L'Aftaire Nogrette

One early morning last week, Robert Nogrette, 63, left his apartment in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt to walk a block to the state-operated Renault automobile factory, where he has been chief of labor relations for 37 years. At 7:35 a.m., a white Renault pickup truck pulled up alongside. Two young men in beige raincoats and caps leaped out, grabbed and chloroformed Nogrette, threw him into the truck and sped away. The kidnaping stirred up a wave of popular revulsion and inspired the Paris police to one of the most intensive man hunts in its history. The reason: Nogrette had been abducted by a gang of gauchistes (extreme leftists) as the first step in what was announced as a calculated campaign of industrial terrorism in France.

Shortly after making off with Nogrette, the kidnapers telephoned the far-leftist paper La Cause du Peuple, edited by French Author Jean-Paul Sartre, and identified themselves as members of the NouveUe Resistance Populaire, one of a dozen-odd clandestine "Maoist" groups operating in Paris. They declared that Nogrette had been taken as reprisal for the death at the Renault plant late last month of Maoist Demonstrator Rene-Pierre Overney, 23. Overney, fired by Renault for political agitation, was shot by the plant's chief of security, Jean-Antoine Tramoni. 25. when he and other Maoists charged the guards at the factory's gates. Immediately, Overney became a martyr for the country's 30,000 squabbling leftist revolutionaries, who have not had a popular common cause since the riots of May 1968, which brought Charles de Gaulle's government to the brink of collapse.

Sea of Flags. Two weekends ago, more than 50,000 revolutionary leftists and socialist sympathizers marched under an undulating sea of red flags, as Overney was buried at Pere Lachaise cemetery, the place where the Communards of 1871 had been put against the wall and shot to death. Conspicuously absent from the funeral were members of the powerful French Communist Party, whose union--the Confederation Generate du Travail (CGT) --represents the Renault workers. Mindful of the popular backlash in 1968 that made the Gaullists stronger than ever, and still eager to establish their political respectability, the Communists decried the disruptive tactics of the gauchistes. But they did denounce the Overney killing as "an extensive exercise in political provocation for the benefit of the government." For its part, the government wavered for a few days and then indicted Tramoni for homicide. Unlike the unarmed Renault guards, he had used his personal pistol to shoot Overney.

To preserve the leftist momentum created by the death of Overney, the gauchistes turned to terrorism in the style of the South American Tupamaros, with Nogrette as their first victim. In exchange for Nogrette, they demanded that the police release all leftists arrested in demonstrations since Overney's death, that Renault rehire 14 fired Maoists and that revolutionary unions be given a chance to contest the CGT's domination of the plant. They also threatened to bomb the apartment of Pierre Dreyfus, director general of Renault.

The threats and demands were to no avail. The government refused to budge, and public opinion was running strongly against the gauchistes. Perhaps fearful of stiff prison sentences should they be caught with Nogrette, the kidnapers turned their hostage loose two days after the abduction. While Nogrette was unharmed by his ordeal, the revolutionaries were politically hurt by what President Georges Pompidou called "an unspeakable act worthy of a country of savages." As the Communists predicted, "I'affaire Nogrette" may well have given the law-and-order-Gaullists new ammunition against the left.

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