FRANCE: Raising the Umbrella

FRANCE Raising the UmbrellaAs lean, elegant Felix Gaillard rose to face his first vote of confidence, all France was still seething with resentment at the U.S. and British arms shipments to Tunisia. “What would happen if France were to arm Cuba or Puerto Rico?” demanded waspish ex-Premier Georges Bidault. “If more young men are to die [in Algeria],” snapped Gaullist Chieftain Jacques Soustelle, “we owe it to Mr. Dulles.” “Britain and the U.S.,” said the Socialists’ Guy Mollet, “acted like people who had ceased to be our friends.”

Gaillard nimbly took advantage of the uproar to perform the time-honored political trick known in France as “raising the diplomatic umbrella.” Though the issue was his request for $240 million in new taxes, Gaillard did not talk economics, instead inveighed against Britain and the U.S. “We cannot be allies in Paris and ignore each other elsewhere,” he cried. Emotionally, the Assembly responded by voting Gaillard his taxes by a margin of 256 to 182.

Ex-Premier Antoine Pinay scoffed at Gaillard’s new revenues as “a drop in the bucket.” But, as Gaillard well knew, his only hope of getting France safely through its current economic crisis was to borrow $500 million or so abroad—presumably in the U.S. The new taxes, however inadequate they might be, made the kind of gesture to sound financial management that France must make if Gaillard is to have any luck with potential foreign lenders.

In the long run Gaillard might regret having raised the diplomatic umbrella to save his political skin. The deliberate prodding of anger against his best prospective lender seemed scarcely the wisest approach for a man who needed money.

At week’s end, at a congress of his own Radical Socialist Party in Strasbourg. Gaillard fell afoul of former Premier Mendès-France. Mendès demanded that France accept the Moroccan-Tunisian offer to mediate the Algerian war (see below). Despite the fact that Gaillard’s government had already rejected the offer, the Radical Socialists by a vote of 648 to 472 endorsed Mendès-France’s demand. Under the ground rules of French politics the vote was not binding on Gaillard or on the 44 Radical Socialist Deputies in the Assembly. But even in France a Premier finds it embarrassing to have one of his key policies disavowed by his own party.