Men & Means

"The degradation of the state is rapidly becoming worse." said Charles de Gaulle. "At this moment, when France is offered so many opportunities in so many ways, she is faced with disruption and perhaps with civil war. In these conditions I am offered one more opportunity to lead the country back to the salvation of the state and republic.

"For this duty the means must be available. If you are willing to invest it, the government . . . will demand from you full powers to act with effectiveness and speed. It will ask them from you for a period of six months, hoping that by the end of that term order will have been restored in the state, hope rediscovered in Algeria and union remade in the nation."

Thus did De Gaulle present himself this week to the National Assembly for investiture as Premier of France. Then, in clear, passionless tones, he went on to outline the rest of his program. Items:

P: The Assembly must authorize his government to draw up a new constitution --which will be submitted to popular referendum.

P: The three basic principles of De Gaulle's republican constitution would be 1) "universal suffrage is the source of all power"; 2) effective separation of legislative and executive powers; 3) Cabinet responsibility to Parliament. It would also include clauses establishing a new solemn relationship between France and "the peoples associated with France"--presumably including Morocco and Tunisia.

P: Once Parliament had voted the powers he demanded--which it must do "without delay . . . for time is not waiting for us"--it would be sent on vacation until October.

Some of this was hard for De Gaulle's parliamentary adversaries to swallow. But for the colons and balcony generals of Algiers-- whom De Gaulle contemptuously dismissed in private conversation as "a bunch of boy scouts"--even harsher medicine was in store. De Gaulle's Cabinet included no diehard colonialists and not one of the men involved in the Algiers insurrection. It consisted instead of parliamentary ministers and nonparty technicians centered around France's three major "democratic" parties. Among them: Socialist Guy Mollet and Catholic Popular Republican Pierre Pflimlin as Ministers of State; Independent Antoine Pinay as Minister of Finance. Those right-wing Algerian French ultras who had gleefully plotted the downfall of Pierre Pilimlin's government were shocked and disheartened by Pflimlin's appearance in the De Gaulle Cabinet. As for those outside France, who feared De Gaulle's well-known propensity for going it alone, they could take consolation in his choice for Foreign Minister, Career Diplomat Maurice Couve de Murville, a stanch supporter of NATO. At midnight of his first day in power, Premier de Gaulle lifted censorship (see PRESS).

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