Winds of Change in France

...Well he might be, since the leitmotif of his years as Finance Minister was the necessity to fight inflation by putting people out of work...

...In this respect Giscard is doing the best he can: Ultimately, France must go it alone, or with those in Europe who have the wit to join it...

...The movement that is now gathering strength in France is not likely to repeat May 1968...

...Even Center deputies asked why the firm had not been nationalized rather than bailed out and then handed over to Peugeot...

...Then, with a monumental condescension that would have embarrassed the manorial Saint Franklin, Giscard proclaimed his readiness to save France when what he meant was to save his class and its system...

...In the meantime, economics is eliminating many newspapers...

...On the other hand, rental apartments are as expensive and scarce as ever, if often cheaper and easier to find than comparable ones used to be in New York City...

...And everywhere eye-level plaques remind one that at this spot, on a given date, various named individuals (unless there were so many that only the number could be inscribed) were killed by the Germans...

...Invariably, too, he will go on to explain in detail all the unreasonable laws and regulations that must be followed in even the simplest matters...

...The Left is less a bogey because of its own institutionalization and because of the Right's thorough failure, and persistence in failure, learning nothing and forgetting everything...

...1 and Radio Television Luxembourg...

...But the public was variously offended and outraged at the government's recent gift of over $200 million to Citroen, the automobile factory that used to be a barony of the Michelin family...

...Yet what is most hopeful is not only the citizen's but the functionary's attitude toward his caste and its tasks...

...This fear has kept the private sector more or less tranquil, since everyone is fully aware of the economic currents throughout the Free World and of Giscard's Nixonian view of the virtues of a little unemployment...

...The French observed all these anniversaries, very solemnly...

...A wave of protest resignations followed, and the matter is dragging through the courts...

...Poor France, to have had to suffer an imitation Kennedy on top of an imitation Nixon...

...What an increasing number of people in France want is reasoned, firmly based change, not graffiti...

...No wonder the led are fed up—quite apart from the fact that for a half-hour in a time of social and economic (and unacknowledged political) crisis the only thing he said was that he was sorry for the unemployed...

...It is difficult to determine whether the money-grubbers or the power-grubbers are the graver threat to freedom of expression...

...No one but the professional young is any longer in the mood for fun and games in the street, or useless skull-cracking...

...Uncharacteristically, he had stayed in his office after dusk so that he could begin, in a slow mortician resonance that never altered, by announcing: "It is your President, whom you have chosen to lead you, who speaks to you tonight...

...1, was abruptly dismissed for the avowed reason that he had permitted disrespectful and flippant treatment of the government, its works and its members...

...Giscard's fall would not distress more than a third of the population...

...Under legislation adopted last year, effective this month, it has been broken into seven different state broadcasting entities, and a large number of employes have been let go...

...One, close to Giscard, recently commented: "Yes, we allow ourselves the pleasure of liberalism as long as things are quiet...

...The government had gambled on an aroused public opinion-although had it materialized, it would very likely have boomeranged-but even more on the lack of strike benefits and on the fear of unemployment...

...The prospect of a year of unemployment pay does not heal the wound of having been thrown on the scrap heap...

...After a six-week-long postal strike that at the very least inconvenienced all 51 million residents of this country and caused real economic damage to hundreds of thousands (complicated by a host of ancillary strikes in Paris, mostly brief, except for the week-long sanitation walk-out), there was remarkably little grumbling about the strikers and the unions...

...To achieve that feat he obviously studied the masquerades of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the various Kennedys to the point of adopting all their little tics, except for the very important one of attending to the job...

...But the overwhelming majority blamed the government for having allowed the country to get into such a mess, principally by fiddling for years at the fire and maintaining intolerable wage scales and working conditions in its enterprises, where most of the job actions occurred...

...Yet there is considerable opposition in official circles, even among "liberals...

...The strikers went back to work, as the union leaders said with only slight exaggeration, "with rage in his heart" (some of it directed, for cause, against those same leaders...

...In addition to the French assumption, supported by considerable evidence, that the Germans are the Americans' creatures, there is the matter of memory and history...

...In spite of the much touted bonds between Giscard and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of the German Federal Republic—"Us se tutoient en anglais" according to former Foreign Minister Michel Jobert, and even the Quakers have stopped doing that-it is unlikely that Washington's only sympathizer on the Continent will be able to draw France any farther back into subjection to the United States...

...No one believed for a moment the government's angry whimper that these were base and baseless political efforts to overthrow it...

...An authentic Resistance hero and early Gaullist, he does not use his Polish title of prince but tends to behave as if the dynasty were still on a throne somewhere (during last summer's prison troubles, he authorized shooting to stop prisoners attempting to escape...

...then, before you can begin to remonstrate, he will explain equally meticulously how you can slash most if not all of the red tape...

...Moreover, according to a recent poll, if the Presidential election were to be held again tomorrow, 53 per cent of the votes would go to Francois Mitterrand, the Socialist leader who eight months ago, as the candidate of the combined Left, polled only 49 per cent...

...No one talks about these memorials, or about the camps, yet few are ready to accept dominance by Bonn, whether as the agent of Washington or as its own Herr again...

...The late General Charles de Gaulle's rhetoric aside, more and more Frenchmen are rightly eager for independence: European if possible, French certainly...

...There is a good deal of the anarchist in most Frenchmen, whatever their heritage, their rank in society, or the roles they are compelled to fill for survival...

...his listeners, "I will address you at your firesides...

...The state, for instance, also owns a substantial part of the so-called private broadcasting corporations-europe No...

...That will depend partly on developments at home, partly on events abroad, and not merely on oil...

...Both the plans and the fight against them, however, are given minimal publicity...

...Pressure among the French people for reform is building slowly and thoughtfully, and it is being felt by the government...

...It is always difficult to attempt to describe the state-not to mention the state of mind-of any nation...

...Citroen was broke again, and its thousands of workers were threatened with unemployment, though no Michelin was a centime poorer...

...True, a few Frenchmen would have had the flics and the troops take over...

...Le Pere Noel has already brought them an inflation on the order of 17 per cent annually that cannot be stopped even by an unemployment figure of 1 million...

...Last autumn Maurice Siegel, who headed all news and public-affairs operations at Europe No...

...Complain about a functionary to another, and he will tell you with a shrug at once resigned and amused: "Mais c'est un fonclionnaire, quoi...

...The advertisements were as plentiful and smooth as ever, without any of that hysteria that creeps into promotions when things are really bad, except that every dealer offers three months' grace before the first payment on a new car...

...But Frenchmen do not expect comprehension from their own barons of industry or from the state...

...Now it is by no means certain that he has much chance of saving his skin, even if he attempts to unload his sins on a scapegoat premier, Jacques Chirac, who last month took control of the GauUist party...

...Undoubtedly the Office de Radiodiffu-sion Television Frangaise had grown unwieldy, and probably it contained a formidable proportion of dead wood...

...There is, in fact, a strong desire in government for a data bank that would include everything ascertainable about everyone, and it is being vigorously fought by the League for the Rights of Man, which French law denies many of the means available to the American Civil Liberties Union...

...But it may be that the time of the international corporate cadres, as indistinguishable from one another everywhere as the glass and steel alveoli in which they work and breed, is ending, and that it will end first of all in France...

...IT is interesting, in the context of civil liberties, that a good deal was made of Giscard's appointing Michael Poniatowski as Minister of State and Minister of the Interior...

...even when it rains and with gasoline now costing about $1.60 a gallon, the autoroutes are jammed...

...Indeed, the underlying atmosphere is curious...

...The specter of the Left is daily less frightening, notwithstanding Le Figaro's warnings to the right-thinking that "the only instance of Marxist Socialism coupled with freedom was Chile, and that quickly led to Fascism...

...meanwhile, in Germany the multinational corporations have already plunged so brutally into the battle against any kind of worker participation in management that even the Bonn government has had to petition them not to meddle...

...it will be more sober, less unrealistic, probably more solid and more durable...

...Yet certain facts stand out as France enters the mid-'70s, especially the prevailing mood of pessimism...

...The resistance is spreading, and the target is also the kind of "Eu-ropeanism" preached by Schmidt's Social Democrats to the tune of Deutschland iiber alles...

...The French rarely trust their own leaders and see little reason to trust foreign ones...

...So far no one's standard of living has changed much, yet it is generally taken for granted that something is going to happen early in the year...

...L'Express, a magazine that would like to be a combination of Time and the New Yorker, does a series on the quality of life in the future, while for almost everyone, as Le Nouvel Ob-servateur accurately observes, today is the pressing problem and tomorrow is just something to talk about...

...eliminating police identification for Frenchmen (though not for foreigners) registering at hotels, and fingerprints on identity cards...

...Since it will be winter," he told Charles Lam Markmann, an American writer and critic living in Paris, is the author of The Buckleys...

...Even Le Figaro, never known for its attachment to the working class, was outraged by existing pay scales -beginning as low as $200 a month -and the living conditions they impose, and working conditions: Many of the sanitation men, for example, get their city-owned coveralls filthy on the garbage trucks during the morning and have to spend the afternoon cleaning the streets by hand in their own clothes because there are not enough uniforms for them...

...Poniatowski announced with great fanfare that he was ending illegal eavesdropping, mail interception and surveillance...

...The latest experience of the broadcasting industry was enough to dispel any lingering illusions...

...Skepticism is very nearly a national characteristic...

...France is always assumed to be the prime example of the functionary's society, and in a certain sense this is true...

...November had hardly begun before the big shops were all tarted up for the Christmas trade...

...Similarly, tha construction and sales of luxury condominiums seem unimpeded by prices and interest rates that are worse than New York's but lower than West Germany's (where the inflation rate is lower because the starting point was so much higher...

...And about 68 per cent of the population-regardless of class, age, sex, education, party, or occupation-expect things to get steadily worse this year, the primary worries being prices and jobs...

...There is every reason to suppose that for once the majority, however disparate its components and its concerns, is absolutely right...

...This is less true of the managers and technocrats-in that respect Giscard is an exception-so magnificently vivisected in Rene-Victor Pilhes' new novel, L'lmpre-cateur...

...Last year was the 30th anniversary not only of the liberation of Paris but of a few German massacres in France, most notably in Oradour-sur-Glane, where an entire village was herded into a church and burned to death (those who tried to escape were machine-gunned -a popular German amusement in occupied Europe...

...It is impossible to be pessimistic about such a nation...

...Nonetheless, the French are not in despair...

...People who have jobs pass the lots of unsold cars twice a day, even if they do not read the business pages, and here as almost everywhere the car is the thing, the symbol that is the hardest to do without...

...How and when things will change no one guesses...

...Paris is empty every Sunday...

...The fla-grancy of this shotgun marriage, with its handsome dowry provided by the unconsulted taxpayers, may accelerate a very different manner of dealing with the failures of capitalism and the menace of massive unemployment in key industries...

...But the French, though well accustomed to knaves, do not gladly endure fools...

...This essential hostility to civil liberties is characteristic of the "liberal" Giscard government...

...Popular sentiment is shifting to the Left: If it has marooned the new Particles forces nouvelles, the latest and thus far weakest avatar of French Fascism, it has also ignored the innumerable extreme-Left sects...

...Giscard proclaimed his bankruptcy at the end of November when he broadcast ostensibly the first of a series of monthly homilies...

...and destroying all secret files accumulated through illegal activities...

...During the week it is hard to believe that anyone uses the city's excellent public transportation system...

...Valery Giscard d'Estaing squeaked into office last May by parading a public-relations "liberalism" that in the end won him the support of those who could neither vote for Mitterrand nor stomach the undiluted reactionism of Giscard's Gaul-list backers-individuals agreeable to a bit of reform here and there but fearful of change...

...But I have not met one Frenchman of any class, age, political tendency, or occupation who believes the illegal acts have been stopped or the files destroyed -or that either will happen in his lifetime...

...Both the Socialists and the Communists, who have traditionally denounced each other's willingness to preside over the class enemy's interests, have expressed their willingness to govern, even under Giscard's Presidency, if Chirac should fall (or be pushed...

...France, like Italy and West Germany, faces an unpleasant dilemma: Much big native capitalism remains (psychologically) at the level of feudalism, with all this implies in terms of absolutism and a not wholly wicked paternalism...

...There are so many of these places, one cannot help wondering where the buyers come from and how long they will be able to keep up the payments...

...Which explains the victory of contraception and the struggle of abortion...

...but, as soon as anything really serious comes up, that's the end of it...

...Hardest hit were those whose training and experience fell in tenuous cultural and journalistic domains where jobs are scarce in the best times, and who were union activists...