Change of Scene
From DARSIE GILL1E
PARIS
WITII July 14 come and gone, the dead season has come to Paris, when unhappy husbands, abandoned by their families, wander distractedly through the streets looking for a grocer who has not locked up and gone to the seaside, too. Only Chemists and bakers are compelled by law to take their holidays in turn and indicate on their shut- tered windows their nearest rival who is still on the job. Grocers, greengrocers, butchers and restaurant-keepers seem to prefer a conspiracy to be all away together, so that the Parisians who remain faithful to their streets live in fear of a diet of bread and tranquilliser.
As the morally debilitating holiday habit spreads, events are less and less inclined to accept its yoke. They get out of hand at the end of July and sometimes gallop in August and September. The sceptical Frenchman suspects that they do not do it all by themselves, but that the men in authority, like the burglars, prefer the streets half empty when they want to get on with it.
The President has now reopened negotiations With the Algerian rebel government after asking the nation not to let the Algerian problem weigh on its mind too much. Algeria, he has almost said, matters because it is in the way, rather than for Its intrinsic importance. Decolonise so as to have Your hands free! If the Algerians want to go off all on their own, God help them!, let them do it. After nearly seven years of war, three and a half of them conducted under his direction, this Opinion shocks a great many people, especially those who have had to do the fighting, but it Pleases those who are getting bored with their °wn patriotic conviction that nothing must be given away. The President is no doubt making a last bid to convince the rebel leaders that French co-operation can be enormously valuable to their country and that they must not presuppose that it Will be always unconditionally there. He offered a similar choice to the black African territories in 1958. Only Guinea chose resolutely to go it alone, though there are evidently strong, parties for a similar course in some other ex-colonies. The President has at all events some weeks of much diminished public attention in which to attempt Once again to end the war with the hope of co- operation.
This can scarcely be achieved without rousing s°rne outcry, and it is far from certain whether it can be achieved at all. The diplomatic problem has been accentuated by Tunisia, the first of the Maghreb countries to be free. President Bour- guiba is now forced to defend himself against the criticism that others are now getting freedom on better terms, and therefore to reopen the Bizerta question at a moment that is necessarily awkward fOr France. But then the slow evolution of France in the last three and a half years, however much the military revolt of April may retro- APectively explain it, has left problems to accumu- late and go sour. While the military situation improved, while money was poured into Algeria Or many admirable as well as many destructive Vrposes, the political situation has moved against ranee. At the final count the Government will necessarily be asked if all the lives lost and expenditure were in vain. The summer holidays would be a good time to strike the bargain if it can be done in the time, though, alas, even if the bargain can be achieved before Paris comes alive again, the wind-up will take much longer.
• Against the bitterness that must arise the Piesi- dent has reopened another theme—the 'marriage of France' to her century, the economic and technical development that has already permitted her to enter the Common Market without grave risk to her industry, though without as much advantage to her agriculture as her farmers think her due. Economic success is not usually the theme to which the President gives priority. When he does, it is a little like the broadcasts that Sir Winston Churchill delivered when he had to think as much of the forthcoming election as of the final stages of the war. As an officer who always hoped to see the French army technically and tactically in the lead, President de Gaulle should not really surprise us when he pitches on technical progress and industrial expansion as a sufficient reason to forget for the moment the still unsolved problem of Algeria, not to mention the mutiny of last April. But to call France's attention to this economic perspective is also to point to the pre- occupations of her leaders before first Indo-China and then North Africa concentrated the lime- light on themselves—namely the creation of Europe.
While the President has always refused to believe in the supra-nationalist approach, he has in his own way believed in the possibilities of uniting Europe. He is reported to have offered in 1958 as one reason why he must come back to office, that he was the only man who could drive through the streets of Paris with President Bourguiba. He might as well have said that he alone could entertain on behalf of France the President of West Germany. He has entertained both these men in the first half of this year and his German guest may have been more significant for the future than the African one. The two visits were at all events complementary, for it looks very much as if the role of the Common Market was amongst other things to give the European nations a substitute for colonial imperialism. To see the frontiers drop inside Europe undoubtedly provides a substitute for seeing them go up between countries and their former dependencies. It gives Europeans a sense of elbow-room though within a reduced space.
France's part in opening this new perspective was the work of the Fourth Republic. Although the ideas of men like Robert Schuman are only partially acceptable to the President, he has at least not tried to reverse the current. His latest broadcast is more implicitly than explicitly European, and his expressed attitude is less generous both than it used to be on African topics and than that of the founders of the Europe of the Six. This is no doubt partly due to the difficult diplomatic situation in which he finds himself and to the shift of the basis of his support inside France. He is now much less the hope of romantics, whether on the right or left, than the guarantor of security to the money-minded and non-political small man. His relations with both trade unions and parties have deteriorated. But in spite of its drawbacks the broadcast does look forward to a state of affairs when a view on to the Atlas mountains will not be the perpetual accompaniment of a walk through the French political scene.
Previous page
