The General's Pick

When the gold ribbon and Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor is draped around his neck this week. General Charles de Gaulle will formally become President of France for the next seven years. Only then will De Gaulle officially name his successor as Premier. But, noting that would-be Cabinet ministers were all beating a path to the same office. Paris pundits were sure that the job would go to short (5 ft. 5 in.), elegant Justice Minister Michel Debre, 46.

Debre, the able lawyer chiefly responsible for writing the constitution of De Gaulle's Fifth Republic, is known in Gaullist circles as "the most faithful of the faithful." A practising Roman Catholic of partly Jewish ancestry, Debre has been a Gaullist since he escaped from a World War II Nazi prison camp to join the French Resistance. Mildness is not his style. Under the Fourth Republic, his ferocious attacks on the old parliamentary system both in France's Senate and in his weekly Messenger of Anger won him the nickname of Pere Colere--roughly, Old Man Fury.

Roman Style. Despite an intellectual background--his father is president of the French Medical Academy--Debre is a singleminded, fire-eating French nationalist. One of France's loudest opponents of the ill-fated European Defense Community, he has long been vocally suspicious of U.S. policy toward France, still opposes the idea of European political unity inherent in the Common Market. He believes that De Gaulle's mandate was not a right-wing but a nationalist phenomenon. He would like to see De Gaulle function as a kind of Roman-style elected dictator-with-a-time-limit. In this he is more extreme than De Gaulle himself. But as Premier, Debre will have far less power than his predecessors; he will even haye to share with De Gaulle the power of naming Cabinet ministers.

In picking a Cabinet together, De Gaulle and Debre are expected to keep much of De Gaulle's present team in office: Antoine Pinay as Finance Minister, capable Career Diplomat Maurice Couve de Murville as Foreign Minister, and safe Civil Servant Emile Pelletier as Interior Minister. One likely departure is Minister of State Guy Mollet, whose Socialist Party dislikes De Gaulle's new austerity budget. Mollet talks of the need to create a loyal opposition, so that resentment particularly among the workers, can be expressed through others than the Communists.

What Will Jacques Do? The question that most piqued Parisian curiosity at week's end was what would happen to Jacques Soustelle, the fiery "wrecker of Cabinets" who masterminded the revolt that led to De Gaulle's return to power. Ambitious Jacques Soustelle clearly felt he deserved one of the senior Cabinet posts--Defense, Foreign Affairs or Interior --rather than his present Ministry of Information. But the widespread (and possibly exaggerated) suspicion of his tactics and his intentions makes many fear the prospect that as head of the Interior he would control the police. When newsmen queried him on his prospects, Anthropologist Soustelle gloomily quipped: "Perhaps I will go back to Mexico and my Aztecs."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.