No One Here But Us Liberals

Valery Giscard d'Estaing promised to bring "change" to France. So far, at least, he is delivering. In a carefully staged show of disdain for the pomp of the Gaullist years, he walked rather than rode to his inauguration at the Elysee Palace, wore a business suit instead of tails, talked for a few minutes about a "new era" instead of delivering an oration about the glories of the past. Over the next few days he announced the first of several measures to "relax" French political life. He decreed an end to widespread wiretapping by government snoopers, promised greater freedom for the French press, and placed a ban on sales of arms to unspecified regimes at odds with France's "liberal mission." Said Giscard: "France is a liberal country, and must set its sights further on going in that direction."

The precise nature of Giscard's liberalizing will become clear during the next few weeks, when he reveals his plans to deal with France's serious inflation (now 18%) and bring about his heralded "transformation of French society." But to judge by the Cabinet that Giscard trotted out in a chatty, informal television presentation, it was clear that he is unafraid of a wrenching break with the Gaullist past. After 16 years in power, De Gaulle's self-proclaimed heirs had come to view the government as their own; Gaullists held ten of the 16 Cabinet posts in the late Georges Pompidou's government. But Giscard named a renegade Gaullist, former Interior Minister Jacques Chirac, as his Premier; although the new President needs Gaullist support to get his programs approved by the National Assembly, he added injury to insult by giving only four of the remaining 15 portfolios to orthodox Gaullists.

As he had promised, Giscard brought a woman into his Cabinet. Simone Veil, 46, a prominent Paris jurist, was named Minister of Health. Three posts went to members of Giscard's small Independent Republican Party. No fewer than eight posts went either to nonpolitical civil servants or to leaders of the small center parties that made indispensable contributions to Giscard's wafer-thin margin of victory. One of them was Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, 50, publisher of the weekly L 'Express and self-styled French new frontiersman, who after many years of unsuccessfully striving to project himself as a Gallic John Kennedy, has at last found a national role; as Giscard's Minister of Reform, a new post, he will have a chance to try out his long-advocated proposals for giving more power and authority to local and regional government. Jean Lecanuet, 54, another centrist leader with somewhat more real political clout than J.J. S.-S., was given the sensitive Justice Ministry. Giscard is likely to lean most heavily on three ministers with whom he has strong personal ties:

JACQUES CHIRAC, 41, Premier. More than a year ago, Chirac, then Minister of Agriculture, went out of his way to praise Giscard as "one of the rare statesmen today." After Pompidou's death, Chirac brashly defied the party barons by scorning the official Gaullist candidate, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, and coming out openly for Giscard. Whether or not Chirac's defection contributed to Chaban's humiliating defeat at the polls, the barons were angrier than they have been at any time since Giscard abandoned De Gaulle in 1969.

"Jacques the Knife," as Chirac is now known in some quarters, is tall (6 ft. 2 in.), stubborn, impatient, ill-tempered at times--and unusually effective in getting things done. Born into a well-to-do Paris family, Chirac began his rise to power in 1962, when at the age of 30 he landed a job on the staff of Pompidou, then De Gaulle's Premier. Chirac's talents as a fixer and arranger made him indispensable to Pompidou, who fondly called him "my bulldozer." He included him in the small circle of staffers with whom he would share a cocktail at day's end.

After the student-worker upheavals of 1968, Chirac conducted some of the tricky negotiations with union leaders on labor reforms that ended the crisis. When Pompidou moved to the Elysee, he brought his bulldozer into the Cabinet as Agriculture Minister and later Interior Minister. Several years ago, Chirac observed that the chief function of a Premier in France is to "take responsibility for everything that is a bit disagreeable and difficult." Chirac has seldom expressed a firm conviction on any issue; he seems less interested in political abstractions than in the technical exercise of sheer power.

MICHEL PONIATOWSKI, 52, Minister of State and Minister of Interior. "Ponia," as he is known everywhere, is Giscard's closest friend and crony in or out of the government. A patrician with royal Polish ancestry--one of his forebears was a marshal in Napoleon's army--Ponia-towski has known Giscard since student days, and he is distantly related to Giscard's wife. He helped Giscard set up his Independent Republican Party in 1966. Well before Pompidou's death, Poniatowski had worked quietly to line up the centrist parties' support that proved so crucial in the election two weeks ago.

For years Poniatowski had been a vocal and witty critic of the Gaullist party, though it was a role that he found somewhat difficult to play after Pompidou named him Health Minister 14 months ago. He complained that the party's paternalism was becoming mere arrogance, that France itself was catching "the Gaullist disease, which is to live on the past, on traditions, on dogmas."

As Interior Minister, he will have a chance to practice what he has long been preaching about civil liberties. One reason for the quick action on wiretapping was the fact that Poniatowski's own phone, as he discovered to his rage one day last year, had been one of 5,000 that were routinely tapped by Interior Ministry eavesdroppers for years.

JEAN SAUVAGNARGUES, 59, Foreign Minister. Calm and smoothly professional, Sauvagnargues (pronounced sew-va-nyarg) should bring a sharp change in tone to French diplomacy. His predecessor, Michel Jobert, delighted in public jousting with Washington over oil and Middle East policy--a performance that Pompidou felt was necessary to please his restive Gaullist constituency.

Sauvagnargues's unexpected move from the French embassy in Bonn to the Quai d'Orsay was in itself a mild slap at the Gaullist orthodoxy. A wartime supporter of De Gaulle's, Sauvagnargues earned the general's disfavor later on, when he publicly allowed that France might want to encourage the continuance of the Atlantic Alliance. He was promptly banished to a long career of postings abroad, culminating in his appointment as Ambassador to West Germany in 1970.

Sauvagnargues is a confessed Germanophile who was very popular in Bonn. His return to grace suggests that Giscard is serious about getting European unity moving again around a friendly French-German axis (see box). As for France's relations with the U.S., Sauvagnargues in the recent past has claimed to be a convinced Gaullist in foreign policy matters. That means that he is skeptical about the future of European unity but feels France should encourage it as a useful device to fend off the weight of the superpowers.

Giscard made a point of making public a private warning that he had given to his newly named ministers. "We are here to change France, not to build our careers," he told them, adding that "you will be judged by the success or failure of your personal management." That was Giscard's way of announcing that the new president of France would be quick to shuffle his Cabinet if trouble arises, as it well could, given the country's economic uncertainties and Giscard's costly campaign promises to raise the pay and improve working conditions for millions of workers. But having begun to change France's political style in a personal way, Giscard runs the risk of being personally blamed if and when some of his changes go awry.

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