COMMUNICATIONS: No Don Quixote Again

The French repented one of their own dramatic gestures. Nearly two years ago, on the insistence of Communist cabinet members, Paris had stopped all trade with Spain, and closed the frontier. No other nation had gone that far, though most U.N. members joined in resolutions against Axis-loving Francisco Franco. By last week the French felt that the gesture had hurt French exports more than it had hurt Franco. They called it off, reopened the border.

One midnight last week, while cameras snapped and ground, French frontier guards lifted the striped barrier across the Bidassoa River bridge at Hendaye. At 8:20 next morning, the de luxe Pyrenées-Côte d’Argent Express pulled into Hendaye station. And there the glistening blue cars sat for four hours, caught in a snarl of bureaucratic red tape. Paris had forgotten to order the Hendaye station master to let the train through, and he liked to have his orders. Sixty of the passengers, members of Milan’s La Scala Opera, volubly wondered if they would get to Lisbon in time for their performance of Rigoletto. Paris finally sent “a thousand regrets,” and the express rolled on.

Now French machines, textiles and fertilizers might move southward again, in exchange for Spanish pyrites, copper and citrus fruit. Reflected the Gaullist France Libre: “Let’s never play Don Quixote again. . . . By this silly closing of the frontier, we have lost an important market. . . . Others, more realistically minded than we, have taken our place. . . . Now we will have to reconquer the place we once held in Spain’s foreign trade.”