Brave Old Wheelhorse

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Said the President of France:

"They represent us as a country divided and discouraged, as a country which would not fight for its independence, as a country which has abandoned itself. All this is not true . . . We know invasion, aggression, occupation well enough not to let ourselves be seduced by sophisms or fooled by lies. We would fight and be in the front ranks."

This week Jules Vincent Auriol, 66, first President of the Fourth Republic, would arrive in the U.S. for a ceremonial visit. He hoped to persuade doubtful Americans that France would be a strong and steadfast ally against Communism. "France," says Auriol, "will fight for the victory of common sense." Auriol's career and his present position exemplified some of the main arguments for both an optimistic and a pessimistic view of France's future. On the plus side: his integrity, his Resistance record. On the minus side: his identification with the feeble "third force" that has failed to arouse France against Communism.

French diplomats thought that President Auriol would be just the man for Americans to listen to. A cheerful, bubbling extrovert with a good, plain-spoken word for everybody, Auriol looks and acts like the mayor of a thriving French town (which he was for 15 years) or like a man who would enjoy a musical evening with Harry Truman. (Auriol plays the violin.) On his only previous visit to Washington, as a member of the 1925 Franco-American War Debts Commission, Auriol shocked his superiors by running up and embracing the doorman at the French embassy, who turned out to be an old school chum. "If you please, Vincent, behave yourself," reproved the commission's president, stiff-backed Joseph Caillaux. "Hey, President," laughed Auriol, "what would you do if you met an old pal from Mamers?"

Easygoing Vincent Auriol is the sort of incumbent the French public wants (but has seldom had) in the presidential Elysee Palace, a genial, approachable man who possesses enough native dignity to give his job as chief of state just a wisp of kingly bearing.

"Vote for the Stupidest." Haunted by the fear of both Bonaparte and Bourbon restorations, the Frenchmen who reconstituted the Republic after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 reduced the powers of the President to almost honorary dimensions. Thereafter, the jealous deputies usually selected as President the kind of man who would not try to broaden the scope of his job.

At the election in 1887, Clemenceau summed up this view of the presidency by growling at his colleagues, "Vote for the stupidest." His fellow deputies paid him a backhanded compliment 33 years later, when they decisively voted him down for the same office.*

When he was elected in 1947, Auriol fitted in comfortably with the modest concept of the presidency. Since then, he has grown a bit in political stature because the precarious coalition cabinets that have served under him called forth his considerable technical skill as a compromiser. By personality and training, Auriol is a good balance wheel; however, the chief ingredient needed in French political life in 1951 is not balance but clear direction and drive. Auriol is not equipped to supply that kind of leadership. If he were, he probably would never have become President of the Fourth Republic.

The Flour of Socialism. Vincent Auriol grew up in the quiet 14th Century town of Revel, in the hills not far from Toulouse. His father, a staunch conservative, wanted Vincent to take over his bakery, used to snap impatiently at his shy, studious son, "We make our bread with flour, not with books." It was only after steady pressuring by Vincent's teachers that he allowed Vincent to enter the University of Toulouse.

There, like many a student before and since, Vincent talked and read himself into Socialism. While still at the university, he became the editor of Le Midi Socialiste, which was written at a cafe table. Auriol, who seldom had money for his meals, would grin at friendly restaurant proprietors, "Never mind, I'll pay you when I'm a cabinet minister."

In the evenings he went for coffee and conversation to the house of Michel Aucouturier, a prominent local Socialist. Aucouturier's ten-year-old daughter, Michele, used to irritate the young student when she came banging in with the coffee to interrupt a discussion. Later, as Michele grew older and prettier, he found her less troublesome. In 1912 she became Madame Vincent Auriol.

For 26 years beginning in 1914, Auriol represented the constituency of Muret in the Chambre des Deputes, always a dependable man for wheelhorse party jobs. In 1936, when Leon Blum formed his Popular Front government, Auriol became Finance Minister.

Like many of his countrymen, Auriol belongs to two very different Frances. For instance, in 1912 Auriol, as a youthful Socialist, supported woman suffrage. Prudhon Masset, a Radical Socialist newspaperman, opposed it. Controversy between them led to a double duel in which Auriol and Masset fired four times at each other, then attempted to settle the issue with swords. (Neither was hurt.) With an effort, Americans can understand duelists, or Socialists; much greater effort is required to understand Socialist duelists. This merger of a proletarian philosophy and an aristocratic code of honor is a perfect example of the contradictions of modern French history.

Enough Wine in the Mairie. Like many deputies, he had also been elected mayor in his constituency. Almost every other week, Auriol would make the ten-hour trip to Muret. On hot summer days he would convoke the municipal council in the mairie only long enough to make the session legal, then adjourn to do the real business over a glass of wine at the Cafe Roussel. "Enough wine," Monsieur le Maire liked to say, "and the opposition sags low."

Only once was Auriol's local reputation attacked. On the eve of an important election, his glass eye (the original was lost in a childhood accident) was found in the bed of a well-known lady. His political friends hastened to explain that they had used the room for a Socialist Party caucus and that Auriol's eye had popped out in a moment of oratorical exuberance. This happened to be the truth, but Muret's citizens preferred to believe a more entertaining account of how the eye got in the bed; delighted with their gallant representative, they elected him with a larger majority than ever.

Auriol made Muret (pop. 4,368) one of the best-run and most progressive towns in southwestern France. He built a municipal hospital, two new parks, a radio station and a special school for training crippled children.When visitors asked him the reason for the town's prosperity, Auriol would explain: "It's Socialism." Other Muret citizens had a more personal explanation: "It's Auriolism."

How a Doctor Disappeared. On July 10, 1940, in the Casino at Vichy, the deputy from Muret was one of 80 members of the Chambre des Deputes who, against an opposition of 569, voted no to giving plenary powers to Petain. Because of his stand, he was imprisoned for seven months, then sent home to Muret under house surveillance. When the Germans occupied the southern zone in November 1942, Auriol was marked for arrest again. Just two steps ahead of an SS division, Vincent and his wife slipped away from the house at Muret.

Two days later the villagers of Gissac, in Aveyron,noticed the arrival of a strange new doctor and his wife at the small local Catholic hospital. The priests seemed to treat Dr. Andre Viaud, a spent-looking retired practitioner wearing the beginnings of a scraggly beard, with unusual respect. When a man stopped him on a walk and asked him to look at some peculiar red splotches on his daughter's face, Dr. Viaud failed to oblige. Instead, he hurried back to the hospital and sent one of the other doctors. He even avoided a chat with one of the townspeople about a sick cow.

As Dr. Viaud, Vincent Auriol spent a year in the Maquis. In October 1943, word came through the underground that he was needed for De Gaulle's consultative assembly at Algiers.

One night, at the village of Villevieux in central France, Vincent Auriol silently crawled in among the sacks in the back of a mail truck. Then the truck jounced past two German sentries, on its way to an open field six kilometers from town. Thirty townsmen had already slipped out to the field, to signal with flashlights to an approaching R.A.F. plane. Shortly after midnight, Auriol, General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny and three other passengers were safe in the air, bound for London.

Between Yesterday & Tomorrow.After two shivering weeks in London (his British clothing points did not stretch to an overcoat), Auriol was flown to Algiers. He was a worried man. Both his wife and their son, Paul, had remained in France, working with the underground.

In Algiers, where Third Republic parliamentarians were trying to give some democratic substance to De Gaulle's skeleton administration, Auriol's years of experience in the Chamber were invaluable. He became more than a parliamentary tactician. Long experience and his reflections after the defeat had made the Auriol of Algiers a wise elder statesman, who forced himself to think deeply about the fundamental defects in the parliamentary system he had served.

To the young men of the Resistance he talked the talk they liked to hear. There would be a new France, he told them. Standing in a corridor, surrounded by a little group, he would analyze rigid party structures that had kept young men from the top. The new Fourth Republic, said Auriol, must have new leaders. In fact, the Fourth Republic has turned out to be a continuation of the Third, with the same defects and many of the same leaders, including Auriol.

Auriol was as disgusted as De Gaulle by the rottenness of the "Republique des Petits Copains" (the Republic of Pals) or government by a Chamber that had itself become a vested political interest far divorced from the people who elected it. In his book, Yesterday--Tomorrow, written during the war, he wrote his own epitaph for the Third Republic. "The old teams," he wrote, "moving slower & slower, went in & out 'making the little tour,' always with a little more skepticism, always with a little more discredit." Of ministerial crises he noted: "At the first hot episode the cement would melt and everything would have to be done over again . . . Sometimes the government was overthrown on the very day it presented itself to the Chamber." Of the presidency that he would later fill, he wrote: "The President faithfully represented and expressed the national will only on the day following a great election, when he confided the task of forming a government to the chief of the victorious party . . . In truth, he regularized political disorder."

"37 Chambers, 6 Presidents." Though Auriol recognized the faults of the Third Republican system, he had neither the inspiring power of leadership nor the right political allies to translate these thoughts into action. Back in Paris after the Liberation, the old leaders forgot the ideals of Algiers and returned to their old ways. There was a difference, however. The Assembly that met in Paris contained a greater proportion of Communists than had ever sat in a French parliament. The Reds were not interested in playing the game of ministerial musical chairs the Third Republic's politicians loved so well. But they were quite content to let the "third parties" exhaust themselves--and France--at the old game.

Much in Auriol's own parliamentary tradition cried out against a strong executive, the apparent alternative to his disorganized "government by parliament." For instance, Auriol, like most of his fellow deputies, resisted any plan to elect the head of the French state by direct vote of its people. They were afraid of what Auriol called the "atavism" of the French people, which might lead them to vote a "strong man" into power, as they had voted for Napoleon I and Napoleon III. The "strong man" they worried about five years ago was Charles de Gaulle.

Presiding over the debates on a new constitution, Auriol was in his element. Scrubby mustache bristling, his face grown plumper and pinker from exertion, Auriol would ring his little bell passionately as the debate grew stormy, calling, "Messieurs . . . MESSIEURS!"

When the constitution was promulgated, after 26 months of doctrinaire hairsplitting, it was a victory for Auriol's compromise policy. (A popular cartoon had showed him yelling into a telephone: "Thirty-seven Chambers and six Presidents, that's my final offer!") But the victory was only tactical. With a few minor changes, the same abuses which Auriol had attacked in his book would be possible under the Fourth Republic. On Jan. 16, 1947, Vincent Auriol was elected President of the Republic; since then his job has been, as he once wrote, to "regularize political disorder."

Always Guests for Lunch. For four years the President has worked and lived behind the pacing Gardes Republicaines in the Elysee Palace on the Rue du Faubourg Saint Honore, which has housed Bourbons, Bonapartes and 14 Presidents of the Third Republic before him. It takes 200 people to make the presidential beds, cook the meals, keep the salons and gardens in good condition, run the private telegraph office, turn out an honor guard on the arrival of a foreign dignitary.

In the cavernous palace, Auriol lives as simply as he does in Muret. He is up every morning at 6. A few minutes later, he brews himself some coffee on the hotplate which stands in his bedroom. For the next two hours and a half, he works in his bedroom on papers set out the night before. At 9, after a walk in the palace gardens, he joins Madame Auriol for breakfast. By 9:30 he is back at his desk receiving his personal secretaries, (including Paul Auriol, who lives with his wife and two sons in another wing of the palace).

There are always guests for lunch. Through one week the visitors' list may note such diverse personalities as General and Mrs. Eisenhower, a mountain climber just returned from the Himalayas, and the Comtesse de Paris, some of whose husband's Bourbon ancestors resided briefly in the Elysee. Most afternoons and evenings are packed with official receptions, dinners and speeches, but the President prefers a quiet evening at home--dining with Madame Auriol in a small bedsitting room. When he has no official engagement, he tries to be in bed by 8.

Weekends, the Auriols stay in a secluded, six-room, one-telephone hunting lodge in the forest at Marly-le-Roi, near Versailles. But every August, for a real vacation, they go back to the rose-walled house in Muret, close by the swift-flowing Louge. This is the France which Vincent Auriol, with a Frenchman's passion for the soil, loves best.

Auriol is a proficient angler and fancies himself a proficient hunter. At the big official hunt parties given every year on the presidential country estate of Rambouillet, M. and Mme. Auriol attain a high pitch of activity. Michele Auriol scurries about directing the beaters to drive copious supplies of game in the direction of favored guests. Vincent with his gun swivels wildly to & fro. Those who know his aim and love their lives, duck. He good-naturedly contradicts any suggestion that somebody else brought down the bird at which he thought he aimed.

"So That's What He Thinks?" Eight times since he took office, President Auriol has been faced by a cabinet failure and the need to form a new government as quickly as possible. His procedure is always the same. When a confidence debate in the Assembly nears the boiling point, Auriol switches on a loudspeaker in his office to hear how it is going. (By law, he is not allowed to enter the Assembly.) He listens sharply to a speaker, jots down notes on a pad, occasionally snapping out a testy, "Oh, so that's what he thinks, is it?" By the time a red-faced Premier has arrived in the presidential office to make the formal announcement of his downfall, Auriol has already been thinking over the likeliest candidates for his successor--and a few tart remarks about how the Premier might have avoided the crisis.

The shifts in governments are made inevitable by the system of proportional-representation elections, which encourages the existence of four or five fair-sized parties, militates against any of them getting a working majority. Like every President since 1870, Auriol can find a temporary majority in the Assembly to handle a specific issue. What he cannot get is a coalition firm enough to handle a whole set of issues.

"Le Systeme D." In spite of political instability, France has put its $2 billion worth of ECA aid to good use. Production is at a record level. In January, French mills turned out 830,000 tons of steel, as against a monthly average of 721,000 in 1950, 140,000 in 1945 and 518,000 in 1938. January's coal output of 4,814,000 tons is the highest on record.

But the benefits of increased production can never be fully exploited without a stable government. "Le systeme D" (from "se debrouiller"--to extricate oneself)--what the individual Frenchman terms his efforts to "muddle through"--has been fatally exemplified by French governments. In the absence of any strong domestic economic policy, wages & prices have run away with themselves. In one month--January 1951--the price of food rose 10%.

Last week a wave of strikes against the rising cost of living threatened to tie up France's transport system. Auriol could not even find a train to take him to his ship. He motored to Le Havre. The feeble government he left behind (headed by Henri Queuille, who has been a minister in 28 cabinets) achieved another patchwork settlement. Unable to promise to halt rising prices, it agreed to higher wages, (which will create still higher prices). The government's own share of the wage increase will be 60 billion francs. That sum is not provided for in the budget, and nobody has any clear idea where it is coming from.

Courage, Vision, Leadership? On the international level, France's great success is tentative agreement on the Schuman Plan--a bold, constructive step toward the economic unity of Europe. This achievement of French leadership, unfortunately, has no counterpart in the political mobilization of Europe against Communism. Auriol and his "third force" friends are thoroughly anti-Communist in heart and conscience. He is probably right about France, and certainly right about himself when he says "we would fight" against a Communist attack. But desperate courage at the eleventh hour will not win that battle. The time for courage and vision and leadership in Europe's defense against Communism is now. By accepting the "third force" label, Auriol & Co. automatically shut themselves off from a dynamic policy of struggle against Communism.

Auriol is like his country: brave, attractive, fundamentally sound; but addicted to expediency and sterile compromise. To the U.S. he can well represent the best of "third force" France. He cannot represent the France for which the U.S.--and Auriol--hopes. That France, decisive master of its own fate, decisive leader of Europe, has not yet emerged from the contradictions of the past.

*The man who defeated Clemenceau was Paul Deschanel, chiefly remembered for an unfortunate mishap. In 1920, on his way to unveil a monument, Deschanel was wandering through a train in his pajamas. He opened the wrong door, landed in a field near Corbeil. He walked barefoot down the tracks to a signalman's hut, explained that he was the President of the Republic. The kindly switchman put his barefooted visitor to bed, called the gendarmes to say that he had a madman on his hands. The gendarmes did nothing about it until hours later when they heard that Deschanel was missing from his train which had finally stopped 45 miles away. Deschanel was in a hospital while Paris newspapers were running accounts, written from handouts, about his presence at the unveiling ceremonies.

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