Sheets in the Wind

Logic and politics seldom slip their feet between the same sheets.

--French political maxim

After three weeks without a government, logic demanded that France find a solution to her current parliamentary crisis. Grudgingly the politicians slipped into their red velvet seats in the National Assembly to hear what Premier-designate Maurice Bourges-Maunoury had to say for himself. Alone on the bench where tradition requires candidate Premiers to sweat out their ordeal, youthful (42), high-domed little Bourges-Maunoury had an attack of stage fright.

The grandson of a marshal of France, and an ex-army officer with a hard-earned World War II resistance record, he is a man of proven courage. A minister in six postwar governments, who as head of Defense had spearheaded the Suez adventure and the get-tough Algerian policy, he has political experience, ambition, determination. What probably caused Bourges' voice to break like an adolescent's as he read out his speech was that he knew as well as everyone else that his program offered no solution for France's financial crisis, no hope for an early end to the Algerian war.

Just before mounting the tribune, Bourges had whispered to a friend: "If they try to trap me with specifics, I'll just read the speech back to them. If they ask more questions, I'll read it again. You'll see, they'll give up." The only thing remotely new in what he had to say was that he would propose a new "general law" in which pacified areas of Algeria would get increasing autonomy, free elections, Moslem instead of French officials, all leading eventually and vaguely to the abolition of the Government General.

The audibly grumbling Deputies had their own ill-tempered answer for Bourges' attitude: they voted 240 to 194 to make him Premier, installing him with fewer votes than Socialist Guy Mollet had in his favor in losing.

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