Foreign News: Iphigenia in Paris

The French were feeling hurt, angry, resentful, frustrated, defensive, defense less, irritable, bellicose, mean, tearful and lonely. Above all. lonely. General Charles de Gaulle, who had played the politics of grandeur with a high hand, had got his fingers pinched in Syria. Hungry for glory, the French had been happy when he signed the French-Russian pact and took his own good time about an Anglo-French agreement. They tightened their belts over their pinched bellies and felt like men again. Now they had no glory, no food and, they felt, no friends.

Bitterly the press attacked Britain as an enemy of France. It accused the U.S. of helping Italy and Germany more than it helped France. With the exception of the leftist newspapers, the press even turned on General de Gaulle’s “dear and powerful Russia.”

Said L’Epoque: “We see signs of a sudden and large improvement in international relations. We learn that the ‘Big Three’ have agreed on the veto rights, that we are now on the way ‘to a solution of the Polish question’ and lastly, in big print, that ‘Russia is siding with the Anglo-Americans.’ . . . International harmony returns with the decline of France and perhaps this decline was the price paid for it. We personally think that Iphigenia was not exactly in favor of being sacrificed and we are not so angelic as to rejoice in being the scapegoat of this international embrace. . . .”

Cried Temps Present: “There is no other right than that of force. Small nations must disappear, and when these small nations are disposed of, the big must eat one another up. . . . And they will all be eaten. But it is better to be the small one. For as the Greek poet said, ‘It is better to bear injustice than to commit it.’ “

One literary allusion that no Frenchman applied to the bluff of a weak France trying to carry out a strong-arm foreign policy was a line from Edmond Rostand’s Chantecler: “Quand le paon n’est pas là, le dindon fait la roue—When the peacock is away, the turkey spreads his tail.”