Man on Vacation

Like antagonists retiring from the battlefield to regroup, France's National Assembly and Premier Mendes-France went off last week on short vacations. For Mendes the vacation was, typically, an opportunity to get work done. Chronically unable to leave his job behind him, Mendes booked reservations for himself and his pretty wife Lily at the Italian resort town of Positano, but then loaded up the schedule with an imposing list of appointments--an audience with Pope Pius XII, a meeting with Italy's Premier Mario Scelba and, on the way home, a conference with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer at Baden-Baden.

Before taking off (in President Coty's official plane), the Premier blandly made one parting gesture calculated to provoke a full-scale battle royal. Summoning his Cabinet, he persuaded them to endorse a new electoral law and then, without any advance warning, sprang it on the scattering Deputies. It calls for abandoning proportional representation, which has helped to perpetuate the splintering of France's parliament into a multitude of bickering factions. Mendes would return to direct vote of Deputies by districts, as it was under the Third Republic.

Once more the dynamic little Premier had confronted Assembly politicians with an uncomfortable decision. The Communists can be expected to fight with bared teeth against a direct-voting law, which makes it possible for the anti-Communists to band together and beat a Communist in runoff elections. The other big parties like Catholic M.R.P. and the Socialists, which depend more on doctrine than on local appeal, are not confident enough of the strength of their individual candidates to cheer for the change. For Mendes-France and his followers, however, the change seems a way to upset party strangle holds and prepare the way to the new "grouping of the left" which Mendesites prescribe for a healthier, more dependable France (TIME, Jan. 10). But French governments that propose electoral reforms have a way of disappearing before the reform puts in an appearance.

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