How the General turned the tables

FRANCE MARC ULLMANN

Paris—Two forces have prevented France from falling apart during her hour of crisis. The first is a President of the Republic who chose not to abdicate. The second is a Communist party which is afraid of living dangerously. These two forces, however opposed they may appear to be, have in fact been dependent on each other. For if the Communist party had really sought a revolution, the President would not have been able to stay in office without plunging the country into civil war. And if General de Gaulle had resigned, the Communist party could hardly have failed to have been led, in spite of itself, into dangerous waters.

This is why the two most perilous days of the French crisis were Tuesday 28 May and Wed- nesday 29 May. For these were the two days during which doubts crept in about the real intentions both of the Communist party and of the President of the Republic. The majority of Frenchmen began to fear that, so as to avoid being outflanked on the left, the Communist party would put itself at the head of a revolu- tion which, up to then, it had done everything in its power to prevent. And the same majority opinion began to doubt the capacity of General de Gaulle to face up to events.

Three factors seemed to have conspired at a single point of time, to create an explosive situation.

First, the referendum proposed by General de Gaulle seemed, even in his own mind, to have been overtaken by events. In fact, when the President of the Republic originally con- ceived this constitutional outcome of the crisis, he had hoped that those Frenchmen who wanted change would vote `Yes' to the text of the referendum because of its content, while those who put order first would still vote `Yes' as the only means of keeping de Gaulle in power. This analysis, however, was soon over- taken. Right from the beginning, the forces of the left insisted on seeing only the plebiscite aspect of the referendum. As they saw it, the various reforms could be implemented in other ways—and, in any case, the President seemed to them hardly the most appropriate person to implement them.

From that moment, the referendum was no longer simply ambiguous: it became the very negation of all political logic. For those who intended to vote 'Yes' to a programme of re- form would be the people who most feared reform and saw in de Gaulle the only bulwark of the established order; while those who were going to vote `No' would be the people who, in other circumstances, would have been most in favour of the contents of the referendum, but who now wanted to get rid of de Gaulle by constitutional means. It was hardly sur- prising, in these circumstances, that the majority of Frenchmen began to have their doubts about a President whose manoeuvre had so palpably backfired.

The second key factor was that the trade unions appeared to have only the shakiest hold over the mass of workers. In one factory after another, the workers voted against ratifying the agreements which had been reached between the government and trade union leaders after thirty hours of negotiations at the Ministry of Social Affairs. The most powerful of the French trade union groups, the Communist-led COT, was therefore forced to change direction. Up to then it had done its utmost to defuse the revolt by making it a traditional matter of wage claims. Now the COT was forced to adopt the slogans of politics. And in so far as the slogans it used could not, it felt, be the same as those of the students (whom it had consistently con- demned as `anarchists,' leftists,"adventurists' and so on) it was led to adopt a line that was both ambiguous and dangerous—that is, to demand the resignation of the legal govern- ment without putting forward a single concrete suggestion of how to replace it.

When, therefore, on the Tuesday evening, M Georges Seguy, secretary-general of the COT, declared that he was not sure that there was any point in resuming negotiations with the Government, everyone concluded that this man who, only a few days before, had staked his career on exactly the opposite, was afraid above all else of being outflanked on his left, and had been reduced to adopting the well- known maxim `I must follow them, for I am their leader.' And when, on the following day (Wednesday) the COT organised massive marches through the principal towns of France —marches that were perfectly peaceful, but whose slogan was 'people's government'—the majority of Frenchmen concluded that some- thing new was on the way. And they were afraid.

Finally, there was the third factor in the equation : M Pierre Mendes-France, the former Prime Minister, began to play the part of the man of destiny. When, at the beginning of the crisis, he had called for the resignation of General de Gaulle, his speech was explained away simply as a blunder. The general view among the more sensible politicians was that Mendes-France had made a mistake in slam- ming the door in the General's face, for de Gaulle might have made him Prime Minister of a coalition government. But in the general disarray of Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, what had originally been a blunder seemed suddenly to be seen in a much more favourable light. Mendes, it was more and more being argued, was not a prisoner of the Com- munist party. Yet he was the only politician to have been applauded by the students. Ergo, he was the one man who could bring about the necessary synthesis—that is to say, undertake reforms while at the same time preserving order.

It was at this point that a number of conser- vative politicians, among them the former pre- sidential candidate M Jean Lecanuet, began seriously to consider the possibility of Mendes- France as the least of all likely evils. And ,0 one saw a thoroughly French paradox: the defenders of order were ready to accept an illegal coup d'etat. Such is the drama of a country which in two hundred years has known at least a dozen different constitutions.

This situation, however, contained within itself the seeds of its own reversal. The rallying of the party of order to Mendes-France could easily be defeated: all that was needed was for General de Gaulle to present himself as the bulwark of order. Equally, the Communist party could be persuaded to resume its stance of the previous week : all that was necessary

to achieve this was for the President of the Republic to make it clear that what was at issue was not the filling of a political void, but whether to embark on an out-and-out civil war. Finally, the ill-starred ambiguity of the referen- dum could be swept under the carpet: all that the General need do to accomplish this was to withdraw his text.

At half past four on the afternoon of Thurs- day 30 May these three conditions were satis- fied. It is not necessary to attribute magical qualities to the words of General de Gaulle to understand the consequences that flowed from them. What one witnessed was simply a return to a situation in which the various political forces of France could follow their natural courses. For France is a country which cannot go off the rails unless the principal actors in the drama are overwhelmed by feelings of fear and surrender—and this includes the mass of French people when they suddenly find them- selves on a course whose origins are fortuitous and whose consequences unpredictable.

The General instinctively understood this. In his youth he knew Machiavelli's The Prince by heart, to such an extent that he would never even bother to quote it : he would simply say (referring to a particular edition) 'such-and- such a page, such-and-such a paragraph.' Now, Machiavelli had written 'Victory is no true victory if it is won through the strength of others.' In the present situation, that meant, as the General saw it, that any government of the left that came to power illegally would inevit- ably become the prisoner of the communists, for the Communist party was the only force organised for non-electoral political combat.

The President knew very well—every French- man knew it, and the Prime Minister, M Georges Pompidou, had continually reiterated it—that the French Communist party did not want to embark on any risky adventures. But in General de Gaulle's eyes this was one reason more, and not one reason less, for indicating clearly to the party that legally elected power would not abdicate. Hence the quick visit to the army to make sure that, in the event of a 100 per cent general strike, a certain number of public services could be maintained. Hence, equally, in the quiet of Colombey, the drafting of a particularly firm speech.

We now know two unusual and significant things about this speech.

The first is that it was the President himself who chose not to appear on television, but instead to rely entirely on radio. He wanted to provide not a spectacle, but a drante. And he wanted his supporters out in the streets, not staying at home. 'What I have to say to the French people,' he confided, 'must reach them through their ears.'

The second is that General de Gaulle had not originally decided on the immediate dissolution of the National Assembly. The first version of his broadcast mentioned elections only in the context of the re-establishment of order—in other words, after the strikes were more or less over. It was M Georges Pompidou who, at half past two that same afternoon, convinced the President that immediate elections were not only possible but desirable. And so, in the last analysis, we come back to the role of the French Communist party. M Pompidou argued emphatically that the party would play the constitutional game and hence that it would not, alone, oppose the elections that all the other parties had been clamouring for. Events proved M Pompidou right. Half an hour after the General's broadcast, the Presi- dent of the parliamentary Communist group, M Robert Balanger, indicated in the clearest terms that his party would take part in the coming electoral battle. And the next day the car accepted the principle of a gradual, sector- by-sector reopening of negotiations either with the French employers' federation or, in the case of the public sector, with the government. And so we were at last back again to the situa- tion that prevailed before those two famous days, Tuesday and Wednesday, 28 and 29 May. But with this difference: that the ultimate out- come no longer hung on a referendum in which the fate of the President of the Republic de- pended on his gaining 50 per cent of the votes, but on a general election which the Gaullist party can win with only 38 per cent of the votes.

Nevertheless, the political future of France remains highly uncertain. By abandoning the referendum in favour of elections, General de Gaulle has risked creating a polarisation of France into two opposing camps. He has, in the words of a left-wing journalist, decided 'to play the population against the people' (that is to say, the majority of fear against the minority of hope). For example, M Jacques Duhamel, the leader of the centre-right, who had almost always voted against the Pompidou govern- ment, today feels himself obliged to conclude an electoral alliance with the Gaullist party.

Hence the anti-electoral movement which is now growing up among all those who had hoped that the 'May revolution' would bring about profound changes in society. Consciously or unconsciously, many workers who refuse to go back to work realise that inflation could well take away from them everything that their trade unions have won for them. Consciously or unconsciously, these workers still hope to outflank the Communist party and force it, as happened last week, to review its tactics.

This, in the immediate future, is the chief thing that could lead to a new explosive situa- tion. But looking further ahead there is another danger. This is that the elections take place and that the voters, taking their revenge for their earlier fears, return to parliament an increased Gaullist majority, reinforced predominantly with men of the right. This could make it very difficult indeed for General de Gaulle, even if he wishes to, to take the lead in implementing a programme of genuine and thoroughgoing reforms.