No Boulanger?

Dignitaries and former Resistance leaders last week plodded across muddy fields to the remote hamlet of Bruneval in Normandy. There, at a ceremony to honor a British commando raid, Charles de Gaulle came out of retirement and opened a campaign to recapture power.

"The tide goes up and down," said De Gaulle. "Perhaps it is in the course of nature that a period of clear and gigantic efforts should be followed by a period of obscure fumbling. But times are too difficult, life too uncertain, the world too hard to enable one to vegetate too long in the darkness without risk of succumbing." Then De Gaulle lashed out against the French parliamentary system and the new constitution. Said he: "The day is coming when, rejecting sterile games and reforming the badly built framework of the country . . . the immense mass of the French will rally to France."

Socialist Patriarch Leon Blum snapped back that the savior of the Republic spoke against the Republic. "I am obliged to acknowledge that an open fight has now begun," he wrote. "Without reservation . . . [the Socialist Party] will be on the side of the Republic." The moderate MRP's leaders were cautious and worried. The Right's approval of De Gaulle was markedly reserved. Communist L'Humanite demanded an Assembly debate to forbid Army officers to listen to De Gaulle. Worried about the increased danger of civil war, Socialist Premier Paul Ramadier paid a hasty visit to De Gaulle. In his white-walled villa, over black coffee, "le grand Charlie" tried to reassure Ramadier. "I am no Boulanger,"* De Gaulle said. Ramadier was taking no chances. The two men agreed that henceforth De Gaulle would be a split personality. At official functions De Gaulle, the hero and ex-Premier, would be nonpolitical. On other occasions he would say what he pleased.

On Easter Sunday, at the Government-sponsored unveiling of a plaque in Strasbourg Cathedral to the American dead in Alsace, De Gaulle appeared as hero. Thousands jammed the rainswept streets to cry "De Gaulle au pouvoir!" (De Gaulle to power!). In the presence of U.S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery, De Gaulle said: "If a new tyranny should ever menace all or part of the world, we may be certain that the U.S. and France would be together to oppose it."

The next day, as a private citizen, De Gaulle spoke more explicitly to a packed square before Strasbourg's City Hall. He cried: "It is time that a grouping or rally [rassemblement] of the French people is organized, which, within the legal framework, will be able to cause ... the profound reform of the state."

If economic conditions worsened, and France's uneasy coalition Government of Communists, Socialists and Catholics cracked under the strain, millions of Frenchmen might turn to De Gaulle again.

* Romantic General Georges Ernest Jean Marie Boulanger was the dominating figure in French politics in 1888-89. He fled before the Government could arrest him for a plotted royalist coup d'etat. In 1891 he committed suicide on his mistress' tomb in Brussels.

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