Nonsense Censorship

Trying to wrest some sense out of France's wavering progress between civil war and De Gaulle, the French press last week also had to grapple with an old enemy: censorship. Though vague and erratic, the government's censorship was the tightest invoked by any Western democracy since the end of the war. Amateur censors, hurriedly recruited from the civil service, stood watch at all the wire services and most big daily newspapers, heavily blue-penciled many a story.

By Guess & by Hunch. The pruning seemed generally aimed at curbing the suggestion of civil war, but, with no firm policy guide, the censors cut stories by guess and by hunch. They seized a day's run of the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune that carried a story on the French fleet leaving Malta. But they let French papers and the national radio network carry the same story the same day. Newsmen also had their troubles with the jittery government. For calling President Coty "the great nothing of the Fourth Republic," the London Daily Herald's Michael Foot, onetime Labor M.P., was expelled from the country.

As startling blank patches marked censure appeared in their pages, French papers warned readers that all of their news should be taken with more than a soupc,on of salt. Influential Editor-Director Hubert Beuve-Mery of the Paris daily Le Monde removed his name from its familiar spot beneath the masthead, argued that responsibility for the paper had passed to the government.

A Censor's Scoop. Some of the censors helped. One agency, blessed with an ex-newsman as a censor, put him to work calling ministries for check points. The first news the Associated Press got of trouble on Corsica came when a censor declared that any mention of the uprising there was forbidden. The Paris A.P. desk got a call through to its stringer on the island before communications were cut off, put the story on the U.S. wire (which was not censored) for a solid 15-minute beat.

Aloof from all such confusion was the man behind the week's news, General de Gaulle. Without a word being touched, the conservative Paris daily L'Aurore cried in boldface headlines: LET THE ELYSEE PALACE DESIGNATE DE GAULLE, and the Communist daily L'Humanite ran a frontpage cartoon of De Gaulle holding the dead body of Marianne, symbol of the French nation, with the appeal: "Bar the Route Against Military Dictatorship." Explained one censor: "De Gaulle's name is too much of a national symbol to tamper with." Translated from the French, that seemed to mean that the falling government, fearful of appearing either to embrace or offend the incoming Premier, found De Gaulle too hot to censor.

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