France's New Premier

LOUISE-FRANC,OISE DE BOURBON, bastard daughter of Louis XIV, built the Palais-Bourbon beside her lover's Hotel de Lassay in order to be near him; her gardens were a favorite place to stroll. Today the Palais-Bourbon is the home of France's National Assembly, and the gardens in recent years have been a morning rendezvous for two unlikely figures. One was a watchful policeman cradling an automatic rifle. The other was Assembly President Jacques Pierre Michel Chaban-Delmas, 54, togged in a track suit. Under the eyes of his security guard, Chaban-Delmas would jog determinedly for half an hour, then do 90 minutes of Swedish exercises in the Hotel de Lassay, the official residence that the Assembly leader occupied with his second wife, Marie-Antoinette. Then it was off--literally on the run--for Palais-Bourbon and the ornate chair he has occupied for the past eleven years.

From now on, Chaban-Delmas can do his jogging in the larger garden of the Hotel de Matignon, traditional home of France's Premiers. The handsome onetime Resistance leader was a sensible choice by President Pompidou. He is a "historical Gaullist," that is, one who has followed the general since World War II. He was on terms close enough so that he received a portrait from De Gaulle inscribed "to my dear comrade-in-arms."

Yet Chaban-Delmas' attachment was based on personal affection for the man and his spirit rather than blind devotion to party and platform. This gave him flexibility in the 1946-58 period, when De Gaulle was out of power. Other Gaullists remember those years as "the crossing of the desert," but Chaban-Delmas served without qualm in the governments of Pierre Mendee-France, Guy Mollet and Felix Gaillard. In recent months his independence emboldened him to define Gaullism in terms that echoed those of Pompidou: "Being a Gaullist means believing that the policies followed by De Gaulle have been, on the whole, good. This does not automatically mean that Gaullists believe that all of his policies are necessarily excellent. There are degrees in Gaullism."

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So far as Pompidou is concerned, Chaban-Delmas has other qualifications for Premier. He is a superb politician who can be counted on to keep Pompidou's fences well mended. The former Premier, Maurice Couve de Murville, was an inept campaigner who could not even win an Assembly seat from Paris' usually safe 7th arrondissement. Chaban-Delmas became mayor of Bordeaux at 32, replacing a socialist who had held the job for 19 years. He has been re-elected regularly because of his public works, which included the first bridges over the Garonne River built since the days of Napoleon III, and his high capacity to see--and be seen. "He sees a football," says one constituent, "he kicks it. He sees an old man, he gives him a decoration. He sees a baby, he kisses it. He sees a wounded veteran, he helps him across the street. He sees a hand, he shakes it."

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The new Premier was born plain Delmas in Paris. He became a journalist after graduation from the Lycee Lakanal, was eventually called to military service as a private. Before long he was in officer's training at Saint-Cyr, where he led his class. In World War II, he fought on the Maginot Line. Demobilized after the fall of France in 1940, he began leading a dangerous double life. Using the code name "Lakanal," he spied on French factories taken over by the Germans. At the same time, as a seemingly obedient follower of the Vichy regime, he studied for and passed the arduous examination for Inspecteur des Finances, the prestigious civil service post from which many of France's top leaders have launched their careers.

Delmas was given more and more underground assignments, eventually was made brigadier general at the age of 29. Once, hovering over a radio for messages from London, Delmas was informed that his Lakanal code name had been broken. Told to propose a new one, he looked out a window, noticed a plaque inscribed "Chateau de Chaban." His exploits made the name so famous that he formally prefixed it to his own at war's end.

By 1944, Chaban-Delmas coordinated all Free French military operations in France. He was sent into Paris to prevent the Communists from inviting destruction of the city through a precipitous uprising. At one point the youthful general was flown to London to plead with Allied leaders for prompt entry. He got back into occupied France, after a flight to Normandy, by bicycling through German lines wearing tennis clothes (he is a tournament player). His clothes, his tennis racket and a chicken he carried were meant to mark him as a gentleman who had been playing in the countryside and was returning home to food-short Paris with dinner.

De Gaulle observed after his first meeting with the young officer that "the famous General Chaban has the face of an adolescent." Over the next quarter of a century, De Gaulle apparently became convinced that the adolescent had matured. His list of possible successors reportedly contained only three names: Pompidou, Michel Debre and Jacques Pierre Michel Chaban-Delmas.

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