FRANCE: The Empty Heart

Rot was discovered in the stately chestnut trees ringing the Rond-point on Paris’ Champs Elysées last week; every one would have to be uprooted. Wrote Le Figaro: “Weakened and tormented by polluted air, the hearts of these great trees empty little by little.” Frenchmen saw in the words an all too obvious simile for the nation.

¶At midweek, a 15-hour strike by 300,000. gas and electrical workers all but paralyzed all France. Industry shut down, transport became hopelessly tangled. Elevators and subways halted, refrigerators and stoves ceased operating. France sat down to a cold dinner to reflect by candlelight on the strikers’ demands for 30% wage increases in the face of inflation’s unsettling statistics; e.g., apartment rents have doubled in the past year.

¶The Treasury’s cash reserves were draining away so fast that they were not expected to last until the end of the year.

¶For the first time since Hungary, the Communists grew bold enough to call a nationwide demonstration demanding “peace in Algeria.”

¶In Algeria itself, rebels slit the throats of nine Moslem women and children as a lesson to other Moslems cooperating with the French.

But amidst the pollution, France still had no government. Conservative Antoine Pinay, the third man to try to end the present crisis, carried his candidacy to the National Assembly, where he warned of “financial disaster,” demanded power to dissolve the Assembly and call for new elections if he should lose a vote within the next year. France’s Deputies do not like to be threatened with elections; they slapped down Pinay 248-198.

President Rene Coty called in ex-Premier Robert Schuman, 71, a Catholic Popular Republican whose name is stamped on the European coal-steel pool. The President asked him to make a quick survey of France’s immediate financial crisis before Schuman or someone else attempted to form a government. Warned Schuman: “The problems facing us now must be solved immediately. It is a question of hours.”