Tomorrow's Secret

Each night, wherever he went, former Minister of the Interior Franc,ois Mitterand was pelted with aged pears, tomatoes, oranges and occasional root vegetables selected for their hardness. Ex-Premier Mendes-France, breezing out of one rally to address another, narrowly dodged a left hook and threw one off-target in reply. The leader of the Union for Defense of Shopkeepers and Artisans, a motley, rowdy party standing against all candidates and most taxes, swore his followers to accept summary punishment up to and including death if found guilty of violating the party line. Another ex-Premier, Edgar Faure, filed suit because a newspaper printed a statement accusing him of indiscriminately passing out the Legion of Honor to buy votes.

All France (plus half a dozen exotic remnants of the old empire) simmered last week with such hot-tempered politics. Only a few days remained before 26 million Frenchmen were to go to the polls and with their ballots reveal what the politicians called "tomorrow's secret": Who, or rather, what new coalition shall next govern France?

Some 6,000 candidates, backed by the clanking machinery of 18 parties, competed for 596 seats in the National Assembly. * The cascade of campaign rallies grew to at least 3,000 a day. Public interest was so high that registration was 1,200,000 above past records.

Old and familiar faces crossed the scene. Crowds heard again from Edouard Daladier, France's agent at Munich, and Paul Reynaud, Premier when France fell. Aged (83) but intrepid Edouard Herriot got from meeting to meeting in his wheelchair. Bodyguards propped ailing Communist Chief Maurice Thorez before microphones to breathe a few words on behalf of Red candidates.

On the right flank rode Edgar Faure, the slick-as-onionskin politician who precipitated the snap elections, and Antoine Pinay, the slow and steady little tanner from St.Chamond. They led a relatively smooth-working alliance of independents, farmers, other conservatives and Catholic M.R.P.s.

On the left flank, a knight in half-polished breastplates and only part-plumed helmet that he had not expected to use until spring, rode Pierre Mendes-France. With him were allied the Socialists, numerically strong but not strong enough, the pundits guessed, to carry Mendes to power. The Communists, though reduced in numbers and caught in contradictions of policy, rode the guerrilla trails in confident expectation of gaining 20 or 30 seats. Also present were roughhousing bully squads organized by brash young Anti-Taxer Pierre Poujade to tear down candidates and break up opposition meetings, Fascist-style.

The Pine & the Rose. In snow, rain and biting wind, outgoing Premier Faure wheeled day and night through his mountain district of Jura, near the Swiss border. No hamlet was too small, no bistro too deserted to pass up in hope of votes to defeat Faure's onetime warm friend, Mendes-France. At one gathering, a Faure supporter in the crowd assailed Mendes' past proposals to limit France's high alcohol production. "Does he expect us to drink milk?" cried the Frenchman. "I assure you," said Faure with a smile, "I don't drink milk." At a bistro a man inquired over his hot wine, "What do you think of Mendes?" Snapped Faure: "He's Robespierre . . . drunk with power," but then--remembering not very old times--he added softly, "He's a very intelligent man. I esteem him highly."

Mendes' partisans argued that Faure, by calling elections so abruptly, and postponing much-needed electoral reforms, has sentenced France to a fresh succession of feeble governments. But Faure replied that France has a chance to elect a new Assembly with a majority strong enough to govern for at least two years. "I don't ask that it live as long as a pine tree," said he, "but just the same, it should live longer than a rose."

While Faure worked at the cracker-barrel level, his ally Antoine Pinay campaigned with lofty confidence. "In 1952, we lowered the monetary fever . . . rescued savings and public credit ... destroyed the widespread belief in inevitable disaster," Pinay told a plump and prosperous middle-class banquet crowd in Paris, then rode off, almost unnoticed, to relax in his own small town of St.-Chamond. He had been one of postwar France's most successful Premiers (March-December, 1952), and had served Faure loyally and well as Foreign Minister during the past nine months. If the right prevails, as many expect it to, Antoine Pinay (and not Faure) is a good bet to be France's next Premier.

Speech & Contradiction. Ambition-driven Mendes-France not only had little time to get started, but he was also the chief target of systematic hecklers from the right and left, including the strong-arm Poujadists. At a Left Bank rally in Paris, students hooted: "Mendes to the lamppost! Feed him to the jackals!" In his home department of Eure, he urged, in five or six speeches a day, an end to colonial wars abroad and "immobilism" at home. He was constantly interrupted. Usually Mendees ignored the burly hecklers who make race-hate their specialty, but once, when someone at a rally cried "Send the Jews to Africa!", the ex-Premier shot back acidly: "I thought the Nazis were gone from France." The crowd applauded and heard him out. At the end of his speech, Mendes, like all aspiring politicians, had to undergo a process known as the contradictoire, in which a candidate is required to hear out and then answer needling questions from the floor. While he sat in enforced silence, a reedy-voiced neo-Fascist accused Mendes of changing his Jewish name, a grinning Communist, waving clippings from L'Humanite, blamed him for German rearmament ("He gave the spiked helmet back to the Germans"), and an M.R.P. spokesman cried that Mendes had stolen the credit from M.R.P.'s Georges Bidault for ending the Indo-China war. Mendes-France gave as good as he got. For a neo-Fascist heckler of his acquaintance he reserved a telling word: "Collaborator." The neo-Fascist exploded with indignation: "Liar! I was a prisoner."

Challenge & Reservations. Like elections everywhere, local needs and local personalities loomed large. But Mendes-France one day last week demonstrated, in perhaps the most important utterance of the campaign, that "tomorrow's secret" might hold consequences pertinent to France's future as an international power and as a Western ally. Mendes, looking for votes on the left, made a move to woo voters away from the Communists--and did so by bending his policy to appeal to pro-Communist voters.

In L'Express, a daily devoted to his cause, Mendes published an editorial taking sharp issue with the recent NATO finding that the new Soviet activities in the Middle East and Asia pose "a new challenge to the free world." Mendes maintained that the new Soviet activity represents merely "economic expansion" of the kind Western nations practiced a century and less ago. The recent Soviet-bloc arms deals with Egypt, added Mendes, were provoked by "the unlucky Baghdad pact, which constituted for the West a blunder ..." Antoine Pinay's signature on the NATO communique,

Mendes argued, "enables us to judge the profound error of French foreign policy."

Mendes, a man of the left, says frequently that he does not want Communist support, and would not accept it. But his message in L'Express was a reminder of how this cunning politician, with his ambition to give France a domestic New Deal, has also shown a cool willingness to reduce, even shuck off, France's foreign responsibilities, and to cut her down to a small power with neutralist tendencies. He seemed to be suggesting to the Communist voters that he too has reservations about a foreign policy they hate, and that he is a man who can be reasoned with.

* There are actually 627 seats in the Assembly, but elections have been postponed in 30-seat Algeria because of the political violence there, and a seat formerly representative of the lost French possessions in India has been declared permanently vacant.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.