Manifesto & Election

Heavily subsidized by the State, the semi-official French news agency Havas, seldom plays big what the Cabinet wants played small. Last week Havas carried on its wires a manifesto issued in dramatic circumstances by the 30-year-old Comte de Paris, son of the 64-year-old Bourbon- Orleans pretender, the Due de Guise.

It is against French law for either the Pretender or his son to enter France, and the frontiers today are closely watched for unauthorized aircraft, but a private plane encountered no obstacle in bringing the Comte de Paris illegally in broad daylight from Brussels to a country house in Normandy. There discreetly chosen French journalists had been assembled "to meet the Comtesse."

The Comtesse de Paris did not appear, but suddenly a door sprang open and the aide de camp of "Prince Henri, Comte de Paris et Dauphin de France" announced, with the traditional French royal reverence, " Monseigneur!"

Monseigneur, whom the journalists later toasted in champagne with the cry "To the restoration of France!" handed them a manifesto. It argued that, while for weak France to have tried "to bluff" and refuse to sign the "Munich capitulation" would have been "as criminal as war itself," nevertheless this "humiliation that has no precedent in our history" must be redressed by strengthening France, and this required neither policies of the Right nor Left but unity under a constitutional monarch.

Referring to his Royal House, Monseigneur declared: "We alone can act as umpire, and, aided by all Frenchmen, can remake France. If France rejects monarchy she must choose between decay and party dictatorship." In two hours the Comte de Paris was safely back in Belgium.

Two days later election of one-third of the French Senate quietly took place with such minor gains and losses of the various parties that neutral observers figured the uncertain French parliamentary balance had simply been maintained. Outstanding was the personal triumph of Socialist Marx Dormoy, a protege of Leon ("New Deal") Blum, who won his Senate seat in a smashing victory this week over Rightist Marcel Regnier, a protege of Pierre ("Hoare-Laval Deal") Laval.

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