The Last Eight

The headquarters of the C.G.T. (Confederation Generale du Travail) is a yellowish limestone building on the Rue La Fayette in Paris. On the fifth floor of that building last week Benoit Frachon, the C.G.T.'s Communist co-secretary-general, sweated out a painful ordeal.

Frachon's effort to hamstring France by strikes and violence had failed. The fact was evident last fortnight (TIME,Dec. 15), but, early last week, Frachon's strike committee was still forlornly calling for "all measures to reinforce resistance and action." Although most of them were Communists, 19 officials of the railroad union told Frachon that they were abandoning the strike, no matter what the committee decided.

Stocky, round-faced Benoit Frachon blinked behind his horn-rimmed glasses. He looked at his eight committeemen. "Si je comprends bien," he said, "tomorrow we will be the only eight men on strike in France."

The Communists decided to throw in the towel. They accepted the government's ultimatum terms. They got a cost-of-living bonus of 1,500 francs a month, which Premier Schuman had offered once before and which the "Cocos" had disdainfully spurned. They got no strike pay. They had failed to breach Schuman's new strike control law.

Next day the last strikers went back to work.

Torn-Up Cards. When Frachon launched his attack, with rioting last month at Marseille, the C.G.T. had 5,000,000 members. Since then more than a million have torn up their union cards in disgust. Some are fed up, temporarily at least, with all labor unions; others are forming independent non-political unions.

On the sixth floor of the C.G.T. building, one floor above the scene of Frachon's ordeal, sat a 68-year-old, paunchy, pouchy man named Leon Jouhaux. In 1909 Socialist Jouhaux became secretary-general of the C.G.T., and for 30 years he was the biggest man in French labor. The Vichy government arrested him in 1941 and he was deported to Germany. When France was freed and Jouhaux got back, he found that he had a Communist co-secretary, Benoit Frachon, and that Frachon had usurped the power. Jouhaux had four adherents on the C.G.T.'s board of 13; Frachon had seven.

Hope for September. Jouhaux heads an anti-Communist movement, called Force Ouvriere, which has already held one national congress. Now that the Frachon gang has lost so much face, Jouhaux hopes that he and other non-Communists can regain control of the C.G.T.'s executive structure at the next elections, scheduled for September 1948. To realize his. hope, he needs a maximum of non-Communist support within the C.G.T. Therefore he has asked disgruntled workers not to secede, or to come back if they have already left. If, despite this plea, disintegration of the C.G.T. continues, it may dwindle to a hard Communist-led core of no more than 2,000,000 workers.

Either way, Schuman's victory has spiked the fear that Communist control of French unions constitutes a veto over French government policy. Schuman had won political freedom to tackle France's grave and deepening economic crisis.

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