Chastened Men

Blithely the Deputies of the French National Assembly returned home for the weekend. The cerements were laid out, the casket prepared for a routine political burial--this time of Premier Edgar Faure, his eight-month-old government and his policy of reform for Algeria. But in their villages and provincial towns, the Deputies made a disconcerting discovery: their constituents were sick and tired of government crises. Worse, with elections scheduled for next year, the voters seemed ready to vent their displeasure on the Deputies themselves.

Suddenly, all France rang with voices warning the politicos to mend their ways. President Rene Coty himself joined in the alarm: "In the course of their ephemeral existence, the successive chiefs of government have unceasingly, and for any reason, seen their confidence and authority questioned by those who invested them. Day after day, they are tormented and harassed until they are morally and physically exhausted." Pointedly, Coty cited Clemenceau's dictum: "Liberty is the right to discipline oneself so as not to be disciplined by others." In the pages of Le Figaro, Andre Franc,ois-Poncet, longtime French High Commissioner in Germany and a "living immortal" of the Academic Franchise (see below), declared: "[Another crisis] would justify the calumnies which depict us, in all languages of the world, as the 'sick man of Europe,' the worm-eaten plank to which it would be folly to continue to cling . . . Already abroad we are being stricken from the role of great peoples."

That Special Poison. As the Deputies reassembled to decide Faure's fate, General Adolphe Aumeran, spokesman for Algeria's bitterest diehards, said cavernously: "The fall of the Cabinet would only have happy consequences." But most Deputies were in a chastened mood. Stubby little Foreign Minister Antoine Pinay spent hours in corridors and offices whipping his moderates and rightists into line. If they were counting on him to replace Faure, he told them, they were wrong. He would flatly refuse to accept the premiership. "If the government is overthrown," he said, "it will mean rejection of the European statute for the Saar, revival of German nationalism, undermining of the Atlantic alliance, and France's inability to play any influential role at the four-power talks in Geneva."

When Faure rose for a final appeal, he scarcely mentioned the Algerian program. Instead, he pleaded with his colleagues not to let "their vision [be] clouded by that special poison of our political life which makes every ministry seem odd if it lasts longer than six months." He concluded: "If your verdict is unfavorable to me, I shall accept it without bitterness; the responsibilities of power are heavy, very heavy . . . If I have not yielded to weariness, if I fight to the end, it is because I think it is my duty to do so; it is because I believe, in the bottom of my heart, that it is in the interest of my country." When the votes were counted, Faure won the Assembly's "confidence" by 308 to 254, a majority far larger than any had predicted.

As usual, the Assembly's decision was soggy with reservations. Ex-Premier Georges Bidault growled: "I voted for the government with death in my soul." One Gaullist complained: "I voted 'for' but I've just told Edgar that I deposited my ballot with a pair of fire tongs." The Socialists, who had given Faure his majority by backing his Moroccan policy, voted solidly against him on Algeria, on the ground that he was not moving toward reforms fast enough. So did three-fourths of the Gaullists, who thought Faure was going too far, and the Communists, who vote against almost everything. But of the 294 Deputies between these extremes of right and left, all but 21 voted "for."

Be Generous or Lose. Faure had achieved a mighty step forward: he had won approval for a policy of reform in North Africa, and thereby saved a part of France's tattered international reputation. But he had not done it gracefully. He had blinked at insubordination by high military officers, tolerated defiance from his own ministers, allowed appointees to modify his orders and obstruct his express wishes. In so doing, he had jeopardized his own claim to leadership. Yet his very temporizing had forced Frenchmen to accept the difficult fact: France must be generous to North Africa or lose it.

Politically, it was an extraordinary accomplishment to win two votes of confidence in two weeks by comfortable margins--and with two very different majorities. "You don't have a Premier, you have a magician," one Deputy told a Cabinet minister. At week's end, trying to capitalize on his temporary advantage, Faure announced that he would ask the Assembly to approve new elections for early December, with the hope of producing an Assembly with a more stable majority. Said Franc-Tireur sourly: "The Assembly, if it decides to dissolve itself, will have accomplished its first useful act for the Republic."

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