Paris

ATLANTIC

February 1948

on the World today

A FRENCH government created through error and indiscretion and composed of political unknowns has turned out, at least for a time, to be the Troisième force, or third power, that France needs to escape Communism and Gaullism. That the coalition cabinet of Premier Robert Schuman could be a permanent answer to France’s problems was hardly to be expected. But as a temporary solution, it has had remarkable success.

The Ramadier government that preceded Schuman’s deserved a better fate. It stood for ten months, from January 22 to November 19, 1947, during a turbulent period of strikes and disorder. It survived several political and economic crises, without being able to produce a cure for France’s ills but at least giving the country some stability.

The coup de grâce was delivered paradoxically by a leader of Paul Ramadier’s own Socialist Party. Guy Model, Secret ary-General of the Socialist Party and leader of the left wing, 1 old a luncheon of the AngloAmerican Press Association somewhat prematurely, and while Ramadier was still Premier, that Léeon Blum was ready to assume power. Late that same evening, Bamadier resigned.

Another political error, this one made by Léon Blum, who rarely commits them, lost for that skillful veteran his opportunity to become Premier again. The mistake Blum made was to associate Communism and Gaullism as double dangers to the Bcpublic, in his address to the National Assembly, where the two extremes, combined, could and did defeat him.

President Vincent Auriol, a Socialist himself, then turned to a less controversial candidate for the premiership, Robert Schuman, a member of the Popular Republican Movement (MRP), Minister of Finance in the Ramadier government, and a member of parliament since 1919. By limiting his attack to the Communists and obtaining the support of the Gaullists, Schuman was able to acquire a comfortable majority in the Assembly.

Schuman and his cabinet

Schuman was born sixty-one years ago of French parents in Luxembourg and brought up in the eastern province of Lorraine, which was German until the end of World War I. He avoided German military service on grounds of poor health. He served as Under Secretary of State for Refugee Affairs in the Vichy government in 1940, but was deported by the Germans and interned in the Neustadt concentration camp, from which he escaped to take an active part in the French resistance.

Although hardly the popular type of politician, lie is generally respected for his personal integrity, modest austerity, and hard work. He is not a brilliant orator, but he is a sound thinker and a convincing speaker.

Unfortunately for him, many of the men in his cabinet were generally unknown. In forming his government, Schuman was pressed for time because the new administration was urgently needed to cope with the immediate problems of the nation.

He was not able to get the big names of the nation. He wanted both Léeon Blum and Paul Reynaud, the independent Premier in the year of defeat, 1940, who has made a strong comeback in public favor and is regarded as among the country’s best technicians in finance and economics. But the Socialists refused to sit with Reynaud, and Blum declined a ministry.

Under prodding from President Auriol to complete his cabinet, Schuman finally, in a hasty, earlymorning political operation such as often characterizes French crises, formed a government of ten MRP, seven Socialist, four Radical-Socialist, and two independent ministers. The best known was Georges Bidault, to whom was confided automatically the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which he has held continuously since the liberation in 1944, except for the brief period of the one-month, allSocialist Blum government a year ago.

A few others could be readily identified: Socialists Jules Moch and Daniel Mayer in the posts of Interior and Labor, and MRP Pierre-Henri Teitgen as Minister of the Combined Armed Forces. Most of the others were obscure politicians.

The Communists strike

As the Schuman government assumed power, the country was submerged in a wave of strikes that had paralyzed the ports, stopped the railroads, and interrupted public services. There was, as in the past, some legitimate basis for the demands for wage increases. But the new strikes were patently political, and no secret was made of their orchestration. The music was signed, for all to see, Cominform.

Two months earlier, when the Communist Information Bureau was established late in September by the conference in Poland and set up in Yugoslavia, with the aim of coördinating the action of Communist parties, the United States government received reliable advance information of the coming Communist outbreaks in France and Italy. The offensive had no chance of success within the two countries involved, so far as taking power was concerned. It had international objectives to wreck the Marshall Plan and to trouble the Conference of Foreign Ministers in London.

Conservative French political quarters also had warning of the outbreak, the French Communists not being so discreet as their fellow members farther to the east. The objectives within the country were reported to be twofold: destruction of the Socialist Party, by forcing its government to fire on the workers, the left wing of that party then to be absorbed by the Communists; and assumption of power by General de Gaulle, under unconstitutional conditions that would make him an easier victim of a later, more conclusive Communist attack.

The Schuman government, with a surprising display of strength, showed itself thoroughly capable of coping with the strikes; and the Communists, with an even more surprising disclosure of weakness, were forced to surrender without explanation or apology. Their surrender can be attributed partly to workers’ weariness with strikes and to public desire for tranquillity, but above all, to vigorous government action on the executive, legislative, police, and military levels.

The government acts

Perhaps the most effective action ordered by the Schuman government was that of the police. It also dispelled a legend, prevalent since the police participation in the wartime resistance and encouraged by the Commnunists, that the government could not count on the loyalty of the force. In a single night the police evacuated the electric power stations of Paris occupied by strikers. In most places, they found only a few men, some of them strangers to the electricity service. At no point did they encounter serious resistance or undergo casualties. Their action ended the most important inconvenience of the strikes, and incidentally proved the loyalty of the police.

The military action was more symbolical. It consisted of calling to the colors the second half of the class of 1943, men born between July 1 and December 31, 1923, about 80,000 in all, chosen because most of them had performed a year of military service since the liberation and could be counted on as loyal, experienced troops. With them were called up all reserve officers who studied from 1942 to 1945 at the Cherchell military academy in Algeria, wartime replacement for the bomb-wrecked SaintCyr and equivalent of West Point.

Thus a force of trained men and qualified officers was provided in case of need. The Communists surrendered before the force ever look the field, and the reservists were promptly demobilized.

The executive and legislative action also had little more than symbolic effect. After five days of debate, the National Assembly adopted the government’s anti-strike bill, only the Communists opposing. It provided a ten-year prison term and 1,000,000 francs ($8000) fine for sabotage, and a fiveyear term and 500,000 francs ($4000) fine for using threats or violence to force a strike. The bill was watered down from the original version drafted by the government, a provision against incitement to strike having been eliminated lest it be interpreted as a limitation on freedom of speech and the press.

The little new law had little practical effect since the strikes were ending by the time it was promulgated. Its future usefulness was limited since it would no longer apply after February 29, 1948. But its enact men ( had shown that the government had the support of the legislative assembly in its campaign against the strikes.

The executive negotiations were generally confined to conferences between Socialist Minister of Labor Daniel Mayer and the Socialist minority of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT). But it was the force of public opinion, rather than the persuasion of the government, that put an end to the strikes. Less than one tenth of the Haris subway workers turned up for a meeting that called a general strike in the Métro. Even fewer actually quit work. That failure was the final blow to the national strike committee.

Most of the international motives for the strikes had disappeared. The bill for interim aid to Europe was already assured of passage by Congress. The Conference of Foreign Ministers on Germany was already certain to fail. The domestic objectives were impossible to attain. The day after the failure in the Métro, the national strike committee called it quits. For another day, there were warnings of further battles to come. But then, even that ceased. Someone in Warsaw, Belgrade, or Moscow pushed a Cominform button, and the agitation stopped in France. Western democracy had won a definite, if temporary, victory over Communism.

Division in the ranks of labor

The aftermath of the strikes brought out the fact that the General Confederation of Labor was no longer capable of carrying out a successful general strike in France. The once mighty CGT was divided. No longer could the working class be considered an absolute barrier to de Gaulle, a disastrous threat to the Troisième Force or a weapon completely in the hands of the Communists. The CGT still had an important role to play, but it had been caught in the dynamic evolution of events, and it had lost the reputation which it had once held, whether rightly or wrongly, as the decisive element in France.

The Schuman government was now free to work toward its main goal, which .was stability of the nation’s economy. The methods it chose were neither typical of the many efforts made previously, nor characteristic of a cabinet containing Socialist ministers.

It placed major emphasis on a special levy on those in the upper income tax brackets, which could be avoided by subscribing to a new 3 per cent government loan, the two measures being designed to take one sixth of the inflated currency out of circulation. But here the government had gone from Unpopular field of competition with the Communists, and had come to grips with the notoriously tightfisted middle classes of France. There, the struggle would be less clear and more difficult.