France: Give Us Some Sous

As dawn rose over Paris early one morning last week, a volley of rifle shots echoed through dank, grim Ivry Fort. Dead before the firing squad sank ex-Lieut. Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, 35, convicted ringleader of last summer’s abortive attempt to assassinate Charles de Gaulle in the Paris suburb of Petit-Clamart as he was motoring to his country home at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises.* Though De Gaulle spared two other plotters, he presumably ordered the execution of Bastien-Thiry to discourage other terrorists from further assassination efforts on behalf of the dread Secret Army Organization.

But De Gaulle’s most prominent foe. ex-Premier Georges Bidault, now a ranking S.A.O. chieftain, was as publicly defiant as ever. He could afford to be, for he was now holed up in southern Germany, where, after a nervous brushoff by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, he sought political asylum from the state of Bavaria. Bathed in publicity and surrounded by police, he obviously was not doing his resistance organization much concrete good in a distant German villa.

But when he called reporters in for interviews, Bidault insisted that his political activities were far from over. “I am the leader of the National Resistance Council. I am the boss of it all,” he boasted. In France, there was only official silence. Fact was, the French government was delighted that the troublemaker was in Germany, where he was under continual surveillance, and was babbling a little too much to the press to enhance his reputation.

With Bidault on ice, De Gaulle turned his attention to the continuing, crippling strike of 188,000 miners in the nationalized coal fields of northern France, who were demanding wage scales on a par with workers in private industry. Rumors circulated that S.A.O. members, disguised as cops, would attack the strikers to provoke them to violence against the government, but the only toll of the strike so far was economic. Thousands of steel and natural gas workers went out on a sympathy strike, and a 24-hour rail walkout cre.ated a transportation tie-up all over France. Into Paris drove a 342-car convoy of some 2,000 Lorraine ironworkers chanting: “Give us some sous, Pompidou.”

Though furious at the continued intransigence of the strikers, De Gaulle knew he might have to give in.**At a Cabinet meeting in Paris, he ordered studies drawn up comparing wages in private and government-owned industry, with an eye toward making adjustments. But he was still rankled at the monetary support given the strikers by the Roman Catholic Church in the northern coal areas. Asked where the funds would come from to pay for any wage hike, he suggested: “We could always take up a collection in the churches.”

*These days, with tighter police security, De Gaulle usually makes the trip between Paris and Colombey by helicopter. Escorted by a heavy police guard, he drives a few miles down the highway to an isolated, predetermined spot on the road. There, as shown with Mme, De Gaulle in photographs released ‘this week (.see cuts), he leaves his car, enters the waiting helicopter, and makes his journey.

**For one thing, le grand Charles was doubtless aware of the latest report of the French Institute of Public Opinion, which revealed that De Gaulle’s rating had plummeted nine points over the preceding month, with only 55% of the French populace now “satisfied” with his conduct of the presidency. It was De Gaulle’s lowest reading in 14 months.