The New Left?

In the very moment of Mendes-France's victory, his best friends anticipated his "fall. His enemies have nicked him mockingly, confident that they can bring him down at their pleasure. Last week Mendes' young brain-trusters, estimating that he has only a few weeks of political life after the Assembly returns from recess, talked of the impending fall as a kind of political death and resurrection leading to the breakup of the old parties and Mendes' return as the leader of a "New Left." Beating the drums loudest for the New Left is Mendes' brilliant young disciple, Journalist Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, whose weekly L'Express provides a forum for Mendes' dedicated strategists. Last week L'Express proudly welcomed a distinguished new recruit to the New Left's ranks: Novelist Andre Malraux.

New Phenomenon. Voluminously voluble, gaunt, hot-eyed, nervous as a neurotic bloodhound, Malraux has an exotic fascination for Frenchmen as an intellectual who is also what they call un homme engage. As a man committed to action, Malraux--believing Communism to be the wave of the future--intrigued in the Chinese revolution and flew for the Loyalists in Spain; during World War II, he fought brilliantly in the Resistance. As a man of intellect, he distilled powerful novels from his experiences (Man's Fate, Man's Hope}.

Then in 1947 he suddenly burst into the quiet world of art scholarship with a massive study of the philosophy of art which one dazzled critic hailed as "one of the really great books of our time."

As restless intellectually as he was physically, Malraux roundly denounced Communism after the Soviet-Nazi pact, became just as disgusted with the paralysis of France's postwar government when he tried his hand as a De Gaulle lieutenant after the war. "To know how foul it really is," he wrote, "one must be married to it, and be frustrated as a man is by a wife with whom he is hopelessly coupled." Convinced that De Gaulle was the only man capable of changing this foulness, he became his chief adviser and closest political intimate. For six years, this curious alliance of the general and the ex-revolutionary persisted. Now Malraux has found a different hero, with better prospects.

"A new phenomenon is dawning," said

Malraux last week, "the renaissance of French liberalism . . . This liberalism is symbolized by Mendes-France. Should Mendes-France fall, crystallization could take place with surprising rapidity." Calculating aloud, Malraux figured that only 1,500,000 of the 5,000,000 Communist voters were really hard-core supporters.

The New Left could count on picking up 3,500,000 votes from them. It could also count on "those Christian Socialists who passionately love justice, including social justice . . . Would this mean an other Popular Front? No. For the man who would take Leon Blum's place -- and he is a successor to Blum in many ways -- is not a Marxist. The perspective would not be pro-Marxist; it would be New Deal." Old Virtues. Another recruit to the New Left is Catholic Novelist Franc,ois Mauriac, chief editorial writer of the influential Figaro, who has professed him self disillusioned by his old party, the M.R.P. "Because certain leaders of the M.R.P. seem to have forgotten the ideals of their youth," he wrote, "thousands of Christian Democrats are ready to regroup themselves."

Servan-Schreiber, pointing with pride to "the exceptional nature of a meeting on the political plane between Pierre Mendes-France, liberal statesman; Franc,ois Mauriac, inspiration of the Christian left, and Andre Malraux, the revolutionary guide who renounced nothing which united him with De Gaulle," concluded: "Here are the men from whom the rising generation can draw reasons for ... believing again in the virtues of political action."

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