Gibe of the Week

From the Danish newspaper Information: "The general feeling prevailing in Tunis is that France is not yet ripe for self-government."

Revolt Against the General

General Charles de Gaulle's remarkably tight hold on his own Rally of the French People was broken for the first time last week. For five years his deputies--now 118, the largest group in the French Assembly--had kept in line behind their stern leader. By staying out of coalition governments, which fell one after another, De Gaulle hoped to show that the constitution of the French parliament was unworkable and must be reformed. Judging by the despair Frenchmen felt at the collapse of their 13th postwar government, De Gaulle had almost made his case.

Then it happened. As his party caucus met to discuss France's latest attempt to form a government, there were rumblings of revolt in the Gaullist ranks. His followers thirsted for the plums of office. At the height of the caucus debate, the general turned on his loyal lieutenant, Edmond Barrachin: "Without me, sir, you would not be a Deputy." Snapped Barrachin: "Without you, mon General, I would be a Minister." When the showdown came, Barrachin toed the party line, but 27 other Gaullists bolted. They were still right-wingers, but they felt that the time had come to play more than a negative role. Their votes in the Assembly put into the premiership an all-but-unknown minister named Antoine Pinay, a conservative but not a Gaullist.

Businessman's Flyer. Antoine Pinay, 60, was on a Paris-bound train when the stationmaster at Dijon handed him President Auriol's telegram inviting him to try his hand at forming a cabinet. Pinay, an Independent Republican, had never considered himself a likely Premier. With his neat crinkly hair, his long thin face, glasses, and his trim little mustache, he looked just what he was: a small-town French businessman.

Mounting the Assembly rostrum without applause last week, he took a businessman's view of France's finances: 1) on falling foreign exchange: "There can be no dishonoring of [France's] signature. She will pay in gold"; 2) on the empty Treasury: "A new loan will have to be negotiated"; 3) on the budget: "We must settle a deficit of 400 billion francs." Said he: "The. remedies are neither of the right nor of the left. They bear no parliamentary labels. They are technical measures to be taken in a climate of political truce." Cautiously he skirted the tax issue which had tripped his predecessor, Edgar Faure.

A World War I veteran (with the Medaille Militaire and Croix de Guerre), Antoine Pinay was one of the 569 French parliamentarians who voted state powers to Marshal Petain at Vichy in 1940. But Pinay managed to avoid collaborationist charges by his excellent record as wartime mayor of Saint-Chamond in the Loire. He operates a tannery in the Rhone town of Saint-Symphorien-sur-Coise. It was the conservative look of Premier Pinay which attracted the Gaullist right wing.

Fledgling Right Wing. With their help, he was able to do without the Socialists, who have sabotaged so many of France's weak governments of the center. His cabinet looked the same as most of those before it, with Robert Schuman still anchor man as Foreign Minister. His program, too, was sketchy; perhaps he would fall as soon as he tried to fill it out. But still, unknown Antoine Pinay had already proved that the Socialists could be left out, that Gaullists can be split, and that, for the first time since World War II, a homogenous right-wing government might be possible. For French politics these days, all that was something.

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