FRANCE: Awaiting the Verdict

Precisely at 3 o’clock one afternoon last week, unseen hands pulled aside a pair of raspberry silk curtains in the Elysee Palace’s jampacked Salle des Fêtes and, as if propelled by clockwork, a looming, cigar-shaped figure appeared in the royal box overlooking the room. For the fourth time in the two years since he took power in France, Charles de Gaulle had summoned the press to hear him expound his policies and plans.

De Gaulle’s prose seemed as ringing as ever as he began with a proclamation of national self-confidence: “Agitation, spreading throughout the world and tremulously reflected by all the media of information, has become the characteristic of our age. But however resounding these commotions may be, obviously they could not succeed in upsetting or intimidating France. We are today solid enough, balanced enough, sure enough of ourselves not to be impressed either by logomachy* or gesticulations … On each of the great questions we have set our course and we will keep on firmly in that direction.” But as the 800 newsmen present began to press him for specific statements on the great questions, De Gaulle’s Olympian certitude deserted him. For the firsf time since he took power, his voice showed signs of an old man’s hoarseness. He was by turns belligerent, defiant, sarcastic, and sometimes even seemed to be almost pleading.

When the Knife Speaks . . . Obviously most embarrassing to De Gaulle was the unstanched hemorrhage of the Algerian war, which he clearly feared would produce a jolting diplomatic defeat for France in the U.N. General Assembly session beginning next week. In the last General Assembly a resolution condemning French policy in Algeria failed by only one vote of winning the necessary two-thirds majority. This year, with the U.N. to be enlarged by 15 new African members, the chances that a similar resolution will pass are vastly increased.

Anticipating defeat, De Gaulle served notice that France would pay no heed whatever to any U.N. vote on Algeria, “because if it is true that one can find in this organization a majority made up of totalitarian states, states without cohesion, states without information or for whom international life is made up of invective ad infinitum, France does not recognize for such an eventual majority any sort of qualification to say what is right and what is the law.”

With unconcealed bitterness De Gaulle snapped: “It has sometimes been said that it is De Gaulle who can solve the Algerian problem and if he does not do so, no one will. Then may I be allowed to do it? I ask nothing more.” Angrily blaming the rebel F.L.N. for the breakdown of last June’s abortive truce negotiations, he rasped: “So long as the knife speaks, we cannot talk policy.”

Too Many Americans. When the questioning turned to NATO, De Gaulle showed the irritable petulance of a man who was not getting his way. Attacking the integration of NATO military forces, the root principle on which the alliance has based its military strategy, De Gaulle dismissed it as “a system in which, in fact, everything is under the command of the Americans and in which the Americans decide on the use of the principal weapons —in other words, the atomic weapons. But in ten years there have been many changes. France has regained its balance and its thrust and . . . has commenced setting up its atomic arm.” He insisted that “if atomic weapons are to be stockpiled on French territory, these weapons should be in French hands,” and called for the transformation of NATO into an old-fashioned entente in which each of the members would run its own defense system on its own soil.

Even as he talked of loosening NATO’s military ties, De Gaulle, with no apparent sense of inconsistency, demanded a kind of Big Three superdirectorate to coordinate NATO political and military strategy not just for Europe but for the whole world. He implied that much of the chaos in the Congo might have been averted “if the U.S., Great Britain and France had discussed together their positions in this matter from the beginning of the crisis” (and, by implication, imposed a course of action on Belgium) rather than “effacing ourselves before the inadequate and very costly action” of the U.N., which he contemptuously referred to as “the so-called United Nations.”

Call for Chaos. Then De Gaulle got in a few cold words about European unity. To suppose that effective political institutions can be built “outside and above the states,” he declared flatly, “is a dream.” Elliptically, he alluded to his own European dream: a French-led political confederation of the Common Market nations in which joint policy would be hammered out in periodic meetings of the Common Market premiers and reviewed by “an Assembly formed of delegates from national parliaments.” (Snapped one German newspaper: “Instead of an integrated Europe. De Gaulle wants to restore a Europe of Fatherlands.”) To get his scheme under way, De Gaulle had a dramatic proposal: “a formal European referendum so as to give this launching the character of popular support and initiative that is indispensable.”

Having staked out France’s positions for the world in like-it-or-lump-it fashion, De Gaulle indulged in a rare personal comment on his own unique role. Sardonically he declared: “Occasionally people tell me or ask others to tell me—and this is very kind—’Oh yes, you are there and so everything is fine. But after you, it will be chaos.’ Then some suggest that we institute this chaos right now so as to ensure my succession. Well. I should like to think that over a bit.” Then, while the assembled newsmen chuckled, the raspberry curtains parted again and Charles de Gaulle was gone.

The Sound of the Pipes. Outside the Elysee, De Gaulle’s pronouncements left few people laughing, were greeted even by his allies with veiled dismay and hostility. While West Germany’s Chancellor Konrad Adenauer hopefully announced from an Italian vacation retreat that there must have been “wrong interpretation of some of De Gaulle’s ideas.” Dutch Foreign Minister Joseph Luns bluntly stated that his government regarded any scheme to dilute NATO as “intolerable.” How, others asked, could De Gaulle talk of strictly national defense when nearly the entire French army was bogged down in Algeria? De Gaulle’s continental allies regard his idea of a European conference as just a device to establish French hegemony in Europe and to exclude Britain from the Continent permanently. As for the idea of a European referendum, the majority of Western European statesmen seemed to share the feeling of a Roman pundit who noted tartly that “Italian politicians mostly feel they have enough trouble with the voters now.”

In France itself the major disappointment was at De Gaulle’s failure to produce any new ideas for ending the Algerian fighting. At week’s end, as the General moved slowly through Britanny on one of his periodic tours to test his hold over the French people, bagpipes skirled, women in lace caps strained to grasp his hand, and adulatory crowds joined him in emotional mass renditions of the Marseillaise. But back in Paris sobersided Le Monde sadly warned: “France has no chance of playing the role she legitimately claims in the world as long as this wound of Algeria is open on her side. Frenchmen will not have to wait very much longer to find out if the monarch to whom they confided their destiny at a critical time has really been able to change the course of history or if . . . like so many others, he has only put off the inevitable day of reckoning.”

-Hastily consulting their Larousses, French editors gravely translated for their readers: “Logomachy—a dispute where the noise of the words used succeeds in triumphing over the reality of things.”