Le Souriant Felix

Le grand Charlie's letter of resignation reached the Assembly at 3 p.m. on Tuesday. Le souriant Felix (smiling Felix), as friends have nicknamed the Assembly's Socialist President Felix Gouin, read it rapidly. He paused, but there was no display from the floor. Just as rapidly, he read his reply. "M. de Gaulle ... I express . . . the nation's gratitude and appreciation. . . ."

Then Felix Gouin asked: "Does the Assembly intend to elect the new President ... of the Republic?" Cries of "Now . . . Tomorrow . . . Thursday!" rose from the benches. A show of hands favored tomorrow. As briskly as a tobacco auctioneer, Felix Gouin adjourned the session. It had lasted five minutes.

Next day Destiny rapped at Felix Gouin's office door, strode past his black poodle Jim, and confronted him above the coffee, cheese, apple and bottle of vin ordinaire upon his desk. A delegation of Socialist, Communist and Popular Republican leaders brought him the news that he had just been elected (497-10-55) President of France. "I am touched," he said. "I accept. . . . It is a bad situation, but I'll try to do my best."

Party Nonpartisan. No successor could have been more unlike tall, stubborn De Gaulle than short, amenable Gouin. In his homely, bespectacled, penguin-shaped person, the politicians of France, after six years of military leadership, had again taken full control of their country's government.

Felix Gouin had been a Socialist since 1902 and a parliamentarian since 1924. A schoolteacher's son, a successful lawyer of Marseilles, he had never deviated from his party's line. Yet few looked upon him as an implacable partisan. In 1940 he had been one of the 80 Deputies who voted against power for Petain. He had helped organize the Resistance. In 1942 the time came to flee, via Spain (where he was interned for three months), to Britain and finally North Africa. He was chosen president of the Consultative Assembly in Algiers and then in Paris.

At 61, Felix Gouin is a systematic, hardworking politician who seldom loses his sleep or misses his meals. He loves his home and the company of his bridge-playing wife, one of France's outstanding furniture designers. He loves his hobbies--art collecting (he has 100 paintings, some valuable) and hunting (a crack shot, he has bagged 42 rabbits in 42 shots). This week, as he takes the Republic's helm, the little man in a big job had need to call on all his qualities of tact, energy and balance.

The Capital Problem. Staring the new President, and France, full in the face was inflation. "The capital problem of the hour," said Gouin in an open letter to his fellow politicians, "is the defense of the franc." Drastic measures were needed--at least as drastic as those of doughty Raymond Poincare, who won the 1926 "Battle of the Franc" with a deflationary program of heavy taxes and Government economies.

Sick though France was in 1926, she was far sicker in 1946. Frenchmen were living on the black market, on primitive barter, on the sale of personal goods, on dwindling savings and equally dwindling hope. The sickness might prove mortal if France did not get her finances in order and her war-ravaged economy in full production.

Gouin would not gloss over the humiliating facts of his nation's plight, which le grand Charlie could not quite bring himself to admit. To rehabilitate herself France needed a foreign loan ($2,500,000,000 from the U.S.) and domestic deflation. Gouin urged a 40% budget cut, most of it in military expenditures, a freezing of bureaucratic jobs and salaries, a shift from armament to civilian output, a suspension of military service to augment civilian labor. "Extremely rigorous measures," he said. "I know that I may become unpopular, but my duty comes first."

Three days after his election, the new President won Socialist, Communist and Popular Republican support for his program,, Promptly he named a three-party Cabinet. Said Popular Republican Maurice Schumann, a veteran Gaullist: "If we had said no, France would have been split in two for at least half a century. The irreparable schism would have precipitated the financial stampede and disintegration of stocks which already threatens us. France would have lost any hope of support from the other side of the Atlantic for her currency."

In the key Finance Ministry, which would carry the burden of deflation, Gouin put a fellow Socialist, quiet, youthful (44), onetime Professor of Economics Andre Philip. But le souriant Felix unsmilingly made it clear that Communists and Popular Republicans, as well as Socialists, would share the responsibility.

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