The Tall Pincushion

It is one measure of Charles de Gaulle's declining prestige among France's restless intellectuals that they now feel free to make De Gaulle himself a pincushion for barbed French satire. The shafts fly at him from right, left and center. On radio, television and in Montmartre cellars, the traditional chansonniers gibe irreverently at De Gaulle's big-power pretensions and the docility of his Cabinet. A favorite target is Premier Michel Debre, who is depicted, not altogether incorrectly, as a puppet and errand boy. One chansonnier lyric has De Gaulle asking Debre the time. Debre's fawning answer: "Any time you like, mon general."

Sun King. Even more devastating is Le Canard Enchaine, a six-page weekly with a circulation of 290,000. Founded during World War I, Le Canard Enchaine (The Chained Duck) is French slang for a censored press. It carries no advertising, makes no profit, and barely pays the salaries of the editors who own it. But its news sources are among Paris' best, and it often manages to print as gossip what more serious journals dare not print as news, is closely watched by politicians and Cabinet ministers for its reflection of the country's temper (at least three copies are delivered each week to the President's Elyse Palace).

When Charles de Gaulle emerged from his twelve-year retirement at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, Canard hailed him as Christopher Colombey, and celebrated his crusading zeal by calling him "Charles d'Arc." But lately Le Canard has taken to picturing De Gaulle with a crown and wearing the robes of Charlemagne or Louis XV ("Apres le deluge, moi!"). As the Sun King himself, De Gaulle is shown crying: "Bread! Next, they'll be asking for cars and washing machines!"

Derision is poured on De Gaulle's military policy. He is caricatured as a medieval crossbowman in the company of rifle-toting U.S., Britain and Russia. France's A-bomb is the "atomic weapon with the bicycle chain reaction." When De Gaulle applies for admission in the Atomic Club, he is asked to produce his bomb. "I haven't got one," he replies. "It went off." In its bitterness, the magazine is losing some of its sense of humor. De Gaulle is no longer Le Grand Chariot but Le Grand Charletan.

Moody Regime. Since Gaullists worshipfully hail their leader as "mon general," Le Canard catches the mood of the regime with a whole series of possessive pronouns. Unpopular Premier Debre is referred to as "Mondebre" or "Monsatel-lite." When the French colonies disappointed De Gaulle in 1958 by choosing independence rather than autonomy within the French Community, a cartoon showed De Gaulle saying to Debre: "If you ask for independence, I'll explode."

De Gaulle has not suffered these slings of scorn with patience. The chansonniers were disciplined last month by being barred from the state-owned radio and TV unless they first submitted tape recordings of their songs. The regime has seized editions of various newspapers, ranging from the left-wing Catholic Temoignage Chretien to the right-wing Ri-varol. Two cartoonists of the prickly, left-center Express--Sine (The French Cat) and Tim--were charged with "publicly insulting the army" in cartoons critical of the Algerian war. Oddly, the Moscow-financed Communist press, despite its noisy demands for peace in Algeria, remains untouched.

In the drawer of Information Minister Louis Terrenoire lies the draft of a bill giving the government a total veto over the editorial columns of the French press. Private protests to De Gaulle (as well, perhaps, as De Gaulle's own sense of a free press's rights) have so far prevented the bill's being offered to the Assembly. But last week, as critics of De Gaulle and the Algerian war grew more vociferous, the drawer was half open.

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