Fertile Games

Charles de Gaulle has a contemptuous phrase for the Cabinet-shuffling by which French governments were once formed: "the sterile games of yesterday." Thus it seemed somehow odd for De Gaulle himself to be indulging in that sort of thing. All last week, in a process familiar during the days of the Fourth Republic, official black Citroens shuttled to and from the beige stone prime-ministerial residence on the Rue de Grenelle bearing nervously hopeful politicians to discuss posts in a new Cabinet. De Gaulle, operating through his faithful Premier, Georges Pompidou, was at work selecting a Cabinet for his new septennat (seven-year term).

Le grand Charles was taking a lesson from the humiliating electoral experiences of last December. Well aware that the next elections, due some time before March 1967, may well cost his U.N.R. party its control of the National Assembly, he reshuffled ministers in a pattern carefully calculated to win back the several million voters fed up with overcrowded apartments, roads and schools, to say nothing of his cavalier attitude toward the Common Market. Shortly after De Gaulle was inaugurated with a brief (30-minute) private ceremony in the flower-packed Salle des Fetes at the Elysee Palace, Pompidou announced the new Cabinet. Principal changes:

> In, as head of a vastly expanded Ministry of Finance and Economics, was fiery Michel Debre, 54, lawyer and journalist who was mainly responsible for the Fifth Republic's constitution and was De Gaulle's first Premier, from 1959 to 1962. Debre won the unenviable nickname of Pere Colere (Old Man Fury) for his ferocious attacks on the Fourth Republic; he earned still more bitter criticism by advocating a hard line on Algeria, and resigned after the ceasefire. Since then, however, he has staged a comeback, in both influence and popularity. As a Deputy representing remote Reunion Island since 1963, he has ably commanded the Gaullists in the National Assembly, and campaigned last fall with promises of higher expenditures for education and welfare--which he is now ideally situated to implement.

> Out of the Cabinet was suave conservative Finance Minister Valery Giscard d'Estaing, 39. Giscard's severe anti-inflationary policies were what put the crimp in private expansion and public spending--or at least so the voters thought. He remains an aide whom De Gaulle can ill afford to antagonize, for his 35-man Independent Republican party gives De Gaulle's U.N.R. its ten-man majority in the National Assembly. Two of his Independent Republicans were given portfolios.

> In, as Agriculture Minister, was scholarly Edgar Faure, 57, who as Radical Socialist Premier attended the Big Four summit at Geneva in 1955 and is a supporter of the Common Market. One of the few politicians of the Fourth Republic to gain the inner circle with De Gaulle, Faure was the emissary whose mission to Peking in 1963 was followed shortly afterwards by French recognition of Red China. His most important task will be to promote Common Market farm negotiations, and his appointment was clearly designed to placate the massive agricultural vote alienated in December by De Gaulle's hostility to the Common Market, an attitude that many farmers think denies them wider European markets.

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