"Dear Compatriots"

The French have a practical way of changing Presidents. The President-elect, Rene Coty, will not start his term until Jan. 17. But he has already set up an office in the Elysee Palace (although still living in his apartment on the Quai aux Fleurs), and each day sits himself at a desk to wade through a mountain of documents to acquaint himself with the job he will hold for seven years. But since outgoing President Vincent Auriol is still in office, Coty stays out of sight at all diplomatic ceremonies so no one will be confused by double-headed protocol. Last week France's Presidents, old and new, worked together on another matter: to keep the government of Premier Joseph Laniel on its feet for the Four Power Conference at Berlin.

Tradition, but not law, requires the Premier to resign when a new President takes office. Last week it was agreed that Laniel would tender his resignation this week; that Auriol, with Coty's concurrence, would refuse the resignation and ask the Premier to continue in office; that Laniel would then go before the National Assembly and request a vote of confidence. Many embittered Deputies who would like to bring down the Laniel government might be inclined to wait, knowing that their chance will come in due time and that the next Cabinet crisis, when it happens, will probably be a blockbuster.

The presidential fireside chat is not an institution in France; but Vincent Auriol, impelled by the gravity of the hour, took to the radio last week with a few cogent words of admonition. "Dear compatriots," he said, "continuity of the Republic and the permanence of France . . . require civic concord, so my first wish is that we should reform at the earliest moment our political and social habits as well as certain institutions, that we should silence fatal passions and hatreds--those hatreds which I have sometimes had to suffer in the silence imposed by my high position, those hatreds which rend the country at the very hour when we should all be joining hands to achieve our recovery and to show our friends as well as our adversaries in the world a united strength and a resolute soul . . . After her great tragedies, the nation must in effect find herself again so as to recreate her power and avoid new tragedies . . ."

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