FRANCE: State of Impotence

For two hours last week the National Assembly of France was besieged in its own house. The cars of Deputies who tried to leave the Assembly building were stopped. When an occasional parliamentarian summoned up courage to step onto the balcony overlooking the square, he was greeted with cries: “A good bomb, that’s what you bastards need.” “Come down here, and we’ll show you what we’re made of.” The rioters responsible for this humiliation of France’s governing body: the men charged with maintaining law and order in Paris.

Like most of France’s current troubles, the riot of Paris’ police had its roots in the Algerian rebellion. In the past year Algerian gunmen have killed three Paris cops, wounded eleven more. Some 7,000 police coming off afternoon duty massed in the courtyard of Paris’ grim, grey central police headquarters to protest the puny 25¢-an-hour “night risk allowance” intended to compensate them for the extra dangers of patrolling the city’s Algerian quarters. When the prefect of police refused to meet their representatives, 2,000 of the cops headed for the National Assembly.

There, blocking off the Concorde Bridge and the Quai d’Orsay, they stopped cars, bicycles and pedestrians, created one of the most monumental traffic jams yet seen in a city famed for monumental traffic jams. No one—neither their colleagues still on duty nor France’s rifle-toting Republican Guard—made any attempt to disperse the rioting flics.

Inside the Chamber there was near pandemonium. Communists banged desks and shouted “Down with fascism” until the Speaker suspended debate. White-faced and shaking with rage, Premier Félix Gaillard berated Paris Prefect of Police André Lahillone for allowing the demonstration to take place.

The riot was one more demonstration of the declining authority of France’s government. Gaillard fired Lahillone, but the Socialists were unappeased, angrily threatened to withdraw their support from the government unless Gaillard also dismissed Interior Minister Maurice Bourgés-Maunoury. “Where is the state?” moaned one Socialist leader. “And in what a state.”