FRANCE: The Consecration of Facts

MENDÈS-FRANCE HAS WON HIS BET, cried the headlines. IT is THE END OF THE

WAR IN INDOCHINA.

From right to left, the editorials praised the stocky little Frenchman. “Tireless energy . . . firm determination,” cheered the Socialist Midi Libre. “Authority and dignity . . . honor . . . loyalty,” said the right-wing L’Aurore of Paris. “What Frenchmen, apart from sectarians blinded by hatred.” asked the left-wing Combat, “could today refuse him their gratitude?” But Pierre Mendès-France was insistent: there must be no show of triumph upon his return from Geneva. He did not conceal from himself the fact that Geneva was a defeat for his country, a victory for Communism; he wanted only to be greeted, he told a Cabinet minister, “as a man who had a difficult job, and who accomplished it.” Said Mme. Mendès-France: “Pierre has no joy in his heart.”

The day after Geneva, Mendès landed at Villacoublay airport in his French air force DC-3. He ran his fingers through his wife’s poodle cut, then kissed her. He declined to review a guard of honor, because: “It’s hardly the occasion for that sort of thing.” He ordered his car along side streets into Paris, in case the people were lining the main roads. But Mendès need not have bothered. There was relief that the war in Indo-China was ended—nothing more. Fewer than 250 Parisians waited outside Mendès’ Quai d’Orsay office, and these were mostly Communists who called out. “Long live peace!” as the Premier strode in to work.

The Debate. Pacing himself characteristically by the clock, Mendès quickly got unanimous Cabinet approval for Geneva, then closeted himself with three secretaries to dictate his speech for the National Assembly. Six hours after leaving the airport, Mendès was at his place in the government front benches, thumbing a pink folder and the white sheets of his manuscript.

When he rose to deliver his accounting, Mendès got a one-minute ovation—very warm from the Communist left, warm from the Gaullist right, scattered or nonexistent from the moderate center, where ex-Foreign Minister Georges Bidault cocked his head towards a wall and elaborately did nothing. Palais Bourbon’s tiny shelflike visitors’ boxes were crowded; most of the diplomatic corps was there.

Mendès was crisp and matter of fact, like a company president notifying stockholders of a sad liquidation of property. “Within a few days,” he began, “blood will cease to flow, and we will no longer see our youth decimated over there. This is the end of a nightmare . . .

“I have no illusions, and I want no one else to have illusions, about the terms of the cease-fire agreement. The terms are sometimes cruel because they consecrate facts which are cruel.” Geneva, argued Mendès, reflected “losses already suffered or rendered inevitable by the military situation.” But Mendès then went on to claim that Geneva would permit France to retain its “presence” in the Far East, even that Geneva had improved relations between France, Britain and the U.S. The Assemblymen clapped hands when Mendès mentioned his good friend Anthony Eden; for the name Foster Dulles they had nothing but silence.

“Now,” snapped Mendès in his best deadline style, “what will be done tomorrow?” South Viet Nam would get its independence, with French “technical assistance”; the French army would remain in South Viet Nam if the Vietnamese wanted it. That was all. There was more applause.

Mendès’ critics seemed less perturbed by Geneva itself than by their fear that Mendes might get too much of the credit. Only Georges Bidault dared to compare Geneva to Munich; he drew only skimpy applause from his own Roman Catholic M.R.P. Party, and short shrift from Mendès. By a thundering vote, of 462 to 13, with 152 absent or abstaining (the latter mostly from Bidault’s M.R.P.), the Assembly hailed “the cessation of hostilities in Indo-China, due in large measure to the decisive action of the Premier.”

The Future. “A stage has been attained,” concluded Mendes. “Now other stages present themselves.” Mendès planned more deadlines. Within the next seven days he would demand “full powers” to make over France’s backward economy. Within 14 days he expected to improve French relations with the embittered North African nationalists. His dynamism was unquestioned, and it had gained him the most notable French popularity since postliberation De Gaulle. Yet the cruel fact of this dynamism was that it had forced through an agreement that consecrated the delivery of 12 million Vietnamese to Communism, and that crippled the new state of South Viet Nam by limiting its national army (thereby necessitating the continued presence of the unpopular French colonial army—to Communist advantage).

Nor was there much evidence that Mendès intended to exert his dynamism to press really hard for EDC; he remained vulnerable, in the deathly climate of Geneva, to Communist pressure against the No. 1 objective of U.S. cold war strategy: the rearmament of Germany. “In Mendès-France’s office in the Quai d’Orsay,” cabled TIME correspondent André Laguerre, “I could hear the worn old cry: ‘We must do nothing brutal to provoke the Communists.’ . . .

“Mendès is honest. He commands respect and admiration, and no objective review of his performance can avoid that conclusion. He inherited a situation which had already been rendered disastrous by the inability of France to defend Indo-China, and in that desperate situation, the Geneva agreement is not entirely a bad one.

“But at a time when a great many people—including influential Americans—are becoming almost emotionally ‘for’ him, it is important to recognize the Mendès-France anomaly: he combines an extraordinary lucid view of France’s capabilities and responsibilities with a refusal to deny the naïve conviction of most West Europeans that Communists are basically ordinary people with whom, if you try hard enough, you can always do constructive business.”