FRANCE: The Ripening Cheese

Connoisseurs of the French scene have learned to grade local political ferment in terms of what they call ripeness. Last week, after 26 days without a government, France’s political cheese was about as ripe as it could get without rotting on the shelf.

The stench of decay was recognizable in Parisian cinemas where newsreel audiences booed and jeered an endless procession of politicos marching vainly into the Palais Bourbon to argue and temporize. Railway workers, bus drivers, mailmen, stagehands, customs inspectors, garbage collectors, undertakers and thousands of other French workers walked out in a paralyzing general strike, leaving Paris streets empty of buses and littered with trash. Unless the government can persuade the Bank of France to lend it 250 billion francs, it will not be able even to meet its next civil-service payroll.

Last week President René Coty went back to the man he had tried first—durable, hardheaded Socialist Guy Mollet, whose government fell on the issue of high taxes only last May after having lasted longer than any other since the war. Mollet offered a grim, emergency program of raised taxes and slashed government expenditures, finally won a tentative promise from Antoine Pinay’s rightists to abstain rather than vote against him on his own promise not to push any Socialist programs. Mollet also demanded a new system of voting in the Assembly to stabilize government tenure. His reform would allow the Assembly to bring the government down only by an absolute majority vote on motions specifically aimed at its fitness, would force the Deputies to face a new election after two such no-confidence votes within a period of 18 months. If such a reform is passed, Mollet has promised to resign forthwith and stand for reelection.