this difficulty to propose a national front comprising all the democratic parties...
...It was, in fact, a vote characteristic of an underdeveloped country...
...the facts of life in the Soviet bloc do not affect it...
...France is a nation in which even the ruling classes have lost self-confidence and national pride...
...Finally, Communist votes come from those who hate France because it is no longer a great modern nation...
...That is the central problem, and it is recognized as such by the Republican Front...
...Thus, the dissolution, designed to extend conservative rule, brought about a situation in which the Socialists have the key position...
...And that is precisely what France is...
...The Communist union leaders refused to sign...
...The Gaullist deputies had...
...But it is hardly certain that this is the case...
...These voters dropped the Gaullist deputies—and who could blame them...
...Even that was not very revolutionary...
...Mendes gained among the elite of the big cities...
...Paris, a businessman told me, is halfway between Amsterdam and Djakarta...
...The Communists cannot afford to vote against liberal measures in Algeria...
...Here is a party which, for at least a generation, has neglected all the real interests of the French worker and has had eyes only for its Soviet master...
...Communism in underdeveloped nations is the expression of the conflict between modern aspirations and prehistoric conditions...
...It certainly would be if France had already reached her apogee, if she had realized her full economic and social potential...
...But while the French ruling classes are too arrogant to identify themselves either with Europe or with the NATO community, the workers have no difficulty in identifying themselves with a powerful state like Russia, which will one day make the necessary revolution for them...
...Therefore, the Republican Front plans to assume power and form a minority government, led by either Mollet or Mendes-France and comprising only their followers...
...The Communist vote is not a vote for a Communist coup d'etat...
...the strain may be too great to last for five years...
...But the Socialists will try to create, at the very least, enough accomplished facts of a progressive nature to enable them to face the electorate in conditions that will then be belter for themselves and better for democracy as a whole...
...In fact, nothing is less revolutionary than these election results...
...And if the left wing of the democratic center is weakened, then the entire center might become a minority, imperiling the whole democratic system...
...They are the largest democratic party in the Assembly and will undoubtedly reserve for themselves the right to form a government...
...two-thirds voted against Edgar Faure's conservative government...
...Only the Communists and Poujadists profited from his sudden dissolution of Parliament...
...But a larger part of the Socialist group would certainly resist it to the bitter end, and the Communists would need all the Socialists and all the Radicals to form a majority...
...One-third of the French voters voted against Parliament...
...It would be, according to Socialist leader Christian Pineau, just as "spineless" and "immobile" as previous broad coalitions...
...France has always had a minority which refused to accept the parliamentary system...
...And so can France...
...The conservatives will have to tolerate a Socialist-led government because they cannot form a government of their own...
...It also contains the votes of those workers who cannot rise—socially, culturally, economically—as long as the shops and small plants of Napoleonic France undercut their salaries and status...
...All the same, on election day the Communists got 25 per cent of the votes, the votes of the same workers who had defied the party in defense of their own interests...
...For this power is like the force of gravity...
...And these two parties firmly refuse assent to further conservative rule...
...And few democrats would risk facing the electorate again before some attempts were made to take the wind out of the sails of the anti-democratic groups...
...The Communist bloc appears to be frozen...
...The Socialists gained in the cities and in the country, winning half a million more votes than in 1951...
...The election results bear out this statement...
...Perhaps only tremendous political shocks or a grinding long-term re-education of the French proletariat could shake the Communists' power...
...The tension between these two Frances explains much that happens here...
...The Catholic MRP, which called for a national front before the election, is now inclined to support an emergency government of the Left...
...moral defeats in the trade unions do not affect it...
...Since 1848 at least...
...Some of the old anti-EDC Socialists (among them Daniel Mayer) have already shown disquieting signs of vulnerability to this campaign...
...This, of course, the Socialists and Radicals refused...
...No longer a majority in the Assembly, hardly a majority of the Assembly democrats, the conservatives can govern now only with the assent of the two parties of the licpuhlican Front, the Socialists led by Guy Mollet and the Radicals led by Pierre Mendes-France...
...For the Poujadists are much less sophisticated than the Gaullists, and Poujade's firm hand may rule them with more success...
...But this is not certain...
...Until now, he has given the impression of being both...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 3
