5 JULY 1946, Page 6

BIDAULT'S GOVERNMENT

By D. R. GILLIE

MGEORGES BIDAULT'S Government is very like his pre-

• decessor's and his predecessor's predecessor's. Like both of them it starts on its career with an overwhelming majority. The meaning of this majority is that the conflicts which the new Premier will have to face will be inside not outside his Government. It consists like the last three Governments mainly of representatives of the three principal parties, M.R.P., Socialists and Communists, who together secured in both the October and the June elections three- quarters of the votes cast. " Tripartism has become the painful necessity of government in France. It is painful because the three parties find it harder to work together than ever did Labour and the Conservatives in the Churchill coalition ; it is necessary because it is impossible to govern France on the basis of a bare half of the nation.

M. Bidault is not only Prime Minister. He is also France's Foreign Minister, and he had to form his Government while repre- senting his country on the Council of Foreign Ministers. In that Council he has in the last few days been acting as conciliator between forces which by threatening to divide Europe into rival camps threaten to divide France also, and indeed his own Cabinet. In 1935 a French Foreign Minister, Pierre Laval, in negotiating a treaty of mutual assistance with the Soviet Union (abortive by Laval's fault) obtained from Stalin a declaration publicly approving France's " policy of national defence, which consists in maintaining her armed strength at the level necessary for security?' That Laval should have asked for this declaration was an admission that an important French party, the Communists, considered Stalin's leadership as having a superior validity for the safeguard of their political ideals and the interests of France than any French Prime Minister what- soever. The first dogma of French patriotism as understood by French Communists is that only in association with Moscow can France advance confidently towards the future.

When M. Georges Bidault looks across the conference table at Mr. Molotov he sees a man who in the last resort will carry greater weight with his Minister of Armaments, his Minister of Reconstruc- tion, his Minister of Industrial Production and his Minister of Labour than he can hope to do himself. Further, the French party which places this immense confidence in Moscow controls the French trade unions, that is to say, most of the important unions taken individually and the C.G.T. (French T.U.C.) as a whole. Whether while forming his Cabinet M. Bidault discussed the attitude of the Communist Party at any moment with Mr. Molotov, as did his predecessor Pierre Laval with Stalin, is unknown, but it is certain that if the French Communists had been given the hint from Moscow M. Bidault would have been refused the collaboration of M. Thorez and his friends. To say this is not, of course, to say that French opinion has no weight with the Communist Party and, through them, with the suggestions they receive from Moscow. The Communists have to win elections in France. They present their case -to the French people as a French case which is what, indeed, they firmly consider it to be. Their success is a success for Moscow ; but Moscow's successes, they devoutly believe, are successes for the French people. Their future depends, like that of any other party, upon winning an increasing number of Frenchmen to the view that they best represent the interests of France, and their possibility of immediate action depends upon the establishment of a modus vivendi with other parties inside the French political system.

The other parties with which . the Communists must co-operate if they are to maintain their .#old on part of the French administrative machine, and which, for reasons to be explained in a moment, must co-operate with them, are the Socialists, who share part of their creed of social and economic reform, but reject the leadership of Moscow and affirm the necessity of political liberty, and the M.R.P. who, while accepting some of the social and economic reforms advocated by the two Marxist parties, and sharing with the Socialists the creed of political liberty, differ from the two parties to the Left of them by their association with Catholicism. This last is a very profound difference, in France, where questions of religion have for a long time raised some of the toughest political barriers. In fact the M.R.P. are astride the watershed which divides French- men into those who are, above all, conservative and those who con- ceive of politics as a long crusade against wicked privileged minorities and obscurantist forces. The M.R.P. secured the majority in the referendum which rejected the constitution drafted by the last Constituent Assembly, but none the less, under M. Bidault's leader- ship, now form a coalition once more with Socialists, half-hearted advocates of the rejected constitution, and the Communists, its real sponsors.

This attitude has three reasons. There is no workable majority to the Right, for, even if the M.R.P. were prepared to work with the Conservative Republican Party of Liberty, other small groups such as the Radicals and the U.D.S.R. would refuse to do so. But even if there were a theoretical possibility of a majority to the Right, men of the stamp of Georges Bidault would refuse to take part in it, since one of their main preoccupations is to prove that the Catholic Church is not necessarily the prisoner of reaction. Finally, anyone seriously concerned -to diminish the hold of the Communist Party on the French industrial-workers must recognise that nothing would be more likely to increase it than to form a Government that would at once be denounced not only in the Communist 'but also in the Socialist Press as the return to power of Vichy. There is an anticommunist majority in France, but also an anti-capitalist (not necessarily Marxist) one. This last reason indicates clearly enough that the alliance of the three parties is in fact an uneasy truce in a struggle that will• be resumed at the elections next October after the new constitution has been either accepted or -rejected by referendum in September. The whole difficulty of M. Bidault's task thus lies in the fact that he must try to bridge a gulf between the parties which cannot narrow. The Communists are in office to strengthen the State within a State that the Ministries held by them constitute. The M:R.P. and Socialists are in the same Govern- ment with them' because there Would be no hope of reducing the Communist vote if the Communists were deliberately left in opposi- tion. This is enough to explain why M. Bidault insisted before the Assembly on his hope that his tenure of office would 'be shortened by the rapid passage into laW of the new constitution. Even in the short time he and his party (the Finance Minister and the Minister of National Economy are both. M.R.P.) will have to face the gravest financial and social problems if they are to prevent rising prices 'and rising wages from precipitating the country into new inflation. It is the Communists who through the trade unions have precipitated the in the long run inevitable—demand 'for increased wages. It is the Communists alone who can put a brake on the trade-Union demands.

It may reasonably be asked what is to happen after the nex: elections. It is not likely that the relative strength of parties will have greatly changed. Possibly the Socialists will feel freer to enter the Government withoul. the Communists if, the constitution having been accepted, the nett Assembly have a five-year instead of a maximum seven-month' life. But this is not certain. Sooner or later it will have to be decided whether the newly nationalised indus- tries, banks and insurances are to be run on a non-party basis or by a State based on a single party. There is no alternative. At present the Communists have managerial control of the nationalised coal industry. When the decision does come, the new institutions of France will be submitted to an immense strain. It will then be seen whether France still has in her the stuff of a• western democracy, or whether she is to become a dictatorship, Communist or anti- Communist.