France: The Eternal Non

The tumultuous student-worker strike that paralyzed France in May 1968 gave the world its first good look at the New Left, Gallic branch. Last week, for the first time, France voted a genuine New Leftist into office. In the unlikely setting of Les Yvelines, a largely middle-class district outside Paris, Michel Rocard, one of the few party leaders in France to side openly with the May revolutionaries, won election to the National Assembly. Rocard, 39, is the boyish-looking secretary of the tiny Unified Socialist Party (P.S.U.), whose slogan is “worker power, student power, peasant power.” The man he defeated in the closely watched by-election was none other than former Pre mier Maurice Couve de Murville, the Gaullist believed by most of France to speak for Charles de Gaulle himself.

Becalmed Republic. Though some overenthusiastic reporters hailed Rocard as “the first swallow of a Socialist spring,” his victory will hardly bring red flags and barricades into the elegant Bourbon Palace, where the Assembly meets. He is, after all, the only Deputy representing the P.S.U. so far. Moreover, under unwritten parliamentary rules that minimize the influence of small parties, he is entitled to hold the floor for only about an hour per year. From the viewpoint of President Georges Pompidou, Rocard’s election may even prove a blessing. Four former Gaullist Ministers have won by-elections in recent weeks and will be around to complain whenever Pompidou proposes any changes in the general’s policies. Had Couve gained a seat in Parliament as well, he undoubtedly would have assumed leadership of De Gaulle’s loyalist wing and shaped it into a strong opposition force.

As a Deputy, Rocard plans to work inside an Establishment that he would like to overturn. That is a role spurned by many New Leftists in favor of instant revolution, but it is not new for Rocard. Son of Physicist Yves Rocard, one of the developers of France’s atom bomb, he graduated from the prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration and entered government service as an in-specteur des finances, one of the elite corps of officials who supervise state spending. It is a position that normally opens the door to the highest echelons of the government and big business. By then, however, Rocard was already an active Socialist. In 1967, having split with Socialist Leader Guy Mollet over his part in placing De Gaulle in power in 1958. Rocard left the government to work as the only full-time employe of the P.S.U.—a distinction he still holds. The party claims only 15,000 followers.

Shrewd Judgment. Couve’s distaste for campaigning helped Rocard. What aided him even more was the TV exposure he gained last May as a minor presidential candidate. Though he won only 3.6% of the vote and was eliminated in the first round, Rocard came across as an incisive, articulate and iconoclastic politician. He labeled the Communists “retrograde bureaucrats,” denounced the Czechoslovak invasion, demanded that France withdraw from NATO and called for total worker control of private business. In his campaign for the Assembly, Rocard told audiences that France must discard its “model of American capitalism.” He also criticized the Gaullist regime for failing to provide adequate schools and transport for satellite communities like Les Yvelines. Couve, gamely making the rounds of shopkeepers, stressed the need for De Gaulle’s worker “participation” program. After the first round of voting, Rocard was barely in second place, 5,109 votes behind Couve. But in the runoff, centrist and leftist candidates, united only by their anti-Gaullism, lined up behind Rocard. He trounced Couve 15,200 to 13,063.

Looking even more dour than usual, Couve showed up at a rally of young Gaullists three days after his defeat and attributed the loss to pointless naysaying. “Since I represented something constructive, the answer had to be non, as always, non, the eternal non” he said bitterly. As one of only two former aides who have seen De Gaulle since his retirement (ex-Defense Minister Pierre Messmer is the other), Couve also had a few things to say publicly about the general’s plans. De Gaulle realized, reported Couve, that any political meddling on his part “would make it difficult for those who succeeded him.” Accordingly, he has “marked his desire to abstain from any future intervention in French political life.” Considering the rebuff that voters had just handed to one of his heirs, that is probably a shrewd judgment on De Gaulle’s part.