Mendès-France — A Domestic Account

PARIS

Premier Pierre Mendès-France, it is reported here, is being criticized in the United States for lacking a sense of humor. Be that as it may, for the first time in recent history the entertainers of Montmartre are at a loss for jokes at the expense of the head of the government. One of the most popular of these tells his nightly audiences that if Mendès-France remains in office over a year, he will be unable to pay his taxes due to a shortage of “material.”

It is difficult to decide just what factor was most helpful in the rise of Mendès-France: the disaster in Indo-China, the beet and alcohol scandals, the “picayune politics” of M. Bidault at the Foreign Office, or the events in North Africa. But this is certain: loss of confidence in the state, much more than the question of the standard of living, was at the root of the social dissatisfaction, and the “Mendès revolution” aims at restoring this confidence rather than altering basic institutions.

The term “palace revolution” perhaps best fits the new regime. Mendès-France came to power by maneuvering along the margins of the main political current set up by the 1951 elections. Faced with an unmanageable parliament, he had sometimes to play a card from the hand of the Communists, sometimes from that of General Juin, and even from that of De Gaulle.

From 1945 to 1948 the various French governments reflected mainly the forces of the Resistance and Liberation. After 1948, they represented nothing but a political mechanism with its axis in the Center parties and its sole function that of elevating the concept and practice of “do-nothingism” to the level of a fine art. In the exchanges between parliament and the government one could distinguish only the raised voices of the small and middle entrepreneurs-a strong economic and conservative political force in France, but one lacking any long-range perspective and made up of an accumulation of individual appetites rather than a solid social bloc. This conglomerate power is an immobilizing and retarding factor, with its individual sectors constantly jockeying for advantage and concerned mainly with an easy way out through high prices and government subsidies.

It is difficult to define the attitude of Big Business toward this sub. grouping, but there is ample evidence that it has not been totally indifferent to the pillaging of credit, the shady operations of beet and alcohol kings, and the general decadence born of political inertia. It is known, for example, that the French bourgeoisie no longer supported the war in Indo-China, that the Bank of Indo-China had withdrawn from that “wasps’ nest” to other, more profitable fields. In its final stages, the Indo-Chinese war was a war of the pirates and black marketeers of foreign exchange allied with a bureaucratic and military clique.

To some extent at least, Mendès-France represents the desire of Big Business to “clea...