FRENCH ASSEMBLY

The Curse of Fractions

TWO weeks after the fall of Pierre Mendes-France, France was still without a government. President Coty had gone to the right and gone to the left; three men (Antoine Pinay, Pierre Pflimlin and Christian Pineau) had failed to satisfy the Assembly; this week a fourth, Edgar Faure (Mendes-France's Finance Minister), was trying, and once again the air was filled with the bickering, squabbling and jockeying that characterizes the National Assembly of the Fourth Republic.

Snapped the left-wing Combat: "This absurd regime dishonors France, submits her to ridicule abroad, and is pushing her toward catastrophe." Man for man, few legislatures can equal the men of the French Assembly for wit, eloquence and intelligence. Many of its leaders are honored veterans of the French Resistance. Why are these courageous men unable, despite themselves, to give France a stable government? The answer is simple, but not helpful: France is deeply distrustful of a strong government. Too frequently and too recently, Frenchmen have had to man the barricades against oppression. Since 1789 France has lived under four republics, two emperors, one consulate, one directorate and three monarchies. In the France of the peasant and the petit bourgeois, where the bell jangles on the shop door as the customer enters, there is a deep-seated "incivisme," an indifference to and distrust of any government at all. The designers of the Fourth Republic (1946) provided what France wanted: a legislative body with absolute control over any executive, however strong his personality, and an electoral system which made it sure that no one party could obtain a decisive majority.

By Will, by Whim. The result is an Assembly of 627 Deputies who agree on nothing but their own prerogatives--among them the power to overturn, at will or at whim, 15 governments in the last nine years. Once elected for their five-year terms, the Deputies are assured of tenure. If they are careful not to bring down two governments within 18 months by constitutional (314 votes) majorities --which they can and do avoid by close collaboration among themselves--there is no power in France, least of all a Premier, who can force them to face the voters.

When they vote disapproval, they risk nothing but the Premier's neck--and France's reputation.

The French (and their Deputies) pride themselves on their individuality, and excel in lucid definition of their differences.

Besides the antagonisms of farmer v. townsman, big business v. small business, worker v. industrialist. France suffers from an older, more stubborn and more pervasive division--the division between clerical and anticlerical. It is a division which makes two parties where there could have been one, which splits the non-Communist left into anticlerical Socialists and pro-Catholic M.R.P., the non-Gaullist right into secularist Radical Socialists and religionist Independents.

Sprawled around the semicircle of red-cushioned seats in the Palais Bourbon are six main groupings and a pivotal splinter.

P: Communists: Polling almost 5,000,000 votes and mustering 98 Deputies, the French Communist Party is second only to Italy's in the West. Like a huge, teetering rock, it looms menacingly over every possible government, forces any coalition to muster three out of every five non-Communist Deputies to its support.

P: Socialists: With 105 Deputies, the largest party in the Assembly. Rigidly doctrinaire, they often seem to have defined their doctrine first, only then invited supporters--an attitude that has left them supported chiefly by schoolteachers and civil servants. Afraid that any willingness to compromise would lose them votes to the Communists, they supported but did not join the Mendes-France government.

P: Democratic and Socialist Resistance Union (U.D.S.R.): A small party (24 votes) of "notables," strong in their local areas but with no following among the electorate as a whole--a "general staff without troops." Swinging between the Socialists and the Radical Socialists, "too well placed to be ignored and too small to be feared," U.D.S.R. is torn by the personal rivalry of Rene Pleven (a leading "European" and a personal enemy of Mendes) and ambitious young Franc,ois Mitterrand, a brilliant orator and resistance hero who was Mendes' Minister of the Interior.

P: Radical Socialists: The party that largely governed France from 1902 to World War II, its 76 Deputies are highly individual strongmen, linked loosely by faith in science and progress and an antipathy to the church. "Radicalism is only the political expression of rationalism," explains Edouard Herriot, its grand old man. Comprised of small businessmen, provincial lawyers and professional men, it includes extreme leftists and reactionaries, dynamic men like Mendes-France and sleepy-eyed Henri Queuille, the farmers' friend and father of immobilisme.

P: Popular Republicans (M.R.P.): Founded at war's end as France's Christian Democratic Party, it is a vehicle for socially progressive Roman Catholicism, has 85 Deputies. Most "European" of all parties, its leaders, Robert Schuman (father of the Coal-Steel Community) and Georges Bidault (now somewhat discredited for his vendetta against Mendes-France), shared the Foreign Ministry until the advent of Mendes. Its young, rising star is Pierre Pflimlin, called "a Mendes-France who goes to Mass." Close to the Socialists on most issues, the two are fiercely opposed on state subsidies for Roman Catholic schools--a burning issue.

P: Independents: A loose grouping including the Independent Republicans and Peasants, its 105 Deputies represent big landowners, conservative businessmen, winegrowers and farmers. The Independents are divided by their Catholicism from the Radical Socialists. The party's grand old man is 76-year-old Paul Reynaud, who was Premier when France fell, but its real leader is dapper Antoine Pinay, the "man with the face of a voter" who gave France its first conservative postwar government.

P: Gaullists: Until 1952, the Gaullists were singleminded: no coalition government was acceptable that did not move toward a strong executive. Leftist on economic questions and sturdy champions of the church, they were dedicated to a strong imperial France and to hostility to Germany in Europe. Now split and losing strength (34 members of the conservative wing splintered off in 1952), the remaining 72 loyalists are led by tough young Jacques Soustelle.

Left & Further Left. Even the seating occasions disputes: in France, everyone wants to sound "left," if only for election purposes. Even right-wing candidates are apt to call themselves Independent Socialists. The Gaullists protested wildly against being seated on the extreme right.

The acrimony between the Radical Socialists and the M.R.P. was solved only when the M.R.P. got an L-shaped seating pattern whose toe extended leftward across the front of the Radical benches.

Since all parties are condemned to being permanent minorities, they dare not alienate the special groups on which they chiefly depend. Socialists must always demand more favors for civil servants, and Independents always refuse any reform of the farm support system. The M.R.P.

sturdily supported Pinay's 1952 government until he tried to take a sliver off family allowances, for which the party, as Catholic spokesman, feels itself a special champion. Thus, a government falls because of the accumulation of differences --not with its enemies--but with its friends.

The Interests. Cutting across all party lines are the special interests, which flourish in a body where a government's very life depends on the swing of 10 or 20 votes. Biggest is the alcohol lobby, which keeps French winegrowers, beet farmers and distillers producing twice the alcohol the French can drink and forces the government to buy the surplus at four times the world price. The North African lobby, run by Senator Henri Borgeaud, took alarm when Mendes tried to reduce the colons' control of the local police. As a result, Algeria's Rene Mayer and 19 other Radical Socialists deserted their own Premier and brought his downfall.

Then there are personal ambitions.

Whenever a government begins to totter, many a Deputy is willing to give it the last shove because he wonders: "Why shouldn't I become a Cabinet Minister?" Nearly one out of every four Deputies in the Assembly has been a Minister.

Each party's Deputies weigh the exact amount of support they can afford to give a government to acquire credit and avoid blame with their followings, whether to keep it in by abstention, to vote for it without joining it, to join it but criticize it, or to join on condition that the party gets a choice ministry.

Blue, White, or Both. Such niceties are reflected in the voting system. Votes are taken by depositing in an urn cards bearing the Deputy's name--white for yes, blue for no, both cards for abstention. But a Deputy does not have to be present to vote, and even if he is, he customarily lets his party leader deposit his vote. By judiciously mixing "yeas," "nays" and "abstains," a party leader can calculate just what degree of approval to render a policy, how to rebuke a Premier with an insultingly small majority, how to bring him down without taking the blame. If the leader needs more time to assess the situation, he simply drops in duplicate ballots for several Deputies, which forces a recount. Before every important vote, the Assembly adjourns so that each party can decide on the "dosage," at which the Radicals are the admitted masters.

The total result is that nothing much gets done. It reduces progressive Frenchmen to despair and to a cynical conviction that nothing can ever be done. But it suits provincial "static" France very well. And impatient critics who argue that all France needs is a good two-party system forget the bitter cleavages of French life. If France were divided now into a Left and Right Party, the Left would be dominated, in all probability, by the Communists. In French eyes, a multiparty system is exasperating, but safer.

Besides, in France the sun shines, the grapes grow, and life can be good. France, the cynics say, is a tranquil country with agitated legislators. The indifferent tranquillity would be fine if there were no injustices to be redressed, no problems of poverty and inequality, no stultifying complex of restrictive and anachronistic business practices that need to be put right, and no deteriorating situation in North Africa. The system "works" because France has chosen to default on its proper place in the world.

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