Apathy, Ennui & Pleasant Pique-Niques

From Paris, where France was in its fourth week without a government, TIME Correspondent Godfrey Blunden cabled:

PRESIDENT Renee Coty's black Renault drives up the Champs-Elyseees between lightly foliaged plane trees to the Arc de Triomphe. The crowd, thinly hugging the barriers, applauds mildly. The Republic is still worth a handclap, and 76-year-old President Coty, typifying today's worried "ordinary Frenchman," is worth several.

But what is that other noise? Jeering whistles, faint calls of "Vive De Gaulle!" It is the first time such sounds have fallen on the ears of the respected Coty in the course of his official duties. Are the citizens impatient with Renee Pleven's 16-day effort to form a government? Never fear. M. Pleven has finally named his Cabinet this morning, and the National Assembly has been convoked to pass upon it. Calmly, Coty lays a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, below the chiseled names of battles won long ago.

Afterward, brass bands come down the Champs-Elysees, the solemn Garde reepublicaine wondrously blowing trumpets and tubas from atop their dancing horses; they are followed by the cantering, cloaked Spahis. In the crowd, a man dressed in a shabby, purple-striped coat shakes a collection box, and the crowd remembers the day of which this is the 13th anniversary--that happy day in 1945 when Germany surrendered, when returning deportees, still wearing the purple-striped clothing issued them by the Nazis, danced in the streets of Paris, and ecstatic women in wooden shoes rode behind the Gardes Republicans as they trotted down the quais.

The glory that is being celebrated is not of this day, but of some more remote time. President Coty does not have long to savor it. Along with the President's luncheon coffee at the Elysee Palace arrives gaunt Rene Pleven, to announce that he cannot form a government after all because the Radicals refuse to support his choice of Andree Morice, a "tough-line" man on Algeria, as Minister of Defense. With a sigh President Coty folds his napkin. Nothing for it but to send out telegrams canceling the Assembly meeting--something that has never before occurred under the Fourth Republic--and to call on someone else to try and form a government.

Next-to-Last Straw. In the evening, hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen who have chosen to devote the day to a pique-nique in the woods, eating off little tables set out under the beech trees and gathering bunches of bluebells are home again, relaxing before their TV sets. There, against the frame of Coty's doorway, they can see and hear how each of the three potential Radical Premiers called by the President greets this honor.

First there is balding ex-Education Minister Renee Billeeres, saying, "Sooner another than me." Then comes 36-year-old Maurice Faure ("I am too young"), then cod-eyed Senator Jean Berthoin, conscious of the desperation that led Coty for the first time to call on a Senator. Berthoin insists: "It must be a Deputy." Finally, half an hour before midnight, Popular Republican Pierre Pflimlin, a thin, silvery and incisive Alsatian reluctantly agrees to try and become Premier of France.

Now it is time to bring out all the old jokes, time for some radio clown to pose the 75 million-franc question: "Name all the French Premiers since 1947," and for the cocktail-party gag, "Do you think the Algerians will get a government before we do?" Some Frenchmen, it is true, seem to regard the crisis as the next-to-last straw. Thunders Editor Pierre Brisson in Figaro: "It is no longer a Parliament, but a monstrous jamming enterprise. The conclusion is to reform or disappear. The margin for the Assembly is only a thread's width." But, unhappily for M. Brisson, his readers can remember that only two days ago a Figaro photographer, sent out to photograph Renee Pleven at his hour of decision, found a more interesting subject in a game of boules being played by a group of taxi drivers, and that his picture made four columns on Figaro's front page.

To Live in France. Like Figaro, all France displays a curious ambivalence--a mixture of apparent political apathy and of passionate disgust for present parliamentary procedures. Ostensibly, the French dilemma hinges on Algeria: it was the suspicion that he was moving toward negotiations with the rebels that toppled Felix Gaillard after 5 1/2 months in office. But the Algerian problem could long ago have been resolved were it not for the unreconstructed imperialist who skulks within the breast of so many Frenchmen. Cynical about government, about grandeur and glory, Frenchmen nonetheless are vulnerable to exhortations that France must rank high among the nations and be respected. ("Respect?" wrote one wag in Paris' Canard Enchainee last week. "I don't want to respect France. I only want to sleep with her.")

Capitalizing on these archaic dreams, the French right has shown itself increasingly contemptuous of democratic procedures. To live in France today is to enjoy the riches of her museums and the misty shapes of Paris under the soft archery of summer showers, to feel the quick, cool darkness under the blossom-laden chestnut trees, and to smell the grass falling to the mower on lawns snow-powdered with tiny daisies called paaquerettes.

It is also to become accustomed to hearing of newspapers being seized by police, to seeing politically controversial books being sold under the counter, to seeing anti-Semitic slogans (A bas les juifs!) scrawled on walls. To live in France today is, in some neighborhoods, to take the rafle (police dragnet) for granted, to pass quickly by when the black wagons swing into the curb and the burly cops close in on a cafee and tap each customer for his papers. It is to read, in the influential Le Monde, Editor Beuve-Meery's melancholy series Simple Thoughts for Has-Beens "enclosed by a past which can no longer be sustained."

Out of the Swim. For some the answer is De Gaulle. The morning after Pleven's failure to form a government, Paris is plastered with posters declaring: "Call De Gaulle and France will be France!" Newspapers proclaim that a Colonel Barberot has convoked a meeting of the "Companions of the Liberation" because "13 years have sufficed to show that all we fought for has been lost," and that "in the service of our country we must use the capital represented by General de Gaulle."

But the proposal is quickly contested by non-Gaullist "Companions." "De Gaulle in his quality as general?" asks Pflimlin. "No one has the right to interpret a silence," snaps Popular Republican Maurice Schumann in sardonic reference to De Gaulle's refusal to commit himself. Muses Peasant Party Deputy Henri Dorgeeres-d'Halluin: "I would first wish to give a last chance to our existing institutions."

So far as anyone can tell, the time has not yet come when most Frenchmen are prepared to throw France's democracy overboard and give a free hand to De Gaulle or anyone else. But neither has the time come when they are prepared to confront the implications of the fear confessed two weeks ago by Socialist Robert Lacoste, outgoing French proconsul in Algeria. Said Lacoste to a French newsman: "Why is all the world against France? You believe it is because we are not in the current of history? Yes, you believe it. I also."

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