And Now "A Third Solution"

France slowly picked up the pieces and dug out from under the debris of revolt. In Paris' elegant Tuileries Gardens, sanitation workers plucked beer bottles and litter from the multicolored flower beds. On the capital's broad boulevards, road crews shoveled steaming asphalt into the gaps where paving stones had been pried up to build barricades. Blue-uniformed mailmen made their appointed rounds for the first time in weeks. Trains and subways rumbled once more; the whine of jetliners echoed again at the airports. By the millions, French workers trooped back to their factories. Though there were still some pockets of holdouts, notably the university students and the strikers at the state-owned radio and television stations and the Renault auto plants, France last week was returning to normal after a month of economic paralysis and chaotic civil disorder.

It was none too soon for France's badly shaken economy. French economists reckoned that the tie-ups had cost France's industries some $6 billion in lost production. Much of that amount could be made up by accelerated output in the months ahead, but the loss of exports and the flight of francs had already forced the government to spend $307 million of its $6 billion in cash and gold reserves. As a result, for the first time since 1959, the French drew $745 million from the International Monetary Fund to help tide the country over the present crisis.

Five Slates. France's politicians were preparing for the shortest and probably the most hotly contested campaign in the country's postwar history. The first round of elections was scheduled for June 23; the final run-off round for June 30. The voters of France will have a choice among five major-party slates of candidates.

On the left, there are three groupings: the Communists; the Federation of the Democratic and Socialist Left, led by 1965 Presidential Runner-Up Franc,ois Mitterrand; and the Unified Socialist Party, a doctrinaire faction whose prime asset is its most illustrious member, Fourth Republic Premier Pierre Mendes-France, 61. It seems likely that Mitterrand's party and the Communists will each enter a full slate of competing first-round candidates in France's 487 electoral districts. But they are likely to combine forces and throw their votes in the final round to the strongest candidate from either party in each district, the other candidate withdrawing--a maneuver that the leftists and Communists used with great effectiveness in the 1967 national elections.

In the middle is the confederation of centrist parties that is led by Jacques Duhamel, 43. Since there is a feeling among many French politicians that the right and left may fight to a standoff, the importance of the centrists has been greatly enhanced. They hope to add at least 20 new seats to the 40 that they held in the old Assembly, thus holding the effective balance of power between the two groups.

Forcing a Polarization. On the center-right is De Gaulle's party, the Union for the Defense of the Republic. Once again, it is allied with the Independent Republicans of former Gaullist Finance Minister Valery Giscard d'Estaing, and on the first ballot, the two parties will support the same candidate in most--though not all --constituencies.

In his first instructions to his new caretaker Cabinet, Charles de Gaulle called for the election, in his words, "of an unquestionable and homogeneous majority"--in other words, renewed Gaullist control of the National Assembly. Gaullist political strategy is to try to bring about the very polarization that Culture Minister Andre Malraux for many years has forecast as inevitable: De Gaulle v. the Communists. On a televised press conference, Premier Georges Pompidou set the tone for the campaign: "The question is who is for and who is against this totalitarian Communism," he cried. "We call on all citizens, on men of all parties, who are ready to prepare the future with us in ridding France of this totalitarian Communist doctrine." Premier Pompidou thus blithely ignored the aid from behind the scenes that the Communist leadership had provided the Elysee in helping preserve order at the worst of the crisis and the fact that Gaullist foreign policy of increasing cooperation with Communist countries has not changed.

De Gaulle himself appeared on television in a remarkable 55-minute interview with Michel Droit, the editor of the pro-Gaullist Figaro Litteraire, Seated on a tapestry-upholstered Louis XV armchair in the Elyseee Palace, De Gaulle appeared relaxed and regal, chatting avuncularly about his own past and France's future. Predictably, he called on the French people "to rally round their President so that France may live," and he warned that if the election results went against his party, "all is lost,"

Unlikely Note. Then De Gaulle adumbrated a new political ideology for France. "Communism," he reflected, "is a dictatorship that is implacable and perpetual. But capitalism in another way seizes and enslaves man. The worker has no hold on his destiny, as ants in an anthill or termites in a termite pile." Pondered the general: "How to find a human balance for modern mechanical society? That is the great question of the century."

De Gaulle proposed "a third solution." It was a society of participation. As he explained it, it sounded something like a cross between U.S.-style profit sharing and the Communist concept of workers' councils. He envisioned an era in economic cooperation, he said when owners, managers, technicians and laborers would share jointly in the profits and participate in decision making. Similarly, he foresaw the same rule of participation in the universities, where all students and professors would join in reforming those institutions.

Was this bluff or real revolution? Editor Droit asked De Gaulle.

"If real revolution consists in profoundly changing the existing order, then this certainly is one," De Gaulle replied, adding: "I am not at all embarrassed to be a revolutionary." On that unlikely note, France this week entered into 14 days of hectic campaigning.

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