The Measure of Conscience

"When the average Frenchman feels worried about the situation, he buys Le Monde," muses Le Monde's Editorial Director Hubert Beuve-Mery. "We have learned to increase the print automatically during periods of worry and uncertainty, and our circulation jumps to 300,000 during times of crisis. It is events such as the accouchement of Brigitte Bardot or Queen Elizabeth which send our competitors' sales soaring. For us it is a political crisis."

Last week Le Monde's sales indicated a period somewhere between uncertainty and crisis. Contained in Le Monde's 16 somber pages were reports on worldly woes, from the U.N.-to the Congo. But it was an article near the bottom of Page One that commanded the French citizen's closest attention. Signed by "Sirius," the piece predicted that unless Charles de Gaulle soon ends the Algerian war, France will plunge back into chaos worse than that from which he rescued it in 1958.

Running the Gamut. That gloomy forecast deserved attention if only because "Sirius" is the nom de plume of Hubert Beuve-Mery--the editor of France's most respected daily. Beuve-Mery, 58, a grave, greying man with a permanently skeptical arch to his brow, has modeled Le Monde after his own image. Like its editor, Le Monde is more conservative than Catholic, more trenchant than traditional, more republican than radical, more pro-French than anti-American, more non-Communist than antiCommunist. At a time when much of the French press ranges from sycophantic toward De Gaulle to uncritical, Le Monde has been his most respectable--and most persistent--critic. No one knows better than Beuve-Mery how difficult it is for the foreigner to classify Le Monde. "We have," he says, "run through the whole gamut of American adjectives --leftist, independent, authoritative, highly respected." It has been all these. And in its day it has taken many unpopular stands, and some odd ones.

Le Monde's circulation, ranging from 215,000 to a crisis-created 300,000, ranks it only sixth among Paris' dailies. As a dutiful recorder of history, Le Monde prints the full texts of so many speeches and diplomatic exchanges that admirers compare it to the New York Times. Le Monde makes few concessions to the average reader. Says Beuve-Mery: "It has a stern aspect--no photographs, no cartoons, no short stories."

In this very refusal to kowtow to popular taste lies one strength of Le Monde--and of Editor Beuve-Mery. The son of a Paris jeweler, Beuve-Mery earned a doctorate of law, went to Prague in 1928, where he became a correspondent for a big Paris paper, Le Temps. The experience was shaking. Beuve-Mery discovered that the news columns of Le Temps, like those of many another prewar French daily, were for hire. After the appeasement of

Hitler at Munich, which Le Temps applauded, Beuve-Mery quit the paper in disgust, returned from Prague to Paris and later joined the Resistance.

When Paris was liberated in 1944, Charles de Gaulle, then President of the French Provisional Government, assigned Beuve-Mery to start a new daily on the ashes (and the presses) of the by-then defunct Le Temps. The result was Le Monde, which had the same grey look, but this time an honest face. The result was something more than De Gaulle anticipated. "De Gaulle told me I had to do something big with this newspaper," recalls Beuve-Mery. "With De Gaulle, everything has to be big. I wanted Le Monde to be completely independent, economically, politically and morally. When I met De Gaulle 18 months ago, I told him I was afraid that I had made something big out of Le Monde even beyond his expectations."

Toward the Revolution. Proclaiming a creed of "revolution by law," Le Monde and Beuve-Mery set a course for a confused, heartsick and frustrated France. Beuve-Mery was a real count-me-out Frenchman, with the Gallic antipathy to international movements. Le Monde opposed the European Defense Community and NATO, and, of course, German rearmament. Many readers, admirers of excellent reporting, found its editorial policy eccentric, though conceding the courage of its convictions. During the interminable procession of Fourth Republic Premiers, Le Monde welcomed each newcomer warily but, with a single exception, Mendes-France, turned critical of them all. With De Gaulle's return to power in 1958, Le Monde, while grudgingly admitting the necessity of a strong hand at the helm, deplored the unconstitutionality of his methods. Le Monde was among the first courageously to publish authenticated reports of French army atrocities in Algeria, needles the government so unmercifully on the subject of the Algerian war that the paper has been seized in Algeria eleven ! times so far this year (it has never been banned in Paris itself. Says Beuve-Mery: "They do not dare"). Some months ago De Gaulle met Beuve-Mery at a social affair of state. "You and your articles," he cried, "you are like Mephistopheles." Then, in faultless German, De Gaulle quoted the passage from Goethe's Faust in which the Devil says: "I am the spirit which always denies!" Replied Beuve-Mery: "But I do not always say no."

In that exchange may be found one distinction between De Gaulle and Le Monde's Beuve-Mery, proud men who are in many ways much alike. Both grieved for France's prewar decline, both yearn to revive the national spirit. But having attended the burial of the Fourth Republic--"enclosed by a past which can no longer be sustained"--Beuve-Mery is unwilling to return to an even more distant past, however glorious. And until it sees the achievement of its revolution by law, Le Monde is likely to remain the nagging voice of an individualist French national conscience.

* France's Charles de Gaulle is himself a haughty holdout from the Manhattan ingathering of world leaders. De Gaulle instead sent over his Foreign Secretary Maurice Couve de Murville, who turned around and flew home before Nasser took the floor to denounce France over Algeria.

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