FRANCE: Jerry-Built

After three weeks of floundering in crisis, Fance had a new government. The new Premier was Georges Bidault, 50, head of the Mouvement Républicain Populaire (the French branch of Europe’s Christian democrats). At midnight, with his cabinet posts already assigned and the Radical and Socialist parties satisfied, Bidault went before the Assembly and won a cushiony vote of confidence, 367 to 183. Every non-Communist deputy except one voted for Bidault; yet there were many who, with deep misgivings about the prospects of his regime, voted for him because they could not stand the floundering any longer.

Some time after 3 a.m., Bidault presented his government to President of the Republic Vincent Auriol. To tired, ailing M. Auriol, most of the faces were familiar. Socialist Jules Moch, who had tried unsuccessfully to form the new government, was again the Minister of Interior. The M.R.P.’s able, courageous Robert Schuman, an ex-Premier himself, had been retained as Foreign Minister. The Radicals’ Henri Queuille, Premier of the previous government, was kept on as Vice Premier. The Peasant Party’s Maurice Petsche remained as Minister of Finance. In all, ten members of the Queuille government had places in the new regime.

Spunky Little Man. Once a rather dowdy (though brilliant) history professor, Georges Bidault suddenly blossomed out after liberation as a dapper diplomat and statesman. Britain’s Ernest Bevin had once patronizingly called him “this dear little man,” but Bidault had been almost the only one in Charles de Gaulle’s postliberation entourage with spunk enough to argue against the stiff-backed general. Son of a devoutly Catholic, well-to-do insurance broker, Georges Bidault had sided with the Spanish Loyalists, denounced Munich and become a top executive in the French underground. Before he married in 1945, he seemed to have almost no private life. Said one of his friends: “If you saw a man sitting in the sun at a cafe with his legs sprawled out, drinking wine and reading La Croix, it could not be anyone but Bidault.”

When Robert Schuman replaced him as Foreign Minister in 1948, Bidault sulked for a while on the Riviera, then plunged back into party politics and was elected president of the M.R.P. He was the French delegate to the Council of Europe at Strasbourg, and showed himself, in the phrase of one observer, “a sincere and ardent bickerer” for European cooperation.

Coalition Dilemma. Said Premier Bidault last week: “We must govern in the center with the aid of the right to reach the goals of the left.” This Gallic triple-talk indicated the weakness of the coalition that Bidault must depend upon to govern. As long as the present Chamber of Deputies exists, only patchwork coalitions of devious and delicate compromise will be possible. An increasing number of deputies want to dissolve the Chamber and hold new elections. Yet that would do little good unless there were a change in France’s basic electoral law. The present law, providing for an especially dizzy form of proportional representation, encourages small parties and makes practically impossible any clear-cut majority in the Chamber.

Bidault, whose party has been losing ground to De Gaulle’s followers, does not want an election. So the spunky little man will do his best to keep France’s latest jerry-built cabinet from crashing down.