De Gaulle to Power

As the hour hand of the clock high on the wall of the National Assembly crept past 3, the hour of final reckoning arrived for the Fourth Republic. In hushed silence the Deputies watched General Charles de Gaulle in a single-breasted grey suit stride to the podium, heard him proclaim in less than seven minutes the terms on which he had accepted the summons to power.

Then, by the unimpressive vote of 329 to 224, De Gaulle got his way. Less than 18 years after the defeated Third Republic voted itself out of existence in the Casino at Vichy, the parliamentary government of France was again declaring itself bankrupt. But this time France's Parliament was capitulating not to foreign conquest but to internal dissatisfaction. But this time the man to whom France had turned was a symbol not of defeat but of desperate hope.

The world looked on with mingled relief and apprehension. The Russians were strangely silent. Dotty old Soviet President Kliment Voroshilov, 77, said De Gaulle's return would "do more harm than good," but Radio Moscow quickly repudiated the remark. Moscow was torn by the desire to let French Communists, rioting in the streets, appear defenders of the Fourth Republic against the "Fascist right,'' while hoping that De Gaulle's proud and mystic nationalism might jeopardize the harmony of the NATO alliance. Washington, too, was tactfully discreet, hoping that De Gaulle could restore his sick nation to health, but resigned to his being a thorny ally.

The illnesses that De Gaulle would have to treat were many and grave. Frenchmen themselves had so little faith in their country's future that early last week they were converting their assets into West German marks at the rate of several million dollars a day. The balance-of-payments deficit was running $40 million a month, and all that stood between internally prosperous France and international bankruptcy was the remains (about $500 million) of the $650 million in foreign loans which the Gaillard government negotiated in Washington last January. Only by restricting its imports could France hope to regain solvency, and such action threatened to delay the creation of the six-nation Western Europe Common Market.

Above all there remained Algeria. De Gaulle's high-flown rhetoric about Algeria had at one and the same time encouraged both the right-wing French "ultras" in Algeria and Arab leaders like Tunisian Pre mier Habib Bourguiba. Now it would have to be translated into plans and actions. De Gaulle's promised trip to Algeria would probably do more to reassure the 500,000 French troops there, who in De Gaulle's words had been "scandalized by the absence of true authority," than it would please the ultras, who may find his proposed solution for Algeria less to their taste than they anticipated.

In the tense days that preceded his final triumph, there were many who cried dictatorship. That fear, belied by De Gaulle's previous record, was belied again by the manner in which he came to power this week and by the way he proposed to use the power he had won.

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