France: Down from Olympus

Withdrawn and hurt, Charles de Gaulle brooded for two days in his Colombey chateau. Then he descended on Paris by helicopter to inform his Cabinet and the nation that “Naturally, [ will be present on December 19.”

Premier Georges Pompidou thereupon summoned good Gaullists everywhere to “general mobilization” on le general’s behalf in the Dec. 19 presidential run off. “It must be demonstrated,” exhort ed a perturbed Pompidou, “that in the face of the dazzling demagoguery of the opposition, Gaullism, too, can open paths to the future.” Premier Pompidou then conjured up some sample rewards in the Gaullist future straight out of the American past: a car and a television set for each and every French family by 1970.

Such a descent from the peaks of gloire to the crass arena of politics hardly seemed possible for the 75-year-old master of the Elysee, long accustomed to thinking of himself in the third-person historic present. But neither French politics nor the once Olympian image of De Gaulle himself would ever be the same again. For last week, needing more than 50% of the votes in a field of six to win a first-ballot reelection as President of France, Charles de Gaulle lost. Though he ran first in the field, he got only 44% of the votes cast. Leftist Francois Mitterrand polled a surprising 32%. Catholic Centrist Jean Lecanuet came from nowhere to win 16%, and the three other candidates garnered a total of 8%. The result forced De Gaulle into a runoff next week with Mitterrand—the most resounding and unexpected defeat for a Western political leader since Britain turned Winston Churchill out of office in 1945.

All Against One. De Gaulle was the most bitterly surprised of anyone. So sure of himself and so contemptuous of the opposition was he that he sloughed off campaigning as beneath his dignity. He scorned to use the full two hours of television and two of radio time allotted to each of the six candidates. He refused to debate issues with his opponents, serving condescending and infuriating notice on the French public that the choice was simply himself “or confusion.” He would not even consider stooping to public appearances or speeches. But while he kept a haughty silence, his opposition campaigned all over France. It was a heady new wine for a richly political people parched for politics for the past seven years under monolithic Gaullism.

De Gaulle’s aloofness freed his opponents from wasting breath and posters fighting each other; it was all against De Gaulle. To a man they joined in flaying De Gaulle for his anti-Common Market, anti-NATO, anti-American attitudes without ever being forced to define their own views very clearly. They hammered at the futile, expensive grandeur of the force de frappe, lamented such very real social needs of the nation as schools to hospitals.

As the self-styled “unique candidate of the left,” Mitterrand, 49, united Socialists and Communists behind him—a rare alliance in France. He scorned le grand Charles for his autocratic ways, called for more attention to domestic needs, less disruptive isolationism in French foreign policy. About the only original measure he proposed was the repeal of a 1920 law forbidding the use of contraceptives by women—a pitch designed to cut into De Gaulle’s massive popularity with French females. Wherever he went, Mitterrand’s crowds were larger than expected, and he tailored his approach to his audience. Small townsmen he lectured in the style of a petit bourgeois professor. Grease-smeared workers in a Renault plant he harangued with: “They must not ask us to bow our heads when they beat us! The workers will march where they wish, and why not to the Arc de Triomphe?”

Toothsome Telegenicity. Center Candidate lean Lecanuet, 45, drew his support from Centrist De Gaulle himself—and thus was decisive in forcing the runoff. His well-organized advertising campaign depicted him as the youthful symbol of France’s future, a kind of French Kennedy (“John Fitzgerald Lecanuet,” sneered the Gaullists). His toothsome telegenicity seemed to grow with each appearance on television, though he began the campaign a virtually unknown Senator. His theme was vive the Common Market, vive united Europe, vive NATO. It won the rare endorsement of “Mr. Europe” himself, Jean Monnet.

The issues thus were clearly drawn: youth v. age, temperance v. Gaullist hubris abroad, the needs of ordinary Frenchmen v. building the Bomb. As the campaign progressed, successive polls showed De Gaulle’s once massive support tumbling. Alarmed, Gaullist strategists persuaded the general to use more of his television time. Forced into a defensive plea ill-suited to his imperial style, he came off poorly, looked pale and haggard beside his youthful competitors. Gaullist ministers whirled into a frenzy of activity in the closing days of the campaign, but it was too late. The televised image stuck. “Suddenly the father of his country was the grandfather,” noted L’Express, more in pity than anything else. And being pitied in politics is worse than being censured.

Le Florentin. Ironically enough, it was De Gaulle who set the rules for France’s first direct presidential election since 1848—and it was he who was ambushed by them. “The stupidest thing of my life,” he reportedly muttered afterward. The rule of 50% -or-a-runoff gave everybody, including Gaullist voters, a free and harmless chance to dissent. They could demonstrate distaste for his haughty ways and still set things straight at the runoff. It was a free swing at the genera], and swing they did.

The final choice is now between De Gaulle and Mitterrand, whom Frenchmen call “le beau Francois” for his looks, “le Florentin” for his political suppleness. One of eight children of a Cognac railroad clerk, Mitterrand climbed to prominence through sheer brilliance and an inborn political knack for being all things to all people. Though his vest-pocket party, the left-of-center Democratic Socialist Union of the Resistance, has never amounted to much, his adaptability shoehorned him into no fewer than eleven revolving coalition Cabinets of the Fourth Republic. For at least two of his Cabinet stints, Mitterrand is given high marks.

Under the Fifth Republic, he has become known as De Gaulle’s most persistent parliamentary critic. As the runoff campaign opened with televised speeches of the two candidates last week, Mitterrand declared war on some of the general’s pet policies. He said that as President, he would sign the nuclear test ban treaty, which “would mean canceling next year’s South Pacific hydrogen-bomb test, move to heal the Gaullist-created Common Market breach in Brussels, and send French representatives to the Geneva disarmament talks that De Gaulle has long boycotted.

Who Thinks for France? For the runoff, Mitterrand has become “the candidate of the Republic” instead of “the candidate of the left,” hoping to collect some of Lecanuet’s centrist bloc of votes. Lecanuet, eliminated but suddenly a national figure, has announced the formation of a new “democratic center” party, which might well provide some day the apres-Gaullism alternative to

De Gaulle. For De Gaulle can no longer count on hand-picking his successor, or on his U.N.R. Party’s surviving him. No longer, in fact, can he count on a parliamentary majority; in 1967 that may well cease to exist.

Long ago, De Gaulle, who has done so much for France, snapped: “When I want to know what France thinks, I ask myself.” Even if he should win on Dec. 19, he found out on Dec. 5 that France has begun to think for itself. The distinction between letat et lui has been drawn, and it is not likely to be forgotten,