France Boiling Up
All the elements necessary to produce an explosion are present in France today. The successive attempts of MM. Blum and Ramadier to arrest inflation have finally failed and prices are now rising rapidly. An agriculture distorted in favour of meat production and hampered by a shortage of transport is failing to meet the demands of the urban population, much less provide the exports of. grain envisaged under the Marshall plan. The compromises of a coalition prevent the Government from going forward and the dangers of a violent reac- tion to Right or Left prevent it from giving up office. It is the sort of situation in which France in the past has tended to look for a Government of National Union under some respected elder statesman, but national union now is out of the question. Had there been any doubt about that this week's speeches by M. Thorez and General de Gaulle would have dispelled it. Between them they have raised the Municipal Elections due to take place on October 19th to the status of a national crisis. M. Thorez declared that the Communists were against De Gaulle, against the Government, against the Western Powers and against the Marshall plan. What they are for, except blood, tears and the Belgrade Information Bureau, is less clear. General de Gaulle told half a million people at the Vincennes racecourse on Sunday that his Rally of the French People favours the present American policy plus French independence and leadership of the smaller countries of Western Europe. Both sides are excluded from compromise, the General by his whole history and the Communists by their recent separation from the Socialists and by the Socialists' own denunciation of the Belgrade Bureau, which, they say, openly subordinates French Communist policy to Moscow. In the meantime the population of the Saar has shown where its sympathies lie by voting the Communists two seats in a Landtag of fifty and simultaneously moving a step nearer to economic association with France. The next straw in the wind will be seen after October 19th.
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