Force de Flap

"It's all right for De Gaulle to annoy the perfidious English, the vulgar Americans or the impossible Belgians," huffed a Gallic gourmet in Paris last week, meanwhile extracting a gobbet of white succulence from a pink lobster tail. "But to endanger lobster shipments, so vital to France, by picking a fight with the Brazilians--that's too much."

De Gaulle, naturally, paid no attention. His sense of grandeur wounded by a Brazilian ultimatum to clear French lobster boats out of Brazilian waters, he dispatched a warship to put an end to such nonsense. Brazil responded by canceling sailors' shore leaves, ordering units of its own fleet to sea. There was an uneasy stir in foreign ministries in Paris and Rio de Janeiro; among Brazilians there was talk of breaking diplomatic relations, even of asking the U.S. to invoke the Monroe Doctrine. Headlined Rio's O Dia: WAR IS IMMINENT.

Swimmers or Crawlers? Le grand Charles's latest fracas was spawned by a fine point of international law and the ways of lobsters: Do they swim as well as crawl? If lobsters swim, then the French may be entitled to catch them as fish; if they only crawl, they are Brazilian.* For, according to a 1958 Geneva convention, nations have a right to all the natural resources on the .continental shelf, including those living organisms that move in "constant physical contact" with the sea bed. Off Brazil, the continental shelf extends as much as 200 miles into the sea, and in those waters, argues Brazil, every lobster is as Brazilian as a coffee bean.

For the past two years, the Brazilians have paid little mind to fishermen from Brittany who dropped their nets near by and returned home with holds filled with the live, spiny lobsters. Occasionally the Brazilian navy stopped a trawler for venturing too near shore, but there was little fuss about it. Then two months ago, local lobstermen woke up to the fact that the French were nipping quite a chunk out of their $3,000,000 annual export business. Hair-triggered Brazilian jingoists joined in the protest.

As the two countries tried to negotiate a joint fishing arrangement, the six-boat French fleet fished on, and Brazilian warships seized three French vessels. Two weeks ago, Brazilian President Joao Goulart gave France 48 hours to withdraw all its boats. Until then De Gaulle himself had remained above the squabble, perhaps because Brazil fitted somewhere in his grand design. He had invited Goulart to visit Paris some time this year, and an emissary had recently reported back after a swing through Latin America that France, in need of new markets, should woo Brazil.

Palate or Patrie? But world influence could wait, decided De Gaulle, and he said non as only he can. He dispatched a sort of force de flap -- the fast, 2,750-ton destroyer escort Tartu--to watch over the fishing boats. An "act of hostility." cried Brazilian Foreign Minister Hermes Lima. "The attitude of France is inadmissible, and our government will not retreat. The lobster will not be caught."

In Rio, the French embassy was smeared with ink and tar. and someone painted "Lobsters yes, De Gaulle no" on a downtown wall. Brazilian diplomats boycotted a dinner aboard the liner France when it docked at Rio, sales of French wines slumped, and Carnival revelers dressed as lobsters danced a new lobster samba. Inevitably, in newspaper cartoons o grande Carlos was depicted as a long-nosed lobster.

As their warships maneuvered miles apart. France and Brazil at week's end seemed in no danger of trading shots. But Frenchmen, who each year eat 2,500 tons of lobster, nearly a third of it imported from such lobstering grounds as Brazil's, were forced to ponder an unsettling choice of loyalties--palate or patrie--and ask themselves, what price grandeur?

* According to crustacean-wise Brazilian naturalists, some lobsters swim, some don't.

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