Battle for France

The U.S. prepared to engage Russia in the Battle for Germany (at Moscow in March). But last week the Battle for France, also an important sector of the Battle for Europe, was well on the way to being lost. Arthur Koestler, brilliant novelist (Darkness at Noon) and acute observer of European affairs, reported (in the N.Y. Times Sunday magazine) what he had just seen in France. His report read like an obituary of Europe's hopes.

The most conspicuously shocking fact was that on the surface, French political life in the Third and Fourth Republics seemed so much the same. There was the same game of parliamentary puss-in-corner, the same Cabinet crises, elections, party coalitions.

But underneath, forces of seismic change gathered strength. They were all the more eerie because most Frenchmen, exhausted by two titanic struggles in one lifetime, simply refused to face a third.

But three facts were inescapable:

P: France had lost her national sovereignty; she was unable to defend her frontiers.

P: The strongest party in France, the Communist Party, asserted unabashed allegiance to a foreign power (Russia).

P: The French Government had lost its internal sovereignty. No French Government could remain in power even for a few days against a strike by the C.G.T., the Communist-controlled, all-powerful central labor federation.

Said one Socialist Deputy: "If the Communist Party decides to take over France, they can do it by telephone." The Communists were not prepared to do so at once. They preferred to wait and undermine the last vestiges of sovereign government in France. France, said Koestler, "has become a Troy, with the wooden horse standing on a pedestal in the market place; the children pat it on the nose, and the grownups, who know better, do the same, with an embarrassed laugh, pretending not to hear the ominous noises in its belly."

Highlights of History. Two recent pictures, little highlights of history, illustrate Koestler's meaning. One shows Communist boss Jacques Duclos (see cut) bouncing out of his first conference with new Premier Leon Blum. Duclos is unmistakably the master, a rotund figure of smug and pregnant power. The other picture shows France's new Socialist Cabinet. On the eve of taking office, they are just as unmistakably the defeated--pathetic shadows, human ciphers called to the semblance of power, but denied even the illusion of political effectiveness. For, says Koestler, "the French Socialists have lost both their courage and their following. . . ."

A Gaullist coup might be one way out. But, like a Communist coup, that would mean civil war, and millions of leftist Frenchmen would refuse to fight for it.

Koestler's only hope, more a counsel of despair than a hope, is for a West European federation--including France, the Low Countries, a de-Francoed Spain, Italy, the Rhine province, the Saar (which France, without Big Three permission, in effect separated from Germany last fortnight with a customs cordon). "This," wrote Koestler, "is not the occasion to discuss the merits and demerits of such a plan; I mention it merely to avoid closing on a note of despair. For so desperate has the situation in Europe become that pessimism, like defeatism in times of war, is no longer permissible."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.