FRANCE

Too far too fast

CHARLES HARGROVE

Paris When President Pompidou, a few weeks ago, chose M Rene Tomasini, a forceful and out- spoken Corsican, with an excellent record as organiser of party congresses and rallies

as the new secretary general of the UDR, it was to breathe a bit of vim and vigour into the cumbersome, and somewhat sleepy

Gaullist machine in time for the local elec- tions next month. His predecessor, M Robert Poujade, who was dying to become a Minister, was his very opposite: a calm, con- sidered, cultured man, with a tinge of aca- demic pedantry.

The trouble is that M Tomasini was not content with being a mere organiser, an 'apparatus' man working silently and effec- tively behind the scenes. He wanted some of his share of the limelight. And being the kind of person he is, he did not go about it by halves. A friendly get-together with the lobby correspondents gave him the opportun- ity for making a splash, and pouring his heart out, for saying out loud what he had been hearing for months from disgruntled and bewildered party workers. He attacked the 'cowardice' of the judges—`and I weigh my words,' he insisted, before the flabber- gasted lobby correspondents; the leftwing partiality of the first television channel; the Prime Minister's 'blunder' in setting it up in competition to the more orthodox second channel; and finally the government's ten- dency to listen more to its bureaucrats and technocrats than to the parliamentarians of its majority. In a roundabout way, it was also an attack against President Pompidou himself.

The Prime Minister was up in arms, so was the Minister of Justice. It was agreed that M Tomasini must go. But when he appeared, chastened, before the Gaullist central com- mittee last week, having already admitted that he had gone a bit too far, a majority of its members sided with him. They did not find what he had said very timely or very adroit; but basically they agreed.

The fact is that M Tomasini's language was moderate compared to what a sub- stantial section of the Gaullist party has been saying for some time. M Tomasini had himself launched a sharp attack on the

Prime Minister at the party congress in Ver- sailles in June which echoed the mumbling and grumbling of the rank and file about the government's exaggerated inclination to give aid and comfort to very recent converts to Gaullism, and its too pronounced liberal policy. The gradual transformation of the UDR

from a Gaullist party into a Pompidolian party has not occurred without a hitch. But it weathered the two greatest crises of its existence far better than anyone—even itself —had expected.

Though its enemies of the left have reg- ularly been predicting its break-up and dissolution, it has remained relatively united by the necessity of remaining in power. But the rank and file did not understand nor appreciate the subtle policy of change to which it was being converted in the name of Gaullist continuity. Party membership drop- ped. There was confusion and disarray. M Tomasini like a good party man grasped all this as soon as he took control of the party machine. And he came to the conclusion that it was necessary, to prevent further decay, to lay down some clear cut boundaries beyond which liberalisation should not go.

Many of the things M Tomasini said had been expressed privately by M Pompidou also—about the first television channel, about the judges, about the power of the techno- crats, especially the young Turks around the Prime Minister, several of whom came from political horizons far removed from Gaul- lism's. He backs M Chaban-Delmas's policy of reform, his substitution of dialogue and discussion between employers and unions for the traditional confrontation and strikes.

But he is sometimes inclined to feel his Prime Minister goes too far and too fast,

that he tends to rock the boat, and bewilder - that vast silent majority of Frenchmen who overwhelmingly voted for a return to law and order and tranquillity after the student unrest and general strike of 1968.

He may be conservative and authoritarian —power lies squarely in the Elysee nowadays.

(There is no 'reserved domain' of policy, as there was under his predecessor, because all domains are reserved.) But M Pompidou is also a prudent man. Keeping the peace means not only preserving law and order but also preventing accumulated discontent from building up into an explosive situation. It means keeping one's ear close to the ground, not only to the mumbles and grumbles of the Gaullist family, and its demand for firm- ness with leftists and students; but also giving some satisfaction to labour. That is the philosophy of Pompidolian pragmatism. In political terms, it is the philosophy of about half the present Gaullist party, of the Inde- pendent Republicans of M Giscard d'Estaing, and the moderates of the Centre. The Tom- asini outburst has revealed two basic currents in Gaullism—a Pompidolian one and a traditional, Bonapartist, one. Both are likely to coexist, with ups and downs, like the Tomasini affair, until the parliamentary elections in 1973, from which President Pompidou is determined to obtain a clear verdict of support for himself.

In 1968, the overwhelming victory of the Gaullist forces was due to special circum- stances which will not be repeated—the reaction of the silent majority in the country against the student and labour unrest. In 1973, this decisive factor will no longer operate, unless the government really plays its hand very clumsily, and succeeds in welding together all the isolated outbursts of labour discontent which are a permanent feature of the French scene in what the Prime Minister called the transition from one type of society to another—the industrial to the post-industrial. A repetition of May 1968 is unlikely for the very reason that it has occurred, a Socialist leader told me. The government, the employers' leaders, are fore- warned, and disinclined henceforth to rest complacently on their laurels.