Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin French Disunity Is Nothing New; Neither Is Left, Right Extremism The French people received a poor New Year's present in a new National Assembly...
...The first would be some sort of compromise, which would give a small but adequate majority to a government actively supported or passively tolerated by all the Center groups...
...Neither Is Left, Right Extremism The French people received a poor New Year's present in a new National Assembly which is more divided, more unworkable from the standpoint of containing a coherent positive majority, than the one it replaced...
...The explanation lies in the electoral system devised in 1951 and in the sharp split in the Center, between the bloc headed by Faure and the combination led by Mendes-France...
...Guy Mollet and other Socialist leaders will not be lured by a "Popular Front...
...There has been a marked decline, recognized and deplored at Communist Party Congresses, in the circulation of Communist newspapers...
...The first of these alternatives is difficult...
...Contrary to the propaganda from Moscow, France's recent election did not show any upswing in the Communist popular vote...
...This was nothing altogether new in French political experience...
...The tendency of French voters to divide into many parties and subdivide into still more factions is deep-rooted and inherent, as a glance at French political history under republican institutions will show...
...Faure's came out of the election with about 190 seats, Mendes-France's with about 160...
...Opposed to parliamentary principles are almost a third of the members of the new Assembly, some 150 Communists and some 50 followers of a small-town rabble-rouser named Pierre Poujade who stressed unwillingness to pay taxes and contempt for politicians...
...After the postwar coalition between Socialists, Communists and Catholic MRP broke down, French politics fell into the pattern of a moderate Center (from conservatives to Socialists) precariously keeping itself in power against the challenge of two extremes, the Communists and the followers of General Charles de Gaulle...
...There have been signs in recent years of a decline in Communist party strength, which is now estimated at about 350,000, as against a peak of 800,000 after the war...
...This is not surprising because, like Communist publications in Russia and everywhere else, these newspapers are incredibly dull...
...Neither Faure nor Mendes-France could convincingly claim a decisive popular mandate...
...These two blocs fought each other hard...
...There were continual factional feuds and intrigues against both Daladier and Reynaud, the two Prime Ministers during the disastrous Second World War...
...The second would be catastrophic, and fortunately does not seem probable...
...This remained just about what it has been for ten years--about 25 per cent of the total votes cast...
...Such alliances were less effective in the recent election, and straight proportional representation operated to permit the Communists to gain seats without gaining votes...
...Though a straight Left majority cannot be organized in this Assembly without the Communists, the price of such support would far outweigh any social benefits such a government might bring...
...It is like bad weather in January, something about which little can be done...
...This provided that an alliance of parties which polled more than half the vote in a given district received all its seats...
...The French Government, however, must go on...
...There is also in France a deep distrust of a strong executive...
...This is partly a product of memories of how quickly Napoleon and Napoleon III transformed republics into empires...
...For three decades the Third Republic led a harassed existence under a crossfire from extremes of Left and Right, from revolutionary groups that gloried in the Paris Commune and looked back fondly to the Jacobin dictatorship and from miscellaneous malcontents of the Right--royalists, Bonapartists, clericals, anti-Semites...
...And their split invalidated, in most districts, the 1951 electoral law aimed at the Communists and Gaullists...
...In view of the election arithmetic, there would seem to be just two feasible majorities...
...So, ever since 1871, the rule in France has been short-lived cabinets and parliaments where it is much easier to find a majority against than for any given proposition...
...The other possibility is a Mendes-France coalition with the Communists...
...And the Frenchman, however "Left" he may consider himself, does not take kindly to being bored...
...Clemenceau succeeded in imposing his authority during the last years of the First World War, but the politicians got even by refusing to elect him President of the Republic after the war...
...Yet the Communists gained over 50 seats with about the same number of votes...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 4
