THE FRENCH CRISIS
By D. W. BROGAN
S I write this there is news of a new French crisis whose character and issue are still unknown. But whatever the
,issue, and whatever the immediate causes of the flare-up, the French crisis is not to be explained in terms of single controversies or single personalities—no matter how bitter the controversies or how domi- nating the personality. Nor is the crisis solely the result of the war, the occupation, the immense material, and the serious political and moral, losses which France has suffered since 1939. What we are seeing is a rapid development, to a critical point, of a complex of problems already acute in 1939. The difference made by the war is very great. France could have kept on " ticking-over " but for the war ; but because of the war the whole engine must be taken down and re-assembled.
To go back to Paris in January after leaving it in July was to have one's political fears and doubts reinforced rather than changed. The physical scene was, indeed, changed. Paris in July and in brilliant weather looked smarter, more immune to the drabness of war, than London. Paris in January looked dowdy, cold and at a low level of vitality. One or two good days made some difference, but, walking about the city, especially outside the smart regions, one found the picture greyer. One remembered that Paris, after all, is a northern city, grey and at times grim ; it was grey and grim this January.
It was not only cold and harassed ; it was angry—or perhaps "sore" (in the American sense) is the better word. And the people of Paris had reason for being sore. The abolition of bread ration- ing and then, two months later, its sudden reimposition, was one of those blunders so indefensible that, in retrospect; they seem not so much criminal as incomprehensible. Even if we accept the view that the first decision was taken for electoral reasons, it is hard to understand. For all members of the Cabinet were jointly responsible for the decision ; all presumably hoped to gain by the removal, and all presumably had a good deal to fear from the resentment of the electors if the experiment failed—and it was very short-sighted to sacrifice so much for a victory in so short-lived a body as the present Assembly. Yet, when the decision was taken, its gambling char- acter was already clear. By October, the unsatisfactory yield of the harvest was evident ; the margin of safety was very narrow, and it has not proved adequate. The French man (and woman) in the street feels with justice that his interests have been neglected, and that incompetence at a high level has been revealed. The freeing of bread from the ration was almost the only immediate tangible result of the first year of the economic policy of the Liberation Government. Bread is very much the French staff of life. "A Frenchman," said Bismarck, "is a small man with a decoration who knows no geography and asks for more bread." No failure could be more maddening.
The chief sufferers have been the Socialists, rather unjustly, for all the Cabinet is responsible. But it was a Socialist Food Minister who took bread off the ration ; it is a Socialist Minister who has had to put it back. And the Socialist party has to pay for this bad luck—which is not its only piece of bad luck. The other is the role that the party has adopted or has had forced on it in the Assembly. The Socialists are now the centre party, the party of government. They have to play the role of the Radicals under the Third Republic. Had they come out of the elections of last autumn as the single biggest party (as they and most people expected), they might have been able to play their part. But they were beaten by the Communists, who are not only more numerous, but are now able to treat the Socialists as a minority working-class party whose duty and interest it is to form a common front against reaction, Fascism, etc. And under this pressure from the Left, the young Socialist militants are nervous about their Marxist orthodoxy and about their electoral prospects.
The elder statesmen of the party have other worries. They know that it is not, in the strict sense of the term, a working-class party ; certainly not an exclusively working-class party. A sharp move to the Left, the acceptance of a common front with the Communists, would split the party and, still more important, alienate or alarm millions of voters whose social zeal is lively, who are against re- action, Vichyism, etc., but have no passionate desire to see a totali- tarian State in complete control of French life and economy. Still less does the third party of the government coalition, the Mouve- ment Republicain Populaire, the M.R.P., wish such an event. For all its programme of social reform and the genuine social zeal of most of the leaders and a great part of the rank and file, the M.R.P.
has its reserves, too, when it comes to entrusting to the French State (no matter who controls it) effective administration of French society. Yet French society needs deep transformations and very wide and rigorous controls. The necessary economic rehabilitation of the country, without which no political solutions, no external triumphs, can have any real meaning, involves the creation of a strong and independent government. The great governmental disease from which France suffered in the last years of the Third Republic was a progressive decline in the authority of the state. M. Paul-Boncour in his recent memoirs has given some good examples of it, but any one who knew France at all well could see the results in a score of cases, from the control or non-control of the Colorado beetle to the control or non-control of the great banks. The Assembly, in its constituent character, pays lip-service to the need for such a govern- ment, but the new Constitution (whose outlines are visible in the work of the constitutional committee) is far more marked by fear than by hope. Because power may be abused or fall into dangerous hands, the constitutional provisions are elaborately designed to ensure that power will be divided and hampered.
As the most active maker of this constitution, the Madison of this convention, is the Socialist leader in the Assembly, M. Andre Philip, the general ironical scepticism with which the constitutional labours of the Assembly are regarded again hurts the Socialists. Yet it is not only the Socialists who are at fault (if it is a fault). For only one party in France has real confidence in the power of the State— that is, of the State under its own control. The Communists could work this constitution, or any other ; since real power, were they in command, would be effectively in the hands of the rulers of the party, who would be able to manipulate the constitutional machi- nery without relinquishing any real levers of command. Power and responsibility wonld be identifiable, as they were in the days when Marshal Stalin was a mere party secretary—but the ruler of Russia all the same. And, in the irritation and frustration from which France now suffers, there are many who are not Communists but who say : "Better Thorez than Philip." This is no doubt a boutade, but more serious is the testimony of a Catholic Resistance leader that a great majority of the young Resistance militants are passing into the Communist camp. There, at least, is the promise of action, of unity, of coherence, of confidence.
On the one hand a united, aggressive and confident party ; on the other a determined and still overwhelmingly respected man. Be- tween the General and the Communists lies the mass of French opinion. It is fascinated by Communist discipline, courage and confidence ; it is also frightened by them. It sees in de Gaulle not merely a symbol, but a dike; yet the General has no party, and some of the most unpopular parts of the present governmental policy are attributed to him. There could be no doubt that, in attacking excessive expenditure on the Army, the Socialists were striking a popular note. (They made a mess of it, but that is another story.) Even the Conservative Figaro has commented that the French people had no reason to think that the money spent on the Army before 1940 had been well spent. Few believe that it is being well spent now. When clothing, food, petrol are so scarce, the signs of military waste are increasingly intolerable—the more so that the Army is thought to be full of very imperfectly converted Petainists. "You are alienating the French people from the French artily," an old friend is supposed to have told the General recently. Yet in a crisis the alternative seems to lie between the Communists (however dis- guised) and the General. Neither may win a complete triumph, but in the struggle the Socialists may be torn apart. And then two parties, not three, will face each other, under whatever disguises.
And behind and below this conflict lies the French problem, the permanent crisis, the economic problem. There is, above all, the
problem of liquidating a great part of French peasant agriculture. You cannot, in effect, plan ,a modern economy for France and pre- serve all the real and alleged rights of the five million peasant pro- prietors. There is the problem of diverting, for years to come, all surpluses into industrial equipment, with its concomitant of ration- ing, economic control, strong, and at times unpopular, exercises of governmental authority. To find an institutional solution that does not depend on a man or a monolithic party is the political problem. It is not being solved at the moment, but it is a permanent problem and the permanent cause of the crisis that did not begin today, or a week or a month ago, but when the Third Republic began, that long abdication of power that led to Vichy.
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