After the Flood in France
EVERYONE knows the illusions of high tide. The water billows grandly into every creek and threatens the dustbins of your seaside boarding- house. There is no difficulty about landing or em- barking. You can step into the lifeboat from the bandstand. The tide goes down. The rocks appear and the seaweed. Where you thought the ocean ruled there is a long breakwater which comes to an end in shallow water through which you can paddle for a quarter of a mile.
The water of French politics is dropping rapidly and we will soon be paddling again. In the early summer the whole Algerian war disappeared under the spring tide of May 13. The defeatists, it seemed, had invented a rebellion where there were only a few outlaws. Grammar-school boys and university students had solved the problems which had puzzled us so, by throwing the archives out of the windows of the Government-General. We have learned better since. But in France we had still the high tide—.of the referendum and the election, of the presidential election and the presi- dential inauguration. In between, however, the Budget came thrusting up with consequences for all of us, and now we are getting back to the things which worry all administrations, once the bucentaur is back in dock.
Did ex-ser.vicemen block the roadway under the Third Republic when somebody interfered with their pensions? Was it the same thing under the Fourth? Is it the same under the Fifth? Yes. Is diminishing or vanished overtime a problem that comes back to the housewife and thence to the shopkeeper, and so on back to the factory? Yes, and only the very philosophic find comfort that it is worse in Germany or Belgium or the United Kingdom. Have the intelligence service and the diplomatic service got publicly involved in an entanglement of telephone wires at a foreign capital? Yes. Such things have happened before. Is the war in Algeria still going on? It is and Colonel Godard, chief of security, has just said it will certainly be finished at the end of the year, which makes the present one so like each of the past four that soon everybody will begin to feel quite at home in it.
The fact is that only the very high-minded felt quite happy surf-bathing on the spring tide. There is a lot of virtue in the grim reality, which at least removes the ritual obligation of bogus argument, before you can start talking about what is really going on.
While the Minister for Information, loyal to the death, has asserted that President and Premier and UNR (tile Gaullist but not necessarily de Gaulle's party) are all in agreement and the UNR and the Algerian deputies have in turn declared they are in full agreement, the organisations which made the coup d'etat in Algiers have come out with comments about the Government and the Presi- dent of the Republic that differ scarcely at all from those they used to make about the govern- ments of the Fourth Republic. Their programme, they have said in so many words, is the extermina- tion or total surrender of the rebels. Since they consider this body, which already has 80,000 dead men marching in its ranks, as a small body of outlaws, paid killers and agents of foreign govern- ments, and therefore politically insignificant, the issue is beginning to clarify and the day may yet come when, the Paris government is able to state quite frankly that it differs from them. President de Gaulle is at least very careful not to deny that he differs as his unfortunate predecessors in authority did when pressed. It is a great deal better to have the nude aridity of Algiers ideas exhibited than to battle with the vapours of 'integration.'
In France itself old enemies are coming to light. Having achieved the substantial success of knock- ing 20 per cent. off the Communist vote last November, the victors at the polls seemed to prefer to keep their eyes on the ten Communist deputies who survived rather than look at the still very impressive figure of Communist voters. With the changed municipal electoral law they hope to clear the Communists out of the mairies too, but it is, meanwhile, undeniable that the Communists are making a very solid showing at the various by-elections that have occurred. There have been several for county councils and three for seats in the Assembly, where technical faults found by the constitutional commission had invalidated the elections of last November. The unseated deputies are certain of re-election and the main interest of the majority is in showing its anger at having to go back to the polls to reaffirm their opinion (in favour of an MRP deputy and two Conservative Independents). But while the other defeated parties (and notably the `Gaullists') have done badly, since there is not much point in reaffirming your support for a lost cause, the Communists have in all three cases voted more strongly than before. Since the abstentions had risen more than 50 per cent. the Communist percentage of the total vote has gone up sharply for even a small absolute increase.
In other words, there is no panic in the Com- munist ranks. This fortress of the Marxist faith is still there unconquered, with only a minor loss of outposts. It is extremely important that this should be made clear, for in adapting herself to the Common Market and confirming the stabilisation of the franc, France is likely to pass through a period of difficult economic and social adjustment as President de Gaulle has already told the nation. The present weakness of the Socialists may prove very serious.
The municipal elections are on the horizon and these are of much more than local importance, for the delegates of the thirty-nine thousand munici- pal councils' of France choose the senators, and the Senate, under the new constitution, has re- covered equality of rights in matters of law- making with the Assembly. This is a matter that has received little attention. The old Senate of the Third Republic was one of the great organs of the State, able to fight the Assembly on a footing of equality once a general election had sunk back a year or eighteen months into the past. The UNR has persuaded the Government to revise the muni- cipal election law in a manner from which it hopes much good—for itself. But then the Socialists and Radicals had hoped much good for themselves from the return to single-member constituencies and they were disappointed. The voting will at least record the shift of opinion since devaluation, abolition of subsidies and increase of taxes. The senatorial elections of two months later may be the occasion for some well-known men eliminated from the Assembly to return to the councils of the nation in the Upper House. The Senate may well turn out to be the House of the -ebb-tide as the Assembly is that of the flood—and the Govern- ment may well be very pleased that it is so.
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