A Not Unspeakable Pain

For a man who had just lost 40 seats in the National Assembly, President Charles de Gaulle was in remarkably good spirits. Summoning his Cabinet to the Elysee Palace less than 72 hours after the close of last week's elections, the great man greeted his ministers with friendly compassion instead of the outsize wrath he has displayed on former occasions when his team let him down.

He even asked each of the Cabinet's 28 members to give a blow-by-blow account of his own electoral battles, delivered a wryly appropriate quote from Vergil when Veterans' Affairs Minister Alexandre Sanguinetti found it hard to talk about his defeat by 166 votes. "Infandum, regina, iubes reno-vare dolorem,"-murmured De Gaulle --"Unspeakable is the pain, O Queen, that you command me to relive."

De Gaulle's own pain was obviously far from unspeakable. Almost cheerfully, he pointed out that many of his losing candidates had been defeated only by the narrowest of margins. Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Mur-ville, for example, came within 235 votes of victory--and Couve had hardly been a dynamic campaigner. All in all, according to De Gaulle's calculations, a shift of 10,000 votes in the right places would have turned 35 Gaullist losers into winners. "That's not seri- ous," he told his Cabinet. "It is a situation that will redress itself."

Besides, it was not as if the Fifth Republic had lost the election. Despite their unexpectedly poor showing, the Gaullists had still captured at least 244 of the Assembly's 487 seats, and could count on the support of a handful of Deputies who had won as independent moderates. De Gaulle's majority had been reduced to a minimum, but it was still very much intact. The opposition might be stronger, but it was still the minority. As in the previous Assembly, it could oppose the government but not replace it. "It's always the same verbalism from the left," said De Gaulle.

Common Positions? The general's leftist opposition, however, had certainly done far better than anyone expected. Voting together for the first time in three decades, French Communists and Socialists pooled their forces against Gaullist candidates in last week's runoff elections and found that the alliance paid off handsomely. The Communists pulled their usual 20% of the vote but nearly doubled their parliamentary strength, from 41 to 73. Francois Mitterrand's Federation of the Democratic Socialist Left gained 25 seats, for a total of 116.

Not surprisingly, both parties immediately started talking of extending the leftist alliance beyond the elections. At a meeting of Socialist leaders, Mitterrand put through a resolution calling for the "immediate creation of a permanent delegation of the left" to work out parliamentary tactics with the Communists. Waldeck Rochet, the balding boss of the French Communists, went even farther. The party's aim, he declared, was that "all groups and Deputies of the left reach common positions on the essential questions, national and international."

Always Evasive. Despite all the words and resolutions, though, the Socialists and Communists are not about to form a full-scale leftist front. Beneath the current display of comradeship lie decades of bitter enmity, of unforgotten Communist boasts that they would "pluck the Socialist chicken" and Socialist taunts that the Communists were "not left but East." The differences have not been buried. The Socialists still agree with De Gaulle's assessment that "the Communists are not a French party" but "an army" that takes its orders from Moscow. Socialist leaders do not miss the fact that French Communists are always evasive when asked point-blank whether they would like to turn France into a Moscow-styled people's democracy.

Whatever the chances of alliance, the Communists emerged from the elections stronger than at any time since De Gaulle came to power. They have, as the French say, been "dedouane"--released from customs. Also, for the first time in the Gaullist era, they are expected to drop their role of sullen isolation in the Assembly, take part in its organization and committees. If they do so, they will, like the other major parties, elect a vice president of the Assembly, who will take his turn at presiding. Communist Deputies will likely be among French parliamentary delegations to the Council of Europe and the Common Market Assembly in Strasbourg.

Welfare Year. The elections will probably have little effect on Gaullist policies. If anything, the new Assembly can be expected to give more support than ever to his drive for closer relations with Eastern Europe and more distant relations with the U.S. and NATO. If there are changes, they will be almost entirely in social and economic policy. De Gaulle has already promised the voters that 1967 will be the great "Annee Sociale"--Welfare Year. At some point after the Assembly opens, he will also probably make some changes in his Cabinet; Premier Georges Pompidou, who won handily in his own district, seems likely to remain, but Loser Couve de Murville is expected to be replaced. Apparently, though, De Gaulle is not overly disappointed with the makeup of the Assembly itself. The opposition will be strong enough to give his government constant trouble but too weak to put it in mortal danger. Besides, if the Assembly gets too rambunctious, the general can always legally dissolve it and call new elections.

-* he Aeneid, Book II, in which Aeneas recounts to Dido how the Greeks sacked Troy.

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