"I Want a Man . . ."

The French public's reaction to political crisis is almost as stylized as the crises themselves. The first stage is cynicism, the next amusement, followed by bored indifference. Presumably, if a crisis ever lasted long enough, the French people would become exasperated enough to demand reform, but since the war that stage has never come. Last week the public was plainly in the third stage of bored indifference.

It was 2:20 a.m. when the National Assembly duly mowed down Socialist Guy Mollet by a vote of 290 to 227, and the French national radio did not even bother to stay on the air to announce the result. But it was also the fifth week of the crisis. Irritably, conscientious President Rene Coty, 75, summoned his confidential aide, barked: "I want a man tonight. Get me Felix Gaillard."

The aide roared off into the Paris night, trying two old (and wrong) addresses before he finally found Gaillard's apartment house on the elegant Avenue Foch. The concierge was annoyed at being waked, totally unimpressed with the information that Gaillard was wanted by the President of the Republic. He summoned a policeman. The aide finally convinced them his business was urgent. Athletic, 37-year-old Felix Gaillard (TIME, Sept. 23), Minister of Finance in the outgoing government of 43-year-old Caretaker Premier Maurice Bourges-Maunoury, hopped out of bed. shaved, dressed and rushed to Coty. Shortly after 5 a.m. the blunt, fatherly President told Gaillard: form a government, and quickly.

Radical Socialist Gaillard, the author of France's recent too-little-and-too-late partial devaluation of the franc, set out to persuade the conservatives and Socialists, who keep rejecting one another's candidates, that he should head a "government to defend the republic." The Socialists balked, but finally at week's end agreed to back him. Barring a last-minute hitch, Gaillard was to be voted into office this week, on his 38th birthday, as the youngest Premier in the history of modern France.

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