Waiting for Khrushchev

During the week's delay while Nikita Khrushchev got over his grippy aches, both Russians and French hammered out a new schedule for his trip to France this week. The visit was cut from 15 days to twelve, and in response to Khrushchev's familiar complaint that his hosts would not let him meet the people, the French added a few factories and housing projects to his touring program, and cut down on a few Chateaux and cathedrals.

But still bent on curtailing his propaganda opportunities, his hosts successfully resisted Nikita's demand for equal time on Paris' city hall steps, where President Eisenhower spoke last September. They also held out against his demand to visit Strasbourg, suspecting that there, on the Franco-German border itself, the Soviet tourist might let fly with a tirade against the Germans.

The 501st Signature. One thing they could not change was the fact that Khrushchev was coming to Paris just as the Fifth Republic unheroically survived its most serious parliamentary crisis to date. The issue was the country's farm problem, which last month burst out in ugly mob rioting at Amiens and last week produced a crisis in the National Assembly that would have toppled a government in Fourth Republic days, before De Gaulle came back to power.

Agriculture employs one Frenchman in five, but farms are usually small and uneconomic, run by older people (average age of farm owners: 55). Since the De Gaulle government untied the link between farm and industrial prices in 1958, farmers' prices have dropped 11% while the rest of the country has crested on an industrial boom. Last month the powerful farmers' organizations demanded a special session of the Assembly to take up the farm problem.

The constitution provides that the Assembly may be convened by a majority of its members. But it also states that the President must sign the decree. "Even if they get 500 signatures," scoffed De Gaulle, "they'll need the 501st"--i.e., his own. In a word--non. When the Deputies presented their petition, signed by a majority of 287, De Gaulle rejected it with cold contempt. The Deputies, he said, had acted under pressure of the farm lobby, "lacking all qualifications and all political responsibility." A special session of Parliament, Charles de Gaulle wrote to the Assembly president, would not "be compatible with the orderly functioning of the public powers, which I am charged with assuring."

Misgivings. The Deputies fell back, silenced, or complaining in lowered tones. The farmers federations only muttered their "very great surprise." From this brusque drama two conclusions were to be drawn: 1) it is still considered politically unprofitable to attack De Gaulle openly; and 2) clear as the drift to one-man government may be, Frenchmen by and large are willing to let it happen. Nonetheless, a considerable disillusionment with De Gaulle had set in. So far it was largely confined to Parliament and a few Parisian editorialists whose consent to one-man government was based on a belief that only De Gaulle could bring peace in Algeria, and who found now that hope less real.

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