FRANCE ENTERS A NEW ERA

IT hardly seemed possible, but Charles de Gaulle was gone. At one moment he had been there, seemingly as durable as the Arc de Triomphe, the most commanding figure ruling any nation, large or small, on the face of the earth. Now, abruptly, he was a retired country gentleman, a recluse in the tiny village of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises sorting his memoirs, to be glimpsed only through a furtive telephoto lens and, most astonishing, to be heard not at all. Within twelve hours after his resignation in the wake of a referendum vote against his policies, workmen had moved his artifacts and files from the Elysee Palace. The presidential communication lines to Colombey were cut, and the other trappings of his office--except for a secretary, a bodyguard and a chauffeur, to which he was entitled along with a $35,000 pension--evaporated like a morning dew. The long era of Charles de Gaulle was over, for France and for the rest of the world.

How much that mattered to the rest of the world was a measure of De Gaulle's outsize scale, his legerdemain in making France count for more than her resources and her population of 50 million people really justified. It mattered to Britain, which he had twice imperiously barred from the Common Market. It mattered to tiny secessionist Biafra, which he had kept alive with arms shipments against federal Nigerian forces for the, past nine months. It weighed heavily in the Middle East, where he was virtually the only partisan Western friend that the Arabs had. It certainly mattered to Washington, which had felt his sting almost ceaselessly for the past six years.

Most of all, of course, the general's departure mattered to France. Most Frenchmen woke up in the first days of what might be called A.D. (After De Gaulle) slightly dazed and a little disbelieving at what they had wrought. Some had doubted De Gaulle's resolve when he told them--arbitrarily, as always--that a non vote would really end his rule. Others, long accustomed to the Gaullist unexpected, wondered whether it was really for keeps, or whether De Gaulle might not still somehow come thundering back into the arena. Above all, the French, the inveterately rationalist sons and daughters of Descartes, set out to reckon a France without De Gaulle and to speculate about the successor who must lead it into the future.

A Clear Alternative

That man seemed almost certain to be former Premier Georges Pompidou, a stocky, graying bon vivant who possesses perhaps more solid credentials of intellect and experience--if not on the historic scale of a De Gaulle--to take over his country than any other Western political peers. The engineer of most of De Gaulle's last triumphs, the administrator of France's return to order after last spring's chaos, Pompidou was unceremoniously dismissed from office by De Gaulle in July. From the role of rejected dauphin he moved skillfully to become a visible alternative to De Gaulle's rule. In the process, he may even have hastened the general's farewell to power.

If Georges Pompidou is destined to become France's next husband, the marriage will be a far cry from its mystical union with De Gaulle. "Life must be allowed to come to you," he is fond of saying, and in his 57 years life has come well and often to Pompidou. Brilliant, somewhat bohemian, and always radiating bonhomie, he has succeeded in whatever he tried, including four distinctly diverse careers. To French politics he has brought the cultivation of a classics scholar (including 10,000 lines of French poetry that he can quote from memory), the logic of a legal expert and the savvy of a banker--all of which roles, without seeming to have prepared overly hard for them, he has played.

For two men so closely associated through the years, Pompidou and De Gaulle could hardly differ more in taste, temperament and approach to life. De Gaulle believed in the imperious exercise of power; Pompidou has promised to serve the nation as an "arbiter." De Gaulle spoke 19th century French and believed in the magic of being mysterious and aloof. Pompidou mingles easily with jet-setters and peasants alike, a ubiquitous cigarette dangling off-center on his lower lip. De Gaulle liked best the France of the history books. Pompidou lives each day as it comes, reveling in the hurly-burly of politics and high finance, equally at ease in galleries of modern art, in a Riviera nightclub or behind a university lectern.

Of course, the style of France's presidency--under Pompidou or anyone else --must change drastically from De Gaulle's. It is not simply that the general's mantle is too large for any one man to hope to wear. France itself has changed, and the departure of De Gaulle is bound to accelerate not only the pace of change but also the people's realization of the nation they are becoming.

The French response to De Gaulle was strongly emotional, but the French are, au fond, a pre-eminently reasonable rather than sentimental people. So long as there seemed a plausible correlation between De Gaulle's aims and France's means, the fervor for the Cross of Lorraine held firm. But the moment De Gaulle got beyond what French common sense thought to be feasible, he began to gradually lose his constituency until finally it was gone.

Even as the French looked to the future, they paused for reflection. As always in a time of farewell to men or places, there was last week an inevitable final twinge of nostalgia and loss. Weary as they are of greatness, the French could not help mourning its passing. No one expressed it better than one of France's most distinguished political writers, Pierre Viansson-Ponte: "Even among his opponents, even among those who campaigned relentlessly for the 'No,' even among those Frenchmen who could no longer stand his self-assurance and his pride, many felt a sudden pang when they thought of him on Sunday night. Thirty years on the stage, sometimes in the glare of the footlights, sometimes in silhouette, eleven years of absolutism, long tempered by his own resolve, later by anarchy, and this exit lacking greatness, the one word forever in his mouth and in his heart."

The French took time out not only to briefly mourn, but also to examine how and why De Gaulle had lost. It was a necessary exercise in national self-analysis, part of the mood of the new France coming to life after De Gaulle.

The causes were many--some petty, some profound, some a matter of substance, some of style. No single one was perhaps decisive, but in sum they represented a massive indictment. Many French voters doubtless cast their ballots on the merits of the issues raised in the referendum, ignoring the eschatology of De Gaulle's destiny. The referendum's proposal for government decentralization spawned a host of local antagonisms from communities that stood to lose by it. Nancy, the historic capital of Lorraine, was incensed that smaller Metz, a city of Germanic language and origin, would become the capital of its region, the new Lorraine. Though they had given De Gaulle 75% of their vote in 1962, the citizens of Nancy delivered an angry 60% of their votes against him in the referendum.

Not everyone opposed De Gaulle's plans with the ferocity of Nancy, but support for the general showed slippage in almost every sector of France. His traditional centers of strength in Alsace-Lorraine and Brittany still produced affirmative votes of 58% and 57% respectively, but the totals were less than in previous elections. The tiny village of Briare (TIME, April 25), a near-perfect voting profile of France in the six previous elections, lost its sole distinction in the seventh by voting 54% in favor of the referendum--almost the mirror opposite of France's 53% rejection. The city of Paris turned down the referendum 56% to 44%, and it could not win a majority even in the chic 7th, 8th and 16th arrondissements, the silk-stocking districts of Paris, and normally solid Gaullist. Women voters, who have made up another Gaullist bastion, gave 10% less than the 70% they mustered in 1962. Finally, and perhaps decisively, the young vote, which has recently eluded De Gaulle, was out in force: some 850,000 French in their early 20s were voting for the first time, and they did not vote for the 78-year-old general.

Then there were pocketbook issues at stake. The French bourgeoisie, which has never altogether given up the notion that the only safe place for silver is in a sock, was angry and upset over France's rapid inflation and high taxes and the lingering uncertainty about the value of the franc. In the two weeks immediately preceding the election, small businessmen staged two strikes over the tax issue--the first in their history. Big businessmen, on the other hand, were concerned about shrinking profits and the "participation" that De Gaulle had promised their workers following the chaos of last spring. The workers, in turn, resented both inflation and the higher taxes that De Gaulle had imposed in order to save the franc last fall. De Gaulle had juggled France's finances in an effort to satisfy both workers and businessmen; he had succeeded in pleasing neither and frightening both.

He was, moreover, pleasing fewer and fewer Frenchmen with his foreign policies. Always the product of his personal piques as well as his grand designs, those policies had grown increasingly alien or irrelevant to the world as viewed by ordinary Frenchmen. They often left the impression that the old man was getting erratic. Perhaps the most damaging stance involved the Arabs and Israelis. Though France has only 520,000 Jews, many more French were incensed when De Gaulle extended an earlier arms embargo to include spare-parts shipments to Israel.

A Question of Dignity

Beyond his actual deeds, his whole domineering style and omnipresent personality had become an embarrassment, or at least a source of frequent irritation. It was impossible to discuss French politics for more than a few minutes without reducing the issue to De Gaulle personally. Even the countless jokes about him had grown somewhat tiresome because they always involved the same cast: De Gaulle with God, Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc or Napoleon. An industry grew up making De Gaulle souvenirs, from adulatory De Gaulle effigies and mildly satirical De Gaulle party masks to obscene artifacts. The monarch was not amused: there were hundreds of prosecutions for offenses against the President's dignity during De Gaulle's eleven years in office compared with only nine in all the presidential terms before him since 1881.

Finally, the dread myth that he had created about his moment of departure had been dispelled. France simply no longer feared the "deluge" that De Gaulle so often promised would follow him. FRANCE CONTINUES, headlined a Marseille paper when the moment finally arrived, but no one any longer doubted that France would. On the night of the referendum, there were some sharp, ugly scenes in the Latin Quarter between police and students, but they were largely provoked by the flics, as though attempting to incite the Gaullist prophecy into reality. If that was the aim, it failed. France accepted the vacuum calmly, fascinated by the details of the transition, watching and waiting to see what would happen next. Interim President Alain Poher, a quiet, reassuring man, contributed to the calm as he moved swiftly and decisively to ensure against chaos (see box).

The Political Parody

Georges Pompidou was the first to announce his candidacy, and though he did so outside the Gaullist party in an appeal for a broad consensus, he became the party's unanimous candidate almost immediately. Meanwhile, the opposition parties seemed determined to fulfill all of De Gaulle's most scornful descriptions of them and to prove the old maxim that four Frenchmen locked in a room together are likely to emerge with five political parties. In the course of their first-week search to mount a challenge to Gaullism, they only managed to stumble over one another in a parody of the Alphonse-Gaston act.

Dour Leftist Franc,ois Mitterrand, the only man who came near to beating De Gaulle in an election, was finessed out of the early line-up by the candidacy of Gaston Defferre, the ebullient Socialist mayor of Marseille. Defferre, the veteran of several Fourth Republic revolving-door governments, whose favorite recreation is yachting, is hardly likely to appeal to the hard-core left, which includes a sizable Communist vote of some 20% to 25%. Yet his candidacy, if it is approved by an infant socialist coalition scheduled to meet this week, clearly blocks that of Mitterrand, who forced De Gaulle into a humiliating runoff election for the presidency in 1965 with the solid backing of the left.

The center, meanwhile, was having trouble finding any at all. Its color bearer in 1965, Jean Lecanuet, made such a poor showing (16% ) against De Gaulle and Mitterrand that a second race seemed almost pointless. Jacques Duhamel, the centrists' attractive parliamentary leader, apparently decided to gamble on landing a Pompidou Cabinet seat rather than on his own candidacy. Interim President Poher, a centrist and the man who led the fight against De Gaulle's referendum, at first seemed to pose the most formidable threat to Pompidou. But his opportunities lessened with each defection from the non-Gaullist ranks -- and they came from both sides.

The Legacy of De Gaulle

De Gaulle's successor will inherit a legacy from the years of the general that is formidable, both at home and abroad. After becoming President, De Gaulle transformed France from an archy into monarchy, from bankruptcy to prosperity, from poor sisterhood in the West to the self-styled leader of Third Nationhood in the world.

The general, however, wanted much more. He was satisfied with nothing short of proclaiming a second age of French grandeur, and he set about washing the old monuments and planning new ones that the nation could ill afford. Was power and prestige in the modern world reserved for nuclear superpowers? Then France would assert itself as a nuclear power with its force de frappe. Did a foreign-aid program entitle a nation to be a giver rather than a taker? Then France would dole out its own largesse--the most expensive per capita in the West. Supersonic air travel was the next age in aviation? France would build the Concorde, even if it meant going to the Anglo-Saxons across the Channel for help.

It was grandeur at high cost, and it made France a land of unhappy contrast. For every grand project, there was a host of everyday domestic needs that went unfilled--an archaic road system with only a fifth the number of turnpike miles of West Germany, a telephone system that makes it easier to place a transatlantic telephone call from Paris to New York than one to a village 35 miles away, a rigid and woefully overcrowded educational system. For the sake of a few tokens of futurism, De Gaulle let the gap between France and modernism grow even wider.

The Mood of France

The French have nothing against grandeur, but it demands an austerity that has nothing to do with their current mood. Contemporary France is moving rapidly, almost visibly, into the age of mass-consumer, pop-culture society, and the last thing it wants is austerity. The evidence of that attitude is almost everywhere. The France of sunny sidewalk cafes and smoky boites is now, also, the France of 536 Wimpy hamburger mills, dizzy discotheques and monumental traffic jams. Vacationers on the Cote d'Azur looking for bargain accommodations now stop at modern motels as well as at the traditional spartan pensions.

Le weekend is a way of life, the long lunch more and more a relic of the past. Huge supermarket chains dispense packaged, preprocessed foods at a speed--and a price--that is fast making the kitchen stockpot and the corner charcuterie obsolete. In Paris, said newspaper ads last week, 300,000 people have already seen Steve McQueen in Bullitt, and the lines are still long. A house specialty of Le Drug Store, now ten years old and still In, is an ice cream sundae with chocolate sauce and a shot of bourbon. They call the result "Coupe Old Crow."

Over the weekend, many a city dweller who stayed in town for the election took advantage of the sunny weather and left for his country home (la petite maison de campagne). There are now more than 2,000,000 people with second homes, and they pack France's narrow country roads with their Peugeot 404s and R.16s. Many others take off to visit relatives in the provinces, for France is a nation that is pulling its young out of the country and into the cities. More than 350,000 Bretons, mostly young, have migrated to Paris, and in their off hours they gather in favorite Montparnasse bars and drink to Breizh Atao (Brittany forever).

Those who stay on to work the farms have adopted modern methods and equipment that would have astonished the peasant farmer of only a few years ago. Last week the farmers of Brittany flocked to their provincial capital of Rennes for its 44th annual fair, France's largest agricultural exposition. Some 1,200 exhibitors from 21 nations displayed their wares at the pennant-draped fairgrounds, and they included large industrial concerns as well as producers of fertilizer and farm machinery. Among the fair visitors was U.S. Ambassador to France Sargent Shriver, who also toured a Breton farm and then dropped by the local Franco-American institute to open an exhibition of works by five American painters (Lester Johnson, Harry Nadler, Robert Natkin, Frank Roth, William Wiley). Looking over the abstract canvases, Shriver cracked: "Every year brings artistic upheavals--and sometimes other kinds of upheavals too." If farms are becoming large, business is becoming still larger. French corporations are swiftly reorganizing their methods and management along American lines. Their executives are studying computer management, and computers are becoming a way of life and profit. There is even one model on Paris' Champs-Elysees that reads horoscopes --and that predicted, after reading De Gaulle's, the defeat. The growth of the French economy has created a role for thousands of marketing concerns.

Once considered incurable stay-at-homes, the French have spilled out of their country in recent years to explore the world in greater numbers than have any other Europeans. Airline offices, with their posters showing faraway places, have taken over the Champs-Elysees, and last week the press announced that a new airbus treaty would be signed with Germany. It is no longer unusual to find a barber in Antibes or a salesgirl in Lyon who has visited the U.S. --or anywhere else--as a tourist. Practically everyone, it seems, has made a summertime visit to the Spanish coast, where villas rent for a fraction of the price they command on the Riviera. Politics, which not so long ago determined whether fresh milk was available at the store, has become a subject of occasional levity. At Paris' Ca-veau de la Republique, a political cabaret near the Place de la Republique, performers last week managed to take the political news in stride. "Imagine if Premier Couve de Murville were to become President," groaned one. "Saying 'Vive De Gaulle' was easy enough, but what a time we would have shouting 'Vive Couve de Murville.' " Another, noting that Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of last spring's student rioting, had been out of action lately, shrugged:

"He has gone into business for himself making prefabricated barricades and inflatable paving stones."

The change in France, essentially, is from small to large, from individual to mass, from the charm of the village and the quartier to the noisy uniformity of the modern city. It is not a pleasant transition, but it is nonetheless inevitable. It is also a transition that De Gaulle did not understand, could not cope with and refused to abet. It made him, in a sense, no longer pertinent.

The tensions of modernization even divided the Gaullist government. Service-level specialists in such ministries as Public Works and Health pressed for change and refurbishing, but the "other" government, typified by the Finance Ministry, opposed radical reform, and it was De Gaulle's personally run Finance Ministry--where tax forms are still laboriously filled out and stamped by hand--that kept control of France. "It has become a system governed by rules rather than objectives," says University of Nanterre Sociologist Alain Touraine.

Some of its rules, moreover, seemed out of joint with France in any age. The cradle of modern revolution and free speech had, through the Gaullists' abuse of their power over the state-owned radio and television networks, one of the free world's most tightly controlled public information centers. Politicians who opposed De Gaulle were rarely accorded air time, and pro-Gaullist propaganda assaults filled prime time during election campaigns. Another arbiter of public taste turned out to be De Gaulle's prudish wife Yvonne. For her influence in banning sex from TV, banishing dirty books from Left Bank bookstalls and chasing Paris' famed streetwalkers into periodic hiding, she gained the nickname of "Tante Yvonne."

It was the stultifying parts of De Gaulle's rule that produced the chaos of last spring. It began with students protesting against the archaic and unfair practices of France's education system.

Significantly, the early demonstrations were supported by their middle-class parents. By the time it had ended, some 10 million Frenchmen -- or 20% of the population -- had somehow struck at their government, either directly or by stopping work. The depth of discontent was clear to all, and it was only the fear of another convulsive round of riots that saved De Gaulle. In the process, he bargained away the wage curbs of the franc's stability, helping to precipitate the fiscal crisis that followed.

As for promised reforms, they came too little and too late. When it could be done at a quieter time, France was ready to try someone else.

An Extraordinary Association

Georges Jean Raymond Pompidou seemed born for that assignment. He was the son of country school teachers in the poor Auvergne town of Montboudif, a name, like his own, that used to evoke howls of laughter from school friends because of its sound. To "Pompon," as the French affectionately call him, it has proved no liability. Indeed, he can turn on the peasant touch at the whiff of a Gauloise, and uses it to great effectiveness campaigning. Pompidou blazed through his studies, graduating first in his class from the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure in 1934. While his classmates ground away at the school's notoriously brutal classwork, Pompidou forever seemed to have time to swing -- cultivating his taste for modern art in the galleries, in political activism in the Latin Quarter (he once helped batter down the door of a rival political organization), or in witty banter at a salon.

Pompidou's easygoing study habits seem not to have bothered the Education Ministry, which offered him a teaching job in the classics after graduation. He accepted, and in 1935 married Claude Cahour, the daughter of a country doctor, whom he had met in Paris. Unlike so many of De Gaulle's disciples, Pompidou had neither enlisted in the exile army nor joined the underground in World War II. He passed it quietly as a teacher, and when the general marched victoriously into Paris, Pompidou watched the parade from the sidewalk, one spectator among many thousands. He liked what he saw, and arranged through a friend to join De Gaulle's staff. He soon came to the general's attention as the writer of succinct position papers.

It grew to be an extraordinary association. After De Gaulle left office in 1946, Pompidou stayed on in a series of civil service posts, but spent much of his time--very discreetly, almost secretly--as the manager of De Gaulle's affairs. He handled the publication of the general's memoirs, administered the foundation in memory of the De Gaulles' retarded daughter Anne, and was in fact unofficial chef de cabinet for the exile in Colombey. When De Gaulle finally returned to office as Premier in the last days of the Fourth Republic, Pompidou took a six-month leave of absence from his job to serve as his official chef de cabinet. On inauguration day, De Gaulle ceremoniously offered a seat in the presidential limousine to Pompidou, and the two rode side by side away from the Arc de Triomphe, leaving ex-President Rene Coty to walk.

By that time, Pompidou had switched careers again and was chief administrative officer of the gilt-edged Paris Rothschild Bank, a position to which he rose in typical meteoric style four years after joining the company as an obscure subsidiary director. Still unknown politically, he accepted De Gaulle's offer of the premiership in 1962. Opposition politicians put him down as having "the confidence of the king," as one of them sneered, but Pompidou soon emerged in possession of much more. He became a first-rate parliamentary debater, and on television he came through as a skillful advocate who could use his eyebrows to almost as much effect as his resonant voice.

His facility at digesting official dossiers became legendary and led to his own decision-making shorthand style. "Vu" meant seen but waiting for better arguments. "Soit" meant so be it, but not the best solution. "Oui" meant O.K., but he still had reservations. Only the best dossiers got a "D'accord," meaning that the matter was settled. Pompidou began to enjoy politics with a gusto, and it showed even in his complaints. "I am bombarded with daily problems," he said one day. "I handle dossiers of a burning actuality. Everything is urgent at Matignon [the Premier's office]. But when I arrive at the Elysee, time no longer marches in the same step. Only the topics chosen voluntarily by the general as important are evoked."

Burning actuality took up most of his time. Beginning with the 1967 election preliminaries, Pompidou assumed close management of the Gaullist party, personally selecting many of its candidates and maintaining ties with the winners in Parliament. His control became dominant in the crisis-ridden atmosphere of last spring, when he even advised De Gaulle not to follow through on his promise of a personal referendum. Instead, Pompidou cannily proposed the alternative of parliamentary elections, on which only Pompidou's--not the general's--prestige would be staked. "If you lose the referendum, Mon General, the regime is lost," said Pompidou. "If I lose the elections, I will be the only one to lose them." Reportedly, a suspicious De Gaulle replied: "And what if you win?"

Pompidou did win, in a brilliantly organized campaign. He, of course, got the credit and De Gaulle answered his own question nine days later in what seemed to be one of the most astonishing displays of ingratitude of his career: he dismissed his longtime friend as Premier. True to form, Pompidou seemed less disturbed by the news than anyone else; he simply removed his favorite modern oil paintings from Matignon, set up an office on the Left Bank and waited for life to come to him. Or seemed to wait. Actually, he made a point of keeping in close touch with Gaullist friends, listening sympathetically to their complaints and quietly gathering up loyalty for the future.

He visited Rome last January and casually remarked: "My candidacy for President is a secret to no one."

It seemed to be to Charles de Gaulle: he soon made a special point of announcing his intention to fill out the presidential term. Ever discreet, Pompidou accepted that decision and campaigned for the referendum, but his statements never lacked subtlety. "I felt that things were going badly for the referendum," he admitted after it was over.

What Pompidou May Do

While France has a host of pressing problems, not the least of Pompidou's accomplishments as President would be to move salon life into the Elysee. It has never lost its appeal for the Pompidous, who frequently have evenings of conversation for the literary set in their elegant six-room apartment over looking Notre Dame Cathedral from the fashionable Ile Saint-Louis. While Pompidou was Premier, their Paris social life retained all of its customary verve, so much so that their names popped briefly into the Markovic, sex-and-murder scandal that seemingly involved le tout Paris.

Pompidou promptly denied any knowledge of "this banal affair," and final absolution came with a recent dinner invitation from the De Gaulles. Tante Yvonne, who once persuaded her husband to keep a man out of his Cabinet because he was divorced, would never have entertained Georges and Claude without reasonable assurances of their noninvolvement. The Pompidous' only concession to Gaullist austerity was to trade summers in Saint-Tropez, which they discovered years before the jet set, for visits to Brittany.

If elected, Pompidou can be expected to make some gradual but fundamental changes in Gaullist policy. Sooner or later, he must resolve the problems of the franc. He will be able, in that effort, to rely on his invaluable experience as an international banker. As an ancien member of that exclusive club while he was with the Rothschilds, he speaks the language of finance, and he has promised to give highest priority to France's economy.

In foreign policy, he would probably moderate France's position on Britain's entry to the Common Market and perhaps on the Mid-East conflict and he is anxious to extend the rapprochement that De Gaulle had in fact begun with Washington. As a onetime professor, Pompidou can bring a rare personal insight into the problems of French schools. He is far less likely than De Gaulle to blatantly use France's information media for his own ends. Finally, and perhaps most important, Pompidou knows the government of France inside and out. Unlike De Gaulle, whose role was too rarefied to acquaint him with day-to-day operations, Pompidou already knows where all the bodies are buried in the bureaucracy--and where to go to make certain that his reforms are carried out.

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