Faure to the Fore

Of the many called to give rudderless France a new government, the sixth chose to try. Striding crisply into the National Assembly, bespectacled Edgar Faure (pronounced fore) asked to be accepted as Premier. The Deputies, impressed by his agile answers to sharp questions, unexpectedly approved him by a hefty majority (401-to-101). Then he sat down to try to piece together a cabinet, the twelfth to govern France since war's end.

Neither well known nor widely regarded until last week, Faure, of the conservative Radical Socialist Party, was Minister of Justice in the recent Pleven government. At 43, he is France's youngest Premier since 1893. The son of an army surgeon, he became a lawyer at 19, later an expert in Russian and other Slavic languages, married a literary wife and, under a pseudonym, wrote three detective novels himself. Faure fled occupied France to join General Charles de Gaulle's Free French in 1943, became the movement's assistant secretary general, and came back to win a seat in the Assembly after the war.

Faure's survival depends on the sufferance of the Assembly, where he lacks the support of the biggest party (the Gaullists), is only tolerated by the No. 2 party, the Socialists, and scornfully rejected by the No. 3 party (the Communists). The Gaullists are still intent on letting France sink to such sorry straits that it will put De Gaulle in command. The Socialists were willing last week to let Faure come to power as head of a coalition of the center, but unwilling to make that coalition strong by joining it themselves. Faure's pieced-together cabinet of 40 ministers was dominated by familiar faces. Twenty-one of the 25 full ministers were in the last government, and Catholic Popular

Republicans again held the key jobs: Foreign Minister Robert Schuman as Foreign Minister and Georges Bidault in Defense. Faure's cabinet, in fact, looks much like the last one, except that it is weaker at the top: Edgar Faure, on the record, is no match for Rene Pleven, who is now jobless. No one was ready to bet that Faure would last long.

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