France's Unsettled Summer:
ALAN, RAY
France's Unsettled Summer By Ray Alan Paris "GENERAL OUTLOOK for the summer: unsettled," say the meteorologists. Political pundits agree. The horizon is already overcast and even the Tour...
...Ray Alan is a British correspondent who has reported on Europe, Africa and the Middle East for many years...
...This was the first time they had ever demonstrated against de Gaulle personally and his prestige and authority slumped both in North Africa and in liberal circles in France...
...Peasants are naturally incensed when they discover that potatoes they sell at less than 1 cent a pound are retailed at 35 cents, and that middlemen are making a profit of 500 per cent on the sale of their beef...
...Since then he has always paid a ritual tribute to Debré in the public speeches he makes when touring the provinces...
...Meanwhile, vacationers are flocking by the hundred thousand to coastal resorts and the Spanish and Italian frontiers—and the tanned leathery heroes of the Tour de France are approaching the end of their ordeal...
...There is a feeling that the climacteric is near...
...A Premier who survived the first week of the Tour could put his feet up and think about taking a vacation himself...
...Any professional or social group with a grievance is thrust by the very logic of the regime into public demonstration or worse...
...But the more vigorous leaders brought to the fore by the "peasants' revolt" are demanding surgery, not first aid—in particular, a reform of distributive circuits, price-stabilization, and the application to agriculture of the state planning which has so radically transformed French industry...
...As this is written, preparations are being made for the resumption of talks between French and FLN representatives at the Château de Lugrin, a few miles outside Evian...
...In order to strengthen France's claim to control of the Sahara's economic resources and strategic possibilities, his spokesmen have suggested that the Sahara might be considered an inland sea in which not Algeria alone but all adjoining states would have "riparian" rights—with France holding the balance, politically and economically...
...the weakness of the cooperative movement and the domination of marketing and distributive circuits by wholly parasitical intermediaries...
...Normally at this season the French scene is dominated by 100 or more dusty masochists on bicycles who pedal day after day, for the better part of a month, over torrid plain and frigid mountain pass...
...the fragmentation of holdings encouraged by French inheritance laws...
...and, as firm after firm closes down, Paris and other inland cities are all but abandoned to foreign tourists...
...The horizon is already overcast and even the Tour de France is having to fight for its headlines...
...In private, he still holds the opinion that all Algeria except the Sahara will one day be independent and governed by the men who control the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN...
...Simultaneously, de Gaulle's plans for the Sahara were going awry...
...The delights of the Tour fade into those of the grandes vacances...
...This is due partly to their ignorance and conservatism, to the rural Frenchman's traditional and still characteristic mistrust of "foreign" ideas and methods—though many farmers have bought tractors, improved their methods and increased their output in recent years only to be rewarded by falling prices for their produce...
...De Gaulle's threat was also made with an eye to appeasing the Army and convincing the Right generally that he is driving a hard bargain with the FLN, and it boomeranged nastily in the first week of July when Algerian Moslems went on strike and held demonstrations to make plain their hostility to partition...
...In place of the calm, ritualized, generally predictable parliamentary crises of the Fourth Republic, the Gaullist interregnum has brought France violence, conspiracy and uncertainty...
...The grateful de Gaulle is reported to have said in 1958 that he would keep Debré in office for the whole life of the Fifth Republic's first Parliament...
...Meanwhile, both Moslem and European terrorists were increasingly active in Algeria...
...Paradoxically, the erosion of governmental authority in de Gaulle's France is due primarily to the Government's institutional strength...
...Under almost any other regime one would have concluded that the Government was so weak as to be on the verge of collapse...
...But the balancing act by which he has succeeded for three years now in retaining the support of moderate Left and moderate Right is becoming increasingly difficult, and a chance concatenation of events which caused the forces hostile to him to combine their efforts, however briefly, could unbalance him...
...Early in the fall Debré is expected to be succeeded by the present Minister for Algerian Affairs, Louis Joxe...
...Such omens are as important in the study of Gaullist palace-politics as in Kremlinology...
...the Right despises him for his betrayal of Algerie française...
...It seems certain that if social unrest is to be avoided in the fall, de Gaulle will have to shift the center of gravity of his Administration slightly to the Left and throw out some ballast— most probably in the person of his highly unpopular Premier, Debr...
...bombs planted by Right-wing French extremists were going off in the very heart of the capital...
...De Gaulle himself is still unchallengeable by non-violent means, and for more than simply constitutional reasons...
...A boy with an air-rifle and a good dog could stage a coup in August...
...The apathetic general public is well content to leave the nation's problems to him, and Right-wing and Left-wing critics of the Government hate each other more than they dislike de Gaulle...
...The industrial unions — whose spokesmen claim that the purchasing power of the workers has declined since 1953, whereas output and profits have risen—are sympathetic...
...the survival of sharecropping and other povertyperpetuating systems of land tenure...
...The Left hates him for his anti-republican past...
...They are contacting the industrial workers' unions with a view to taking joint producer-consumer action in September or October...
...In its new form, the plan would recognize Algeria's nominal political sovereignty over the Sahara, limiting the condominium to control of minerals...
...Under the Fourth Republic, politicians and editors of Left and Right observed a truce from early July to mid-September...
...But the date has yet to be fixed and the tones of both parties seem to be hardening...
...Officials of the Ministry of the Interior were debating the deployment of the security police: Should they be dispersed in the provinces to intimidate riotous farmers or kept in Paris to ward off a possible coup...
...THE PEASANTS' fundamental grievance can be summed up in a single statistic: Whereas farmers and fruit-growers make up 26 per cent of the population of France, they receive only 13 per cent of the national income...
...They, at least, know where they are going and when they will arrive...
...They complain, too, that the Government persuaded them to increase production and support the Common Market with promises of handsome earnings from agricultural exports to Germany —promises that have not been kept...
...Parliament is unlikely to be dissolved, as elections would undoubtedly take a heavy toll of the Gaullist provincial notables who provide the Government with an automatic majority on the rare occasions when it requires the approval of the Legislature...
...and teachers and other public servants are talking of fresh strike action after the vacation...
...It also was hurriedly trying to appease peasants who had blocked important national highways, halted trains, cut power and telephone lines, battled with security police and gendarmes, and hanged Premier Michel Debré in effigy...
...Every employed person is entitled by law to three weeks' vacation with full pay...
...But those were what many thoughtful Frenchmen are beginning—wryly if not yet nostalgically—to call "our years of stability...
...As summer took off its tie and rolled up its sleeves, General de Gaulle's "strong" Government, armed with dictatorial emergency powers, was granting public servants who had just held a token strike pay increases which they had failed to obtain in two years of peaceful negotiation...
...A former monarchist, and the author of the more "monarchical" features of France's present Constitution, Debré was one of the wildest of the demagogues, and one of the most active of the plotters, who undermined the Fourth Republic...
...Algeria is still de Gaulle's biggest headache and the likeliest detonator of a fresh explosion of wrath against his regime...
...Highway traffic is halted for the Tour, peasants leave their fields to watch it, cooks abandon their kitchens...
...The race is a commercial rather than a sporting event, and not much cleaner than boxing, but Frenchmen love it...
...The chief danger arising from the recent "peasants' revolt" was that if it were allowed to go too far, and the farmers paralyzed national communications and neutralized the security police, plotters of the disaffected Right might have been tempted to exploit the situation...
...The Government has discreetly assured the farmers' syndicates that it has asked Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to open the rich German market to French agricultural produce starting next fall, when his elections are out of the way...
...It also has suspended the tax on milk and agreed to purchase and stock surplus butter and beef...
...And it was handling the officers who had taken part in the spring mutiny in Algiers with considerate leniency for fear of upsetting the Army—while rumors were again circulating of an impending putsch, to be set off in Paris this time, not indiscreet Algiers...
...But he has angered the FLN by threatening to partition the country if they fail to fall in with his ideas on the future of the Sahara, French bases in coastal Algeria, French-Algerian "association," and the status of European civilians...
...and even high-school students and their parents were demonstrating in the streets in protest against the inefficiency of the officials responsible for organizing the national baccalaureate exam...
...JOXE is ALL but unknown to the general public and his political future will almost certainly be decided by the nature of the settlement France finally makes with the Algerians—even though he has no real influence over French policy: President de Gaulle's fingers are on all the buttons...
...but during his recent tour of eastern France he refrained from doing so...
...The suggestion is an interesting one, but early in July FLN emissaries were scurrying around northwest Africa with a modified version which omitted France and gave a slightly larger slice of the Saharan cake to each of the "riparians"—who found this last suggestion even more interesting...
...In French official circles concerned with Algeria, in the Army, and in the security police, the atmosphere is tense...
...French officialdom now seems to be resurrecting a plan for an exclusively French and Algerian condominium over the Sahara which the FLN has already rejected...
...De Gaulle has so successfully emasculated Parliament, straitjacketed the radio and TV, and reduced the bulk of the press to a state of servility, that there are perilously few constitutional outlets for protest...
...More important are socio-economic circumstances which only political action can redress: the shortage of facilities for agricultural and agronomic education...
Vol. 44 • July 1961 • No. 28
