The Ticking of the Clock

The squat, blue-jowled man with the broken nose and the meaty shoulders of a middleweight boxer pushed his way last week through a swirling crowd of aides, secretaries and Cabinet ministers waving papers at him. "If it can wait until July 20, keep it," he snapped. "If it can't wait, do it yourself."

At week's end, France's Premier Pierre Mendes-France had only 16 days left. His pledges were still only pledges. In Indo-China, where he had promised to get peace in 30 days, the French abandoned a third of the Red River Delta without a fight. From both sides of the Atlantic, apprehensive allies warned him against any attempt basically to alter EDC. Trouble flared in restive Tunisia and Morocco.

But in just two weeks in office, Mendes-France had already had more impact on France--and Europe--than any French Premier since De Gaulle. Here was a man who bluntly announced what he thought France should do, demanded authority to do it, and acted as if he meant to carry it out. After years of trimming and timidity, Mendes-France had struck off the deadhead of France's postwar malaise--immo bilisme. Whether his 30-day gamble gamble is won or lost, the French people had found in Mendes-France something that had long been denied them--leadership.

"We Must Choose." Mendes-France believed in himself. And last week, in hundreds of letters to newspapers and the government, Frenchmen declared their belief in him. "Your presence gives us comfort," wrote a pensioned widow. "A man who speaks to us with frankness and simplicity, you have restored confidence long lost to us," wrote a retired miller.

Mendes was frank to the point of bluntness. The nation, he said, had been living beyond its means. "For years, we have undertaken tasks beyond our strength," he said. If the crepes suzettes sizzled as lavishly as ever in Paris' chic restaurants, it had been because the economy was propped by U.S. aid, and kept in an artificial fever of inflation by governments which lacked the courage to face realities. France's military commitments were far beyond what its economy could support. Mendes insists: "We must choose"--a favorite phrase.

A year ago. Mendes told the National Assembly flatly: "France must limit her objectives, but attain them; establish a policy which is perhaps less ambitious than some would desire, but hold to it. Our aim must not be to give the illusion of grandeur, but to remake a nation whose word will be heard and respected."

In other words, France could no longer maintain the fiction that she was one of the world's Big Five, a fiction nurtured by De Gaulle and his successors, affirmed again and again by Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, made statutory in the permanent seats of the U.N. Security Council. As events have shown, and as Mendes-France affirms in effect, it was just an illusion, and the effort of maintaining it in Indo-China proved disaster in fact. What Mendes is now proposing is that France recognize itself as a second-class power, but an honest one. Free of the need to keep up a front. Frenchmen will be relieved of the nagging of creditors, the sneers of critics, the exhortation of friends. Henceforth, they might seem poorer--but feel prouder. Did this mean that Mendes is longing for the illusory place on the sidelines labeled "neutralism"? Mendes denies it. "Let us have no illusions. No imaginable policy could enable us to escape if, unhappily, a new war were to break out... National defense is imperative for any free country, and for France more than any other, because of her geographical position."

Mendes' view might be put in the French saying, Reculer pour mieux sauter--take a step backward so as to jump better. He argues that by trying to be strong everywhere, France is strong nowhere, that strength cannot be achieved anywhere with an overburdened or propped-up economy. Says a British friend: "He does not argue that France should stand alone, but that France should stand erect."

The Gambler. Almost unknown to the general public a year ago, Mendes-France has become a living symbol of change, in a country that longs for change. Previous Premiers had one goal that was more important than all others: to stay in office. A "successful" Premier was the one who managed to stay longest, and however patriotic he might be, he had to shape all his actions towards continuity in office. Generally, this meant that it was safer to do nothing. Thus, a Premier formed his majority first by telling the Catholic M.R.P. that he was for EDC, then telling the anti-EDC nationalists that he did not propose to bring EDC to a vote for some time.

Mendes did not say on what terms he would get peace, or what formula he would achieve for German rearmament. He simply said he would solve these two problems or get out. To a weary and politically conscious people, the appeal of this gamble was unique and overwhelming.

F.D.R. & P.M.F. Mendes-France direly needs all the popular appeal he can get. He has no political following in the Assembly. Though his fellow Assemblymen are impressed with the clarity of his thinking and the austerity of his character, few love him. He acquired respect by refusing time and again to enter governments whose economic policies he considered disastrous; he was admired for the brilliance of his economic analyses, and for his courage in his Cassandra role of proclaiming unwelcome truths. But like Roosevelt, whose New Deal he greatly admires, he has won a small, enthusiastic coterie of youthful intellectuals and dedicated supporters who see him as a man of destiny (and sedulously cultivate the parallel with F.D.R. by referring to him as P.M.F.). Typically, when he received the word of his investiture, there were no emotional embraces or victory celebrations. To the small group of disciples waiting with him, he said in his hard, flat voice: "This is now behind us. For us, the clock is already turning."

Secretaries in Bathrooms. Mendes moved fast as the clock turned. Scorning the magnificence of the Hotel Matignon, traditional quarters for French Premiers, he moved himself and entourage into the stately offices of the Quai d'Orsay. Being his own Foreign Minister, he felt that he needed the mechanism of the French diplomatic service. Also, he did not fully trust the diplomats who have for so long been disciples of Georges Bidault. Mendes shook the suave Quai d'Orsay to its foundations. He ordered its well-groomed officials to get to work at 8:45 a.m. instead of sauntering in at 11. He rushed in his own office staff, installed secretaries in bathrooms, and put an Under Secretary of State in Bidault's old dining room.

He shocked Quai d'Orsay chefs by ordering sandwich lunches served at his desk. Five or six times a day he was on the phone to Geneva, or talking by radiotelephone to the French headquarters in Hanoi. When the Geneva negotiators told him of bickering delays, he snapped: "Never mind. We must not change our course. We must show them our nerves are stronger than theirs."

He began calling quick, informal Cabinet meetings presided over by himself--instead of by the President of the Republic--a practice unused since De Gaulle. If Cabinet members were long-winded, Mendes cut them short with: "Could you summarize the rest of your remarks?" or "Perhaps you can give us the meat of your argument with less of the details." He rationed his time, told visitors he could give them three minutes, or if there was protest, he might add: "All right, take seven, but you've already used up one and now you have only six left." Not until 9 at night did he drive off to his apartment in fashionable Auteuil, where he hurried through a late dinner. After all, his days were numbered.

Young Riser. Pierre Mendes-France has been in something of a hurry all his life. Born in Paris 47 years ago, an only son of a small clothing manufacturer whose Jewish family traces its genealogy in France back to 1300, Pierre attended Paris public schools, grew into a serious, bookish boy.

In his university years, while gayer lads of the Latin Quarter caroused, Mendes sat up nights arguing with friends about the devaluation of the franc, organized leftist lectures and debating clubs. Once he was cornered by rowdy royalists who tried to throw him out a second-story window, but succeeded only in breaking his nose.

Edouard Herriot, hearing young Mendes speak extemporaneously (he had lost his notes) at a Radical Socialist meeting, told him: "You are one of the most brilliant minds for your age I have ever met." The next year, Mendes became, at 21, the youngest lawyer in France; his thesis on Raymond Poincare's financial policy was published and provoked a long letter from Premier Poincare himself.

At the urging of fellow Radical Socialists (they are a moderate businessmen's party), Mendes moved to the Normandy town of Louviers to set up law practice and run for Deputy. Just four months over the legal age for Deputies (25) in 1932, he squeezed out a victory over the conservative rival, when the Communist candidate withdrew in his favor. He was the youngest Deputy in France.

His victory in a conservative stronghold marked him as a coming man. In 1933, when he married beautiful, Egyptian-born Lily Cicurel, whose family owns Cairo's most fashionable department store, the two witnesses at the wedding were Cabinet ministers--Edouard Daladier and Georges Bonnet.

With impressive energy, Mendes worked at politicking, wrote extensively on international economics, and began a history of Germany (the manuscript was lost during the war). In 1935, he was elected mayor of Louviers. He is still mayor, and delights in the job. "The inertia of the Assembly in Paris has always made him suffer," says a friend. "Out in Louviers, he can see his ideas take shape."

In France, it is often useful to have two political careers at once: one national, one local. The young mayor's economic ideas were brought to the attention of Leon Blum, then trying to form his second Popular Front government, and in 1938 Pierre Mendes-France, only 31, was made Under Secretary of State for the Treasury, the youngest government member of the Third Republic.

Mendes' program in that crisis-crammed year called for mobilizing production for war. The Senate rejected the plan, and the Blum government fell. "A policy of abandonment and cowardice would not avoid war," said Mendes later. "It would only lead to a war in which we would be faced with worse conditions." Out of that brief episode came Mendes' friendship with Georges Boris, a leftist journalist turned civil servant, who had recommended Mendes to Premier Blum. Now a crisp old gentleman in his 60s, Boris is Mendes' chief of Cabinet, the only man older than Mendes himself in his immediate entourage and his only really intimate friend.

A Legal Matter. When war came, Mendes volunteered for the air force. He was back in Paris on leave when the Germans burst through and around the Maginot Line. Embittered at France's "moral abdication, lack of honor, treason," he gathered up his wife and two sons, followed the government and the remains of the Chamber of Deputies to Bordeaux, was put aboard a cruiser to Morocco. Reporting to the Rabat air base for duty, he learned that he was going to be arrested soon for desertion from the air force. He might have escaped to Gibraltar, but Mendes was a lawyer with a highly developed French sense of legalite; he decided to accept arrest and argue his case. At the trial, Mendes expected that he would be allowed to defend himself. A series of military men testified for him. The tribunal heard them and then declared him guilty without hearing him. "An innocent man has been convicted out of political hatred," cried Mendes. "This is not the justice of France but of Hitler.*

His obligation to legalite was fulfilled. "Not only did I have the right to my liberty," he says, "but I considered it my duty to escape."

Whispers in the Night. One day he noticed a six-foot piece of spiked lightning rod lying in the mud in the prison courtyard, realized he could use it as a ladder. But he took thought. He was not in good physical shape. He left the rod in the mud, went back to his cell and did pushups. He began saving his prisoner's pocket money, bought a ration book from a fellow prisoner, wangled a local train timetable--only to find that the rod had disappeared.

Weeks went by before he spotted a rusty hacksaw in the prison workshop and stole it. He found a rubber stamp, fabricated himself a shoddy set of papers. Then he had luck; the prison doctor decided he had a bad liver and sent him to the hospital. There Mendes, as an officer, demanded a private room. He briskly set to work sawing the window bars, and let his beard grow. One evening, he packed a bag full of extra clothes, made a rope of his sheets and let himself down to a narrow courtyard. He slipped past a guard, made his way up to the top of the prison wall and lay flat. Then he heard whispers.

Below him, leaning against a tree, were a pair of lovers. The boy had a proposition. The girl was hesitant. Minutes passed. Mendes waited, helpless. At 11 o'clock, the local cinema would empty and the streets would be crowded with people.

Below him, the conversation went on. "Never did it seem more urgent for me to see a woman lose her virtue." he says. Finally the boy won his plea and the couple disappeared. Mendes dropped 20 feet to freedom. Later, in a book, Mendes addressed the unknown girl of that night, promising that "the day we account for our acts before the Creator, I will take on myself, if you wish, the fault you committed that evening. For I wished it, I swear, more passionately and more impatiently than your young lover."

For eight months, Mendes worked in the underground, adopting a pipe and a mustache as a disguise, then made his way to London to join De Gaulle's Free French. He immediately applied to fly again, was trained as a navigator in the Free French bomber group. "He turned all colors before going on missions, but he always went and he volunteered when he could," says a friend. Mendes fretted about bombing France, finally concluded that if he did not do it, others would, and perhaps not aim so carefully.

In London, Mendes stayed coldly aloof from those fellow exiles who jostled and intrigued for Cabinet positions in De Gaulle's'phantom government. "They are not bad men," he confided to a friend, "but they scurry around. They scurry so much they forget France."

Unheeded Man. In time, Mendes himself became De Gaulle's Minister of National Economy, and worked out an austerity plan for the economic reconstruction of postwar France, including such severe anti-inflation measures as freezing all large bank deposits. But at a Cabinet meeting in January 1945, a majority led by Finance Minister Rene Pleven vigorously objected. After five years of occupation, the French people would not stand for a new period of austerity, they argued. "You see, my dear Mendes," said De Gaulle, "the Minister of Finance and all the experts are against you." "I remember," answered Mendes sadly, "when all the military experts were against a certain Colonel de Gaulle." Three months later, Mendes resigned.

From that day in 1945, Mendes-France remained in political isolation. Lacking political power, he served in technical positions. He represented France on the International Monetary Fund and on the U.N. Economic and Social Council. In the National Assembly, he was chairman of the finance committee. Always, in speech after speech, he warned France that the day of reckoning would come.

He cried for more investment, more production, less military spending, more housing, control of inflation. He castigated the unenlightened selfishness of French capitalists, pleaded for a French "New Deal" (he has been searching for an effective French equivalent phrase). "We are in 1788," he warned.

He also warned that if France did not give its colonial people more independence and quickly, they would take it themselves. The Indo-China war could have been avoided by granting Indo-China greater independence, he charged, and the same lesson is going unheeded in Tunisia and Morocco: "The 19th century colonial regime has had its day."

As early as 1949 he was telling the Assembly: "One day you will be forced to call on French conscripts to win the war in Indo-China. By the time you do it, it will be too late to win the war. You will also be forced to negotiate the settlement with Ho Chi Minh's Communists, but by that time it will be too late, too."

Both as politician and social animal, Mendes was a lonely man in these years. "There's a certain interior coldness about him," admitted one of his few close friends. His austerity was somehow impressive in itself. He does not smoke, dance or gorge. "He's a great believer in the American drugstore," said a friend, "because he can eat a little and quickly." In Paris, he is rarely invited to theater premieres or fashionable salons. "Getting choice invitations requires work," says one Parisian hostess. "Pierre doesn't go around complimenting people. He just doesn't care." The only passion he developed during these years was one for skiing.

Typically, he studied it as if skiing were a problem of high finance, developed a theory that it is a "study in will power." "He thought that one could reach a sort of inner harmony while skiing," says a friend. That harmony is still far off; he has broken a leg, been hospitalized with contusions. "I've never seen such a terrible skier," says a friend.

Within Thirteen Votes. In June 1953, President Vincent Auriol asked Mendes to try to form France's 18th postwar government. At first he refused; he was not ready. Then characteristically he concluded: "After criticizing the government as I have done, the people would not understand if I refused myself to try."

He failed by 13 votes. But his speech, blunt, sometimes eloquent, always incisive, raised him from the role of gloomy, intellectual Cassandra to the stature of a national figure. Overnight he became, in his own unblinking eyes, a man of destiny. "I have created a hope and trust in the country," he said. "It is now my duty to honor this hope and trust."

Sounding Board. To organize and kindle this new enthusiasm, rising young newspaperman Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, publisher of the intellectual magazine L'Express, began a series of informal diners du travail. Jacques Soustelle, De Gaulle's bright young lieutenant, came, so did young MRPers of Bidault's party like Andre Monteil and Robert Buron, and Socialists like Robert Lacoste and Gaston Defferre. Says Servan-Schreiber: "First, we had to get a sounding board for Mendes. With his isolation in Parliament, he made brilliant speeches but there was no political echo. Secondly, he had always worked alone. He didn't know how to work in a team."

Mendes waited. He was content to have Bidault try to negotiate an end to the Indo-China war. Let the opponents of negotiations negotiate, he said, because they are tougher. But Mendes always insisted that Geneva was folly, that the only way to get peace was through direct negotiation with the Viet Minh. "Really, your policy is incomprehensible," he told Bidault. "You ask Mao to stop aid to Ho. Why should he make you this gift?" Mendes also suspected another motive behind Bidault's policy: Bidault's hope that the U.S. could be persuaded to do what the French alone could not do--maintain French illusory politique de grandeur in Indo-China.

When Dienbienphu fell, Mendes knew in his own mind that he would become Premier. Early in June, he made a speech which he expected to bring down the tottering Laniel government. The speech was the poorest of his career. Even while friends muttered polite sympathy, Mendes confidently began work on the speech that swept him into office twelve days later.

Hearth Chats. Mendes-France, the man in a hurry, had the list of his Cabinet members in his pocket when he made his appeal for investiture. He formed his government in a record 36 hours. He declared he might even choose men from parties that had not voted for him, and he made good the promise by picking two young MRPers, faithful attenders of the diners du travail. With an average age of 47, his was the youngest Cabinet in French history.

Mendes has also let light and air into the stuffy salon atmosphere in which French politicians have traditionally gone their subtle ways in a cloud of courtly titles ("Monsieur le Ministre, Monsieur le President'"), confiding their secret maneuverings to only a small group of ancient parliamentary correspondents. Adopting another Rooseveltian practice, he held press conferences, gave "straight answers when he could, said "no comment" when he could not. He also adopted the "corner of the hearth" chat, by broadcast Saturday nights direct to the French people.

Last week Mendes had news on his Indo-China timetable: "During the first week progress was made but, frankly, in the second week things did not go so well," he admitted. He sought to justify the French withdrawal in the Red River Delta: "If the positions held by the Expeditionary Corps remained dispersed and fragile, our negotiators would have had to do their job under the threat of tragedy, and their chances of success would have been terribly reduced." He still had hopes; he had come away from his meeting with Chou En-lai fortnight ago in Switzerland convinced that the agile Chou sincerely wants peace.

The difficulty is that whether or not Mendes-France brings off his promise of peace lies not with him, but with the Communists. Wrote France's leading commentator, Raymond Aron, in the conservative Figaro: "It now happens that M. Molotov and M. Chou En-lai become arbiters of French politics. They are free to provoke or avoid a ministerial crisis. If they grant a cease-fire within the prescribed time limit, Mendes-France will inevitably become suspect, since he will appear the favorite of those he himself calls his enemies."

Promises to Keep. In the 30 days allotted to him, Mendes has other tall promises to keep. He has promised to submit the kind of tough domestic economic program that successive postwar governments have flinched from. But Mendes insists that, economically, France feels better than it really is, that French prices are 10% to 20% above world prices, that French national income is only a meager 3% over 1929, that France's unsound trade balance with the rest of the world has been concealed by dollar aid. Socialist Deputies who support him on Indo-China may desert him over his economic plan.

And there remains the nettlesome, wearisome subject of EDC. Mendes-France insists that there has never been a majority for EDC in its present form in the Assembly, despite what U.S. diplomats report. But he thinks there is ,a majority for some kind of German rearmament. Perhaps it is the kind described in the current Parisian quip: "The French want a German army bigger than Russia's [175 divisions] but smaller than France's [18 divisions]."

Mendes' solution for the problem is to turn it over to two of his Cabinet members, one ardently for EDC (Radical Maurice Bourges-Maunoury) and the other (Defense Minister Pierre Koenig, a Gaullist) with a strong aversion for putting French soldiers under any supranational authority. He told them to work something out.

The trick will be to find something the French Assembly will accept and other member nations of EDC will not reject. Possible Gallic compromise: ratify the EDC treaty, but with two reservations in added protocols--that "unanimity of vote" should be required for the first five years (thus giving France a veto on any action it dislikes) and an escape clause allowing France to get out after ten years. At least Mendes is the first French Premier to set a deadline on submitting the EDC proposals to the Assembly for a yes or no vote.

Unanswered Questions. French partisans of EDC mistrust Mendes. Last week Bidault snapped: "This man is either Disraeli or Kerensky," and went off to pick mushrooms in the Versailles woods. Now that Mendes has ticked off half of his allotted time, other Frenchmen, sympathetic to his aims but doubtful of his chances, are asking questions. Is Mendes an innocent in all but economic matters, surrounded by inexperienced intellectuals united only by their dislike of inertia? Or is he a self-disciplined realist who expresses a French mood of grim resolution? Or is he Kerensky, the last man before surrender?

Nobody yet had the answers. If Mendes succeeds in all his aims, France might be in sounder, if more modest, circumstances than it had been in years. And if Mendes-France fails? Said a cynic: "The old gang will come back. Indo-China will still be lost, because as a nation we aren't really ready to fight for Indo-China, and our allies aren't ready to fight if we aren't. EDC might scrape through, more likely be blocked. The Americans and British will rearm the Germans anyway, which we will be bitter about but will accept. France will still be rich enough not to go bankrupt, or important enough so that the U.S. won't let her go bankrupt."

Mendes himself thinks he will probably not last a full year, and may go down much sooner. "But by that time the logic of Mendes' views will be clear to the country," explains a disciple earnestly. "There may be dissolution and new elections, or we may have to wait longer. But people will see to it that Mendes-France eventually gets back."

Will Mendes bring off his gamble? The country was for giving him a chance, and while it was, the Deputies dared not vote against him. He has until July 20, and all the while the clock is ticking.

*With typical meticulousness, Mendes, after the war, appealed this conviction. It was set aside only last month.

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