Glory with Reservations

As much to honor the Fifth Republic as the Revolution that led to the First, Charles de Gaulle's Minister of Culture, Novelist Andre Malraux. had promised "a July 14 like no other." The 170th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille became, like every Bastille Day. a barometer of France's mood. This time the motif was military and the official theme was glory.

Some Parisian newspapers found it incongruous that a regime so regal as that of De Gaulle's should have appropriated Bastille Day. the anniversary of the people's Revolution. But Andre Malraux dug out the stirring Berlioz version of La Marseillaise originally scored for goo instruments and a great chorus of 600. and ordered the bands to play the old revolutionary songs--including the dirgelike Hymn to the Supreme Being from the Revolutionary Year II (1794). On the esplanade of the Invalides. where colorfully garbed couples from the twelve

French-African Community states danced the night away in "the world's biggest ball,'' famed Chanteuse Josephine Baker chose a tall, bronzed Foreign Legionnaire for her partner. Alas, her throaty French fell on noncomprehending ears: he was German.

Next morning, under a sunny sky ("God is certainly a Gaullist." people said), World War II tanks rumbled down the Champs Elysees with freshly painted names of assorted half-forgotten skirmishes and battles with the Germans. They were the same tanks of the Rambouillet depot that were alerted to descend-upon Paris for an army coup only a little more than a year ago.

Broomsticks & Berets. The military hardware passed unapplauded. The scarlet-plumed Republican Guard, the blue-and-white cloaked Spahis on their white chargers, the white-kepied Foreign Legion with their sand-scuffling step, the pantalooned Senegalese, the Chasseurs Alpins shouldering their lacquered skis--these, passing like a handful of old-fashioned cigarette cards, delighted the children. The paratroopers in their mud-and-moss camouflage got a single "Vive les paras!" from a tall man with an open-necked shirt. "But what have they got?" asked another spectator. "Broomsticks and berets. We are 30 years behind the times."

Many Frenchmen speak as bitterly of obsolescence as do the Spaniards. They speak of the "prestige" of France, writes Editorialist Morvan Lebesque. "as gourmands speak of our 'prestigious Beaujolais' or our 'prestigious coq-au-vin'; a word like any other, a chance word that sleeps around, a prostituted word." But what if, before summer's end, De Gaulle should produce an H-bomb? Then his prestige would be a reality felt anew by his army, his country and his enemies.

On Bastille Day, thousands had turned out only to see him. They strained to catch sight of him as he drove past, standing in his open car, acknowledging the cheers and the Vive de Gaulles with a light but adequate gesture of either hand. "Only De Gaulle can negotiate peace in Algeria." Socialist Guy Mollet told his party convention last week.

War & Words. But Parisians themselves were not noticeably in a martial mood on Bastille Day. Draft notices had just gone out to the young men born in 1939. The war in Algeria has taken 1,043 French lives in the past six months, and that day the newspapers reported a big new Algerian battle in which some 80 more French soldiers died.

The humorous weekly Le Canard En-chaine,, its circulation doubled in the past year because of its biting irreverence for De Gaulle, wrote an open letter to Mon cher Malraux: "If you say Algeria is France, then it is a civil war, because Frenchmen are being killed there. During the American War of Secession, would you have organized a colossal torch parade in Washington?"

Something of this sort seemed to be in the heads of those French who, once the parade was over, sat at ease on the forbidden lawns under the already browning chestnut trees, watching with disinterest the top-hatted ambassadors, the rugged para colonels, the elegant African women and elderly African statesmen in colored robes on their way to the great reception at the Elysee Palace. As evening fell, there were more fireworks, Roman candles, bright detonating stars, and street dances to accordion accompaniment. But the huge "V for Victory" sign made by the fixed beams of military searchlights behind the Place de la Concorde had about it, with the Algerian war still on, a kind of mockery, or promise postponed.

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