Georges Bidault's Week

As the dread African Goums marched into the Place de la Concorde, ending the great Resistance Day parade, the unity that the Resistance had brought France seemed to falter. Young hotheads started yelling: "Vive De Gaulle! De Gaulle to power!" A Parisian moblet caught the fever, broke police lines. The flics--recalling fatal rightist riots on the same spot in 1934--laid about blindly with their iron-buttoned capes and arrested a handful of battered demonstrators. Other hotheads besieged Communist headquarters, burned

Marxist books and smashed windows. Next day half a million disciplined Reds tramped past the scene, chanting "Down with the fascist assassins!" and "A 25% wage rise for all workers!"

Frenchmen felt a chill. The outbreak, the first riot since liberation, showed that deep and dangerous passions lurked under the surface of coalition politics.

"Above Party." And the bright legend of Charles de Gaulle, the liberator, was shaken. Two days before, in Normandy, on the second anniversary of his D-day landing, he had said the "perpetually divided" nation needed a strong President "above all parties," and implied that he was willing to take the job.

Leftists promptly blamed the rightist riot on De Gaulle's speech. In the Chamber of Deputies, Jacques Duclos shook his fist, cried: "Let me warn you. Where the rioters started . . . last night . . . Adolf Hitler started over twenty years ago!" Pravda's correspondent fished farther back in history, likened De Gaulle to President-Emperor Louis Napoleon. Leon eBlum, De Gaulle's most lenient critic, shook his head. "In France the step from presidential to personal power is all too short. . . ." Not a single responsible party leader defended Charles de Gaulle's gravest political mistake.

Harassed but unruffled, graceful Georges Bidault commuted with a dancer's step between the Foreign Ministers' treaty talks at the Luxembourg Palace (see INTERNATIONAL) and the Palais-Bourbon, where the French Assembly had made him provisional chief of state. To complicate Bidault's task of Cabinetmaking, the Communists egged on the labor unions to demand inflationary wage increases to meet rising living costs.

Above Tactics. More than agility maintained Bidault's balance amid this national and international confusion. His M.R.P.'s victory in the June 2 elections had a foundation deep enough to oppose the Communists with more than day-today maneuvers. When Bidault had said that "we are the only party that can fight Communism and still work in harmony with Communists," he meant that the M.R.P. was trying to revive European political life with a social "revolution by law" based on democracy and justice. Bidault was cool to proposals for a Western bloc against Russia because he feared that such merely negative, defensive pacts (like the "guarantees" of 1939-40) would be merely skin deep. He was reaching deeper toward the economic distress and social turmoil from which Communism grew. He sought to give the people a positive political faith which would arm them, better than alliances, against the warped but fanatical faith of Communism. By week's end Bidault, without compromising his program, succeeded in forming a coalition Cabinet of the M.R.P., the Communists and the Socialists. It was almost the same Government as the outgoing one, with the Communists still excluded from the key posts of Army, Foreign Affairs and Interior (police).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.