The Dilemma of the French Left
By Professor D. W. BROGAN
tt A France s'ennuie." •That lapidary phrase condemned,
in advance, the dying bourgeois monarchy of Louis Philippe. And if one neglected all other aspects of the life of the Fourth Republic, one might foresee the imminent con- demnation of its parliamentary system For, at a moment when the Government of the Republic is supported, very tepidly, by a good deal less than half the Deputies, public interest in the parliamentary dilemma is almost invisible. A crowd barely running into one figure was all that was to be noted outside the Assemblee Nationale when the Socialist Ministers were resigning, and it was hard to resist the temptation to speculate what would next be carved on the facade to cover up " Assemblee Nationale," as it had covered up " Chambre des Deputes," that had covered up, in turn, " Corps Legislatif."
It would, of course, be absurd to take this apparent passivity as conclusive, but it remains true that French political nature abhors a vacuum, and that a parliamentary democracy cannot really work if Parliament is ignored or despised. True, there was plenty of easy and fashionable denigration of Parliament under the Third Republic, but there was also a lot more interest, even if a scornful, even if a contemptuous, exploitation of its comic side. Charles II said of the House of Lords, it was " as good as a play." The French Parliament is not as good as a play. Even the actors don't think so, and when something does happen, it is something ugly. The kind of scenes made by the Communists is no laughing matter, for, however well they are orchestrated, planned as to time and occasion, they do represent something formidable. At moments one fears that it would not take very much to turn the Palais Bourbon into an imitation of its predecessor over the river, where the sanction of a lost debate was to be despatched before the Revolutionary Tribunal. A Parliament that attracts attention only in moments of outrageous disorder is not likely to be an effective instrument of government or, at any rate, an effective means of winning and keeping the voters interested in the pressing issues of the day.
France has made, in many ways, an astonishing recovery, so astonishing that it easy to reflect, comfortably, that Politics don't matter. Some of the politics don't matter ; they reveal merely the natural preoccupation of politicians with the dangers of election. But some matter a good deal. Parliaments, before this, have had to put up with minority parties determined to make a mockery of the procedure and make the life of the institution unbearably difficult to carry on. There was the Irish Party, but its motive was to get out, to plague Pharaoh, with all its resources, till he let the people go. The French Communists do not propose to go ; they propose to stay and take over. Discrediting Parliament is a stagg in a much bigger process, the assimilation of the Fourth Republic to the People's Democracies.
It is difficult to convey to English readers the difference it makes having a very large Communist Party, with a hard core of twenty per cent. of the voters, with round about a fourth of the Deputies—and with the memories of the German occupation as a continual stressing of the fact that this Party is a political instrument of a Power with overwhelming armed force at its disposal. The prestige of the Red Army, a well-earned prestige ; the fear of what the Red Army might bring in its fourgons, a well- founded fear—these are part of the French problem. But possibly a more serious part is the genuine Frenchness of the problem. For what France is facing today is the old problem of the schism inside France, the alienation of the most active of the French workers from the rest of French society and the successful seizure of most of the assets of one of the great French traditions, the Revolution.
If the French Communists were only a Russian agency it would not matter so much. If they were merely upsetting the French
economy or disorganising French defences at the orders of their foreign masters, it would be bad enough, but not as bad as it is. For every time the Government, any Government, tries to defend itself, to impose the minimum of order, so many ghosts walk. Every action taken to preserve the law can be made, and will be made, to recall memories of the Rue Transnonain, of the June days of 1848, of the mur des Feder& of 1871, of the mutiny of the Seventeenth Infantry, all the images d'Epinal of the most varied revolutionary tradition of Western Europe. And the Ministers, Socialist or Radical, will be cast, against all historical truth but not against all political plausibility, as Cavaignac, as Gallifet.
The conspiratorial character of the current Communist campaign is so evident, the fact that, if a Parliamentary Government cannot maintain the authority of the French State, there are formidable people willing and ready to do it—all this impresses the Deputies with a sense of the dangers of the Parliamentary game. But no consciousness of the dangers can alter the fact that, for the Socialists, for the left wing of the M.R.P., the alienation of their workers, the final transfer to the Communists of the assets of being the leaders and defenders of le peuple, is a risk that emotionally, if not quite rationally, they put above the dangers to the working of parliamentary institutions inherent in the musical chairs of votes of confidence and other parliamentary parlour games.
Of course, it is possible that the Communists are over-playing their hand. The " hiccup " strikes sometimes do back-fire. Those Parisians who, on a wet and windy night, find all heat and light cut off, find the lights going out in a bus as well (against the will of the conductor), are not won to the Communist Party. In Rome in 1922, in Berlin in 1932, such tactics did misfire. And there is something comic in calling out the workers of the great national arsenals to protest against making war materials! The workers might be very disconcerted if the Government took them at their word and shut down the arsenals. Then it is true that the prestige of the Communist Party among the intellectuals is not what it was. Kostov and Rajk, Lysenko, official art, official history are hard to swallow in a country where ridicule used to kill. During the Stalin birthday-beano people noted that the place where you couldn't possibly see the work of Picasso was Russia, and an ingenious female friend of mine, by 'phoning " S.V.P.," learned that the famous dove of peace couldn't possibly fly. (I was also told that the friends of modern fellow-travelling art are worried that the U.S.A. is going the way of U.S.S.R. and adopting Stalinist canons of permissible art to the financial distress of the artists.) But in Saint-Denis the protests of Vercors or the unshaken loyalty of M. Louis Aragon don't really matter.
And it is in places like Saint-Denis that the party has its roots. There and elsewhere it has one good campaign-point, the inter- minable, expensive and wearisome war in Indo-China. The cost of that war represents nearly all the budget deficit, the formal cause of the current 'political crisis. The war is regarded with horror by people as far from following the party line as M. Claude Bourdet, and the question whether a Government has a right to impose such a war on the country is being warmly debated between him and M. Francois Mauriac. Tonking is becoming as odious a name as it was in the late 'eighties, when it brought down Ferry and nearly ended the Third Republic. Without this running sore the servility of the French Communists might turn all but the strongest stomachs.
In the face of the inability of the Assembly to produce a majority, General de Gaulle has again staked a claim not, indeed, to immediate power; but to a consultation of the people, leading the way to the making of a new constitution. The present one has had, he asserts, a fair trial and stands condemned. It will be difficult, indeed, to resist this argument unless the Assembly can create a majority. The peuple souverpin may well look askance at a body incapable of performing its primary duty. In every part of the Assembly there are men and parties who have good reason to fear a dissolution and a Gaullist solution of the con- stitutional problem. They may comfort themselves with the thought that the General is a figure followed by a row of ciphers.
It is not quite true, but even if it were true, it might not be important. I reminded one of the most brilliant of modern French historians of the greater poverty of Louis Napoleon in 1850-51. M. Andre Malraux, to name no other, is worth a lot more than Persigny or even Morny. The Socialists are impaled more than any other group. The sillier among them (especially the militants who are not deputies) will be tempted to strike an attitude, to enter into a tacit alliance with the Communists, fighting fire with fire. On the Right there are many who will be no more happy at the prospect of being, Willy nilly, allies of the General, for a dissolution might turn on the question " Was the General right in 1946 as in 1940 ? Ls he right in 1950 as he was in 1946 when he left the Government rather than try to work an unworkable machine ? " They don't know the answer the voters would give to a simple issue like that, but they fear it.
So caution and apprehension may induce another papering-over of the cracks. Parisians have begun to apply to their political situation the old Vienna gibe: " Situation hopeless but not desperate." But Paris is not Vienna, France not Austria. Fluctuat nec mergitur is a good motto for Paris—and for France, but even the French ship of state can't go on shipping water for ever without foundering—or calling all hands to the pump under a new command.
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