Incautious Invitation

Even the most dedicated French parliamentarians are beginning to question how long the Fourth Republic's weak parliamentary system--of ineffectual Premiers and squabbling Assembly--can or should last. The latest critic: Robert Schuman, himself head of two of France's 24 postwar governments, and now newly elected president of the European Parliamentary Assembly. In the course of a speech on European integration given at the University of Virginia, Schuman injected a "marginal and probably incautious remark." Said he:

"From our experiences in the first World War, we knew how important it was to give one man the responsibility of organizing and leading troops of different nations. Should present-day France, if I may say this in passing, perhaps resort to the same solution by giving one man, or better, a small team, temporary power to reform its political institutions, which, as everyone agrees, are unsound?"

Schuman later explained that any step toward "stability and authority" must be taken only through "democratic and parliamentary measures," but his "incautious remark" sounded like one more cautious invitation for a return of General Charles de Gaulle, 67, who sits in Mac-Arthurian solitude at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises waiting for the French Assembly to admit its own bankruptcy and send for him on his own terms.

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