France: 6,000 Miles from Home

Former Premier Michel Debre is such a listless political personality that a current joke says he was once seen riding in an empty limousine. He has a fussy manner and a flat, whining voice that somehow rub politicians and many other Frenchmen the wrong way, obscuring his considerable administrative talents. In Charles de Gaulle’s electoral landslide last November, Debre—the dedicated Gaullist. major architect of the Fifth Republic’s constitution, and the man who served a longer uninterrupted period as Premier (1,193 days) than any other in French parliamentary history—was ignominiously defeated in his own carefully cultivated rural constituency by a local garage owner.

De Gaulle, who himself had used Debre as whipping boy for many of the regime’s mistakes, soon found, however, that he sorely missed Debre’s parliamentary skill.

Gaullist aides began to ponder ways to get him back into the legislature, where, if elected, he was likely to become majority leader. Trouble was, no Gaullist faction in France itself wanted him. But at last a constituency was found where Debre seemed unlikely to lose. Last week the former Premier gulped hard and accepted a bid to run for office on Reunion Island, a tiny French dot in the Indian Ocean nearly 6,000 miles from Paris.