The Art of Sinking

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From France's ornately somber National Assembly building one day last week emerged one of the world's least known and (at the moment) most important politicians. He was huddled in a black overcoat and brown woolen muffler, as if trying to withdraw into himself before the winds of winter and discontent that wailed about him. His black Homburg, tipped far over his pale blue eyes, almost scraped his nose, perhaps the most remarkable French nose since Cyrano de Bergerac's--a long, melancholy nose whose moody descent ended in a surprising and somewhat rakish twist, thus expressing both resignation and defiance to the world's all-embracing sadness.

"Do you feel happy?" asked one of the acquaintances who surrounded him in a solicitous cluster.

Premier of France Robert Schuman, who had just gone through an Assembly session which might or might not result in the fall of his Cabinet, smiled. "As usual," he said. "It seems they are giving me three weeks to find you a cheap steak."

Deadline in March. Robert Schuman's way of summing up the situation, at the level of the deliberate commonplace, made his government's crisis sound almost trivial. But Frenchmen knew what he meant. And they knew that if Schuman failed in his efforts to halt rising prices, and his coalition government fell, the situation might be beyond the power of any new coalition to solve. That would almost certainly mean an early showdown between the two challenging opposites in France today--Charles de Gaulle's super-party, Rassemblement du Peuple Franc,ais, and the Communists. The end of Schuman might mean the end of parliamentary rule as France had known it.

France's National Economic Council (an advisory body that usually echoes the nation's mood) had told the Premier simply: "You have until March 15, at the very latest, to lower prices 10%." Beyond that date, no labor union could promise to hold down the workers' dissatisfaction. In fact, the Communist-led C.G.T. (biggest federation of French unions) was unwilling to wait that long. The Communists last week demanded immediate wage boosts which they knew the government could not grant.

The Gaullists (though Schuman has been careful not to antagonize them) also blew hard. Cried the Mayor of Paris, Charles de Gaulle's brother, Pierre, last week: the government had "already failed . . . and the succession will be ours."

Novelist Andre Malraux, De Gaulle's highbrow pressagent, rang a tocsin of his own: he predicted that Maurice Thorez' Communist legions would soon launch a major offensive which might lead to civil war by April 15. Other alarms came from a less intellectual but intensely French quarter. In Paris, 5,000 midinettes, shivering in thin coats, protested against their dismissals by Paris dress houses (which were suffering a slump despite the New Look). Cried clothing union leader Alice Brisset: "Hardy measures are needed!"

Paris housewives, who could now just about buy two eggs for what a whole chicken would have cost them before the war, were most incensed of all. Suzanne Kerguelen, famed around the Neuilly food market for her sharpness of tongue, spoke for them all when she said: "C,a, va mal chez moi, comme partout" ("Things are tough at home, and tough all over"). Said Jacques Rumpert, a petit bourgeois like millions of others, who runs a typewriter repair shop at Montparnasse: "Que voulez-vous? I worked hard all my life. My aim was to have a house, with a small garden by the Seine, so I could fish. All that is out now, ... I am not a Gaullist. I'm not a member of the 'Third Force,' and I am not a Communist either. I belong to the biggest party in France, the 'Je-M'en-Foutistes!'* You can call it the Fourth Force, if you Want to."

The Battle of the Fafiots. The general uproar was specifically addressed to Robert Schuman, a man who dislikes noise. Although he was almost a political unknown, he had to command France's respect. He had to take a firm line, although he presided over a coalition Cabinet that included Socialists and assorted centrists, as well as his own strongly Catholic M.R.P. Above all, as a convinced economic liberal, he wanted to end the system of government controls which has been stifling France since the war; but at the same time, he was forced to use repressive measures by current economic emergencies, and by his Socialist colleagues, who were committed to a controlled economy. His dilemma was well illustrated by the affair of what the French used to call their gros fafiots (five grand).

It happened this way: Leon Blum and his Socialists had rebelled last month against measures like decontrol of consumer goods, the free market for gold and currency. To save his Cabinet, Schuman had made a costly concession. He agreed to a pet Socialist plan: withdrawal of 5,000-franc notes, which supposedly would smoke out illegal currency hoards. As soon as the announcement was made, prices went up drastically.

Schuman thereupon had to reimpose many controls. Now, could he reverse the trend? Said 28-year-old Pierre Guiton, a history teacher, last week: "I hope he succeeds . . . but I have no confidence." Few Frenchmen, indeed, knew enough about their Premier to judge his mettle.

The Two Sides of a Christian. Schuman used a phrase last week which was a clue to his plans, his talents and his character. He declared that France must acquire "le climat psychologique de la baisse," which could be interpreted as "the art of sinking." For Schuman's job was not only to deflate prices; he had to deflate the grand illusions, the bitterness, the suppressed (and sometimes open) hysteria, and indeed the sense of frustrated tragedy which France had acquired in three wars and on which both the Communists and De Gaulle thrive. Schuman had to show France--if he could--how she could sink gently, down to the solid reality of earth.

By inclination and character, at least, Schuman was fitted for his task. He had few friends. He was so shy that he blushed when he was paid a polite compliment. The French language, which is made for oratory, in his speeches sounded plain and calm. His favorite cartoon character was Ferdinand the Bull. In a land resounding with the Marseillaise and the Internationale, Schuman said quietly: "I have a poor ear for music." He was a part of the sturdy old antediluvian France.

Schuman liked to say, "I am a technician, not an ideologist." He had a profound distaste for "isms." Therefore he was capable of as many twists and turns as he found necessary in the daily business of saving the Republic. But at the same time, Schuman never lost his quiet humanity nor his faith in men--qualities which distinguish him from the "Coco" doctrinaires of the Left and the gauntly pessimistic De Gaulle on the Right.

Sometimes Schuman seemed to have a split character. Two of his aides, who work in separate offices adjoining him, saw him differently. Said one: "To me, the man is a saint. Most people would call him a mystic." Said the other: "If he's a mystic, he certainly has both feet on the ground."

One of them saw the devout Christian. The other saw the Lorrainer. Schuman is both.

"Hitler Is Lost." Schuman was born (1886) in Luxembourg, of an old Lorraine family. When Germany annexed Alsace-Lorraine in 1871, his family automatically became German, and Robert was German, technically, until his 33rd birthday. In school, he displayed a redoubtable memory. Said one of his teachers: "That boy will end by editing an encyclopedia."

He also displayed a somewhat elementary sense of humor. His favorite butt was the cook; he likes to remember creeping into the kitchen to surprise her by hiding a raw apple within one of her roasted chickens. His humor has not grown much more sophisticated. Recently, when asked why he had gone to see the Hollywood version of the Hemingway story The Killers, he replied: "I heard those gangsters had found a new way of making money."

He studied law, built up a successful practice in Metz. When Lorraine was returned to France in 1919, he was elected deputy from his district, and has been reelected ever since. The first to "discover" him was wartime Premier Paul Reynaud, who made him Undersecretary for Refugees in 1940. At one point during the war, Schuman was kept in solitary confinement by the Germans. "It did not leave me bad memories," he says. "I meditated."

The Germans tried to get him to collaborate. Said he: "A concentration camp is not an argument." Later he managed to escape by masquerading as a French schoolteacher, hid out in various French monasteries. He spoke a few times before refugee groups. One night, in the crypt of a big Lyon church, he told the Bishop of Metz and 1,500 fellow Lorrainers: "Hitler is lost! You may be sure of that." After that, the Nazis put a price on his head. Friends who knew him before the war now find him subtly changed. Schuman, the Premier, has more warmth than Schuman, the lawyer.

"He First Kisses Me." Schuman's parents gave him a sheltered boyhood. After their death, he stayed on in their 17th Century house at Chazelles, near Metz, with only his old childhood governess to look after him. When she died, 40 years ago, he engaged a housekeeper, Marie Kelle, who still keeps house for him at Chazelles. Every now & then he manages to spend a weekend there. The stocky cupboards and chairs are stuffed and stacked with books (he has a collection of 8,000 rare volumes, mostly history and theology). He regularly gets up at 8. Relates Marie Kelle (who at 70 is quite deaf): "When he comes down, he first kisses me, then settles down to indexing his books."

Schuman says that he never even came near getting married. He frankly admits that women frighten him. But he became the first French Premier to name a woman to a ministerial post (Madame Poinso-Chapuis, Minister of Public Health). Says Schuman: "Only a bachelor could turn a trick like that."

Schuman's asceticism borders on stinginess. The last time he bought an article of clothing was in 1946, when, visiting the U.S., he acquired a blue necktie with white polka dots, and three shirts. Late at night, before retiring to his apartment (he lives and works in his official residence, the solemn Hotel Matignon), he wanders through the empty offices, switching off lights.*

"Quit It." Schuman's Cabinet is composed of individually able men. Most notable: Georges Bidault (Foreign Affairs), haggard Jules Moch (Interior), whom the Communists have jovially nicknamed "The Assassin"; and swarthy Rene Mayer (Finance), who carried out Schuman's stringent taxation projects. Despite the Cabinet's internal contradictions, meetings are calm. Schuman never loses his temper. When he is irritated, his mustache twitches. In the Assembly last week (where he had to defend the withdrawal of the 5,000-franc notes), his mustache twitched ominously. But he remained mild.

Schuman: "The government has started an experiment. . . ."

Heckler on the Left: "And what an experiment! My child does better with a toy chemistry set!"

Schuman: "Believe me, my position is not an enviable one."

Heckler on the Right: "Then quit it!"

After the debate, Schuman asked the Assembly for a vote of confidence. The vote would not be taken until this week (to permit a cooling of tempers). If Schuman won, it would be the seventh time since he took office; if he lost, he could spend more weekends at Chazelles.

The Khaki Convoys. Schuman could not count on U.S. aid alone to meet France's problems. Marshall Plan aid might not reach France for another six months, and interim aid funds would be used up by April 1. But Schuman went about his business last week with a serenity that confounds his enemies.

While the country shivered in the grip of the first bad freezing spell of the winter, convoys of khaki-painted trucks driven by troops crawled along the straight, poplar-lined roads of France toward the richest agricultural areas, where there is an abundance of vegetables waiting. Soldiers bought up the vegetables and returned with them to the cities. Thousands of middlemen would lose their cut, but this week consumers in Paris, the industrial north, and the relatively barren, wine-producing areas in the deep south would be getting potatoes, carrots, leeks and beans at 10 to 20% below their former price.

Simultaneously Schuman ordered the launching of a propaganda campaign. "As long as the housewife is convinced that there is a shortage of everything and that prices are going to continue to rise," said Schuman, "she will throw herself on everything she can afford to buy . . . encouraging the very boost in the cost of living which she fears. The French housewife must be re-educated. . . ." Newsreels, the state radio and pro-government newspapers were being mobilized for the Premier's "psychological" campaign. The campaign would have to move fast.

The Unimpassioned Vegetables. In fighting for the price of steak, Schuman was fighting for the Republic and for the West, too. Said he last week: "Community of interests and ideas unite the American and French nations. It is not only a matter of economic solidarity, or even merely of memories that are shared. It is a matter of common preoccupation about the future. Europe is the advance post of our common civilization." He was also fighting for an old order of solid living and easy democracy which Schuman's generation had known in France; with all its faults, that order had grace, freedom, and a gentle humanism not far removed from practical Christianity. If he failed, it meant that this order was doomed--perhaps not only in France.

Last week, he slipped out of the Hotel Matignon to take a walk; frantic policemen scoured the city, finally found him in a park playing pickaback with some children he had befriended. At dinner one evening, secretaries kept bringing him bulletins from the price front, telephoned to Paris from prefects all over France. Meat was steady. Beef and veal were generally cheaper, rabbits and poultry were going up. Fresh fruit was soaring. Vegetables were going down. "Monsieur le President, Monsieur le President,"* stuttered an excited secretary. "Vegetables are descending!"

"Let us not be impassioned," replied Schuman. "The vegetables are not."

When Marie Kelle called him to ask whether he would be down for the weekend, he said: "Not this time, Marie, not this time." But, mused Marie, "at my age one has no illusions. Monsieur will not stay long in Paris. He will come back here. He will not be Premier for long. I think he would prefer to come back."

-"Je m'en jous" means, roughly, "The hell with it." *In his passion for parsimony, Schuman resembles former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, who also haunted his offices, switching off lights. *The customary title of French Premiers is "President of the Council of Ministers."

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