SEMI-CRISIS IN FRANCE
By D. R. GILLIE Paris
FRANCE'S still-born Cabinet crisis is a very grave symptom of her political situation. She has not so much avoided a political crisis as shown she cannot afford one. The Communists are at the present moment the strongest single party in France, and also the party most distrusted and disliked by all others. No government can be formed without them, first of all because they have secured control of most of the trade unions in the country, and their co-operation is therefore needed to avoid labour disputes, and secondly because the Socialist National Council has forbidden Socialist leaders to enter a coalition which does not contain the Communists, for fear that the latter, with the advantage of being in opposition, should prove even more dangerous electoral rivals than they are already. But Socialists and Communists, with some colonial deputies affiliated to one or other of these two big parties, still form only half the Assembly, and the Socialist leaders do not feel confident of their ability to control alone the restless and unscrupulous activity of the Communists. They therefore want the parties on their Right to enter the coalition—the Radicals and the U.D.S.R. who form the Left Alliance, and the M.R.P. who in most other countries would be called Christian Democrats. The M.R.P. like to have representatives of some of the small groups to their Right in the cabinet, first of all to cover themselves against criticism from their own followers for having entered a coalition which includes the Communists, and secondly to protect their Right flank from the competition of care- free opposition parties.
In this situation the only kind of government that can be formed is one that includes practically all the parties. Before the war most French parties were loose organisms in which individuals were more important than party machines or programmes. Today all that is changed. Centrally-organised parties—the Communists, the Socialists and the M.R.P.—dominate the scene. The electoral system by which the citizen votes in a multi-member constituency for a party list is partly responsible for this, but it is a symptom as much as a cause. In pre-war France, where the landmarks seemed almost as stable as in past centuries, the call in a crisis was for a pilot, drawn from the dozen or so leading politicians, who was as easily dropped as he had been taken aboard. Today the landmarks them- selves seem unstable, and the citizen seeks protection for his interests and ideas in a "monolithic" party. The Socialists provided the original prototype, but now appear quite old-fashioned, almost in- dividualist. The new model is the Communist Party, whose dis- cipline is copied by the most recently arrived of the Big Three— the M.R.P.
To form a government used to be almost as easy as to bring one down. Today it involves most complicated manoeuvres in order to bring the enormous party machines into line and to keep them there. Articles are written and speeches are made about the draw- backs of the system, the lack of a clear political line that results, the advantages of smaller and more coherent coalitions ; but there is no real alternative to a government which represents about four- fifths of the National Assembly. How can such a government fall? Or rather what is the advantage of allowing it to fall, since the whole process of getting the parties into line and lashing them together will have to be repeated? The differences between the parties yoked together are profound. The most noisily " Republican " of them all, the Communist Party, is the one which is known to have pushed furthest its preparations for a totally unparliamentary fight if the .present system breaks down. It is undoubtedly the Communists who control most hidden arms ; probably they who have the biggest funds (though their enormous Press is costing them dear). Cer- tainly they alone could precipitate a general strike, and, if they wished, most easily dislocate the administrative machine of a govern- ment they disliked. But it is improbable that they could keep supreme power once they had stolen it. They would probably find themselves cut off from coal imports (for the near future mainly American), and it is certain that they would, for the time being at any rate, do the gravest damage to the foreign policy of their friends in the Kremlin. So they must up to a point play the coalition It is to the Socialists that has fallen the heavy responsibility of leading this unwieldy government, and, as compensation for the responsibility, the other parties have agreed that they should have " weighted " representation in the Cabinet, almost twice as many ministers as any other party. M. Ramadier insisted, when he formed the Government, that the parties, as well as the representatives of the parties holding' office, must give proof of solidarity. This was notably lacking under all the previous post-Liberation coalitions. The party representatives in the Government are not the party leaders in the house. Until the Indo-China crisis emerged, there had been an improvement ; but now the startling doctrine has been given M. Rarnadier's unwilling approval that a party may, on a first-class issue, abstain from voting provided that its ministers vote for the government of which they are members. The Communists have thus been able to Capitalise the unpopularity with the masses of military operations in the Far East, while announcing in their Press quite illusory opportunities of negotiation with the present Government of Viet-Nam.
They have been all the more pleased to do this because, like other parties, they are faced with a disillusioned, uneasy public opinion, not unlike that of the winter of 1933-34, which produced the riots of February the Sixth. The Communists have ridden their following• in the country very skilfully, but on so tight a rein that they are concerned to strengthen their demagogic armoury. In such an atmosphere all parties are looking round for simple and emotional appeals. While the trials of important " collaborators" are coming to an end, and the few remaining ones attract less and less interest, other crimes arising from the Occupation-period are emerging—those of the double-crossing adventurers, who risked their lives and made their fortunes by serving both sides and whose discovery therefore draws into a most unpleasant limelight men who have made their career since the Liberation. Such is the case of the millionaire scrap-metal dealer Joanovici, now in flight, who had a number of the newly-promoted officials at the Prefecture of Police in his pay. The course of post-Liberation scandals so far bears out the impression that, if French political life is on a lower intellectual level than before the war, its moral level is higher. The men in trouble are mainly officials who have made mushroom-careers—as is not surprising in view of • the lack of proportion between the power they exercise and the pay they receive. But the public is inclined to react according to old reflexes, and every party may be expected to play the cards it possesses for all they are worth. Mean- while public scepticism grows.
It is in this situation that the Government' has to face colonial problems that would be grave in any circumstances. Just as in home politics the nation's leaders have for the time being to manoeuvre in unwieldy unity an all-but-all-party coalition, so in colonial questions they have to treat as a unity France's overseas empire. It is not merely that France's whole tradition points to emancipation through association with Paris—colonial representation in the imperial parliament and modernisation through administrative decisions from the centre, that leave no room for the conception of a Dominion, though some for federation. France's most important overseas problem, the one that must be solved if she is to be more than a strictly European power—that of North Africa—must be solved on these lines. It is as impossible to place power in the hands of the European settlers in this area, whose number is well over i,5oo,00o, as to hand it over to the Moslem majority. The former would try to set the clock back ; the latter would create conditions leading -to a European emigration, economic ruin and widespread starvation. The only possibility of progress, both economic and political, is for Paris to keep the initiative, and there- fore the power.
This makes it itnpossible' to treat the Indo-Chinese—or rather the Annamese—problem entirely on its own merits. Whatever the conse- quences for Indo-China, it would be highly arguable that for France the best policy would be that of Britain in India, if it were not for the game, while doing what they can to prevent the government from producing such results as would enhance any one of the other coalition parties' reputation, all of which a good Communist considers to be the instruments of capitalist reaction.
reactions elsewhere in the French Empire. But these reactions would be equally bad if fighting dragged on without some political solution. This accounts for the curious fact that in France,. a country where colonial expansion (especially in Indo-China), has often been fatal to politicians, no party, and certainly not the Communists, has proposed withdrawal from Indo-China. The wrangle has been over a priori assertions that negotiation is here and now possible with particular people. No one has even suggested what shculd be done if negotiation is neither now nor ever possible. It seems unlikely (as the Govern- ment recognises) that those leaders in Viet-Nam who launched the treacherous attack of December 19th (so remarkably like Pearl Har- bour as M. Moutet has observed) want to negotiate. The hope is that others will be found. But they certainly will not be if the Government's hands are tied as the Communists demanded. Hence an attitude that no one would have expected from French Socialists even two years ago. France is fighting in Indo-China for N. Africa in other words to be something more than present-day Italy—with the knowledge that the fighting will be all in vain if it does not very rapidly lead to negotiation.
To negotiate France must remain united ; she must maintain con- tinuity of government. The constitution is new. So is the internal political technique, which is at present appallingly laborious, but has avoided disaster. It is the Socialists who, in spite of electoral defeats, are providing the bridge between the old and the new, and a Socialist President of the Republic who is trying to build up his office into a visible instrument of national unity and mediation be- tween the parties such as it never was under the old regime.
Previous page
