The First Foray

Charles de Gaulle has yet to announce his candidacy, but any who doubted his intention of seeking a second term in this year's presidential election had only to watch him in action last week to change their minds. Sweeping out of Paris in the first major foray of the election year, le grand Charles was grandly in the running.

The setting could scarcely have been better for his purposes: four Western departments (Vendee, Maine-et-Loire, Mayenne and Sarthe), all warmly Gaullist, all heavily Catholic, all refreshingly rural. Sun and showers alternately splashed the meadows as the presidential cortege--a mile-long column of black limousines punctuated by thundering motorcycles--struck sonorously past ranks of poplars and blue-legged gendarmes. In village after village, De Gaulle repeated the tried and true routine: a ritual exchange with the awed mayor, a Lyndon-like lunge into the thicket of outstretched hands, a brief utterance from the bunting-draped platform, then the Marseillaise and a hearty "Vive la France!"

The Tiger & the Ducks. The main theme of De Gaulle's speeches was equally familiar and equally effective: "Our destiny is called national prosperity." But through it, he wove the even headier subthemes of national pride and France's independence of the U.S. At the beach resort of Sables-d'Olonne, he cried, "This country, this France which has bound its wounds, is recovering its power, its influence; this France which is increasingly reckoned with from one end of the world to the other . . ." In Sainte-Hermine, he laid a wreath at the monument to Georges Clemenceau, the French "Tiger" of World War I, and said: "Today, France is as Clemenceau would have wished: independent, free, mistress of her destiny."

Again and again, De Gaulle drew cheers by denouncing the Yalta agreements of 1945, which, as he put it, had created "the two hegemonies [Russia and the U.S.] which menace international peace." Again and again, he promised local mayors aid from Paris, usually in the form of light industries that would stanch the outflow of young people to the cities. In some villages, De Gaulle's rewards came in more substantial form than mere cheering: countrymen presented him with everything from a case of oysters to a brace of ducks.

Leftists & Centrists. But it was the cheering that pleased De Gaulle most, and the roaring crowds seemed to energize him. It all boded ill for De Gaulle's only serious presidential opponent, Marseille's Socialist Mayor Gaston Defferre, over whom le grand Charles holds a massive 4-to-l advantage in public-opinion soundings.

Nonetheless, Defferre is still fighting. Last month he proposed a "federation" of democrats and Socialists--a grouping of leftists and centrists loosely made up of Socialists, Popular Republicans, and members of the "moderate" political clubs that abound in France. The federation would, in effect, weld France's traditionally splintered left and center parties into a functioning opposition that could seriously challenge the Gaullists--if not now, then in the future. The Christian-Democratic Popular Republicans seem willing enough to submerge themselves in Defferre's federation; it is the Socialists' Guy Mollet who has so far shown no sympathy with the plan. But with the election now only six months away, the pressures on Mollet are considerable. As Le Monde observed: "If the possibility of defeating De Gaulle exists, it is through the federation."

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