Ghost from the Past

The Popular Front seems as distant a memory of the '30s as the League of Nations and Josephine Baker, but it stirred uneasy echoes in France last week. French Socialists and Communists were again talking about unity, this time in an electoral alliance aimed at defeating Charles de Gaulle in the next presidential election (which must be held some time before De Gaulle's current term expires in December 1965). The alliance would not be so naive a collaboration as the disastrous partnership of the 1930s, but the resemblance still appears too close for comfort.

One architect of the plan is the clever and capable Gaston Defferre, 53, Socialist mayor of Marseille for the past decade, and the man most talked about in France these days as the challenger to run against De Gaulle. Though he has proved himself staunchly anti-Communist in the rough and tumble of Marseille politics, Defferre tacitly accepted Communist support during last year's voting for Parliament in order to give his slate a better chance against Gaullist candidates (three out of five Socialists in his department did win). Chief supporter of the unity maneuver is Defferre's noted fellow Socialist, ex-Premier Guy Mollet, who for years rigorously attacked the Reds as being "not left, but East," then did a significant turnabout in the same parliamentary elections. Local Red candidates in his constituency withdrew in Mollet's favor, and Mollet for his part obligingly called for a "public dialogue" between Socialists and Communists.

Last week Defferre, Mollet and an eight-member Socialist delegation returned from Moscow, where they had a nine-hour conference with Nikita Khrushchev. A few years ago such a mission to Moscow would have been political suicide for Socialists. But things are different in the balmy atmosphere of the East-West detente. In Moscow, Mollet claims to have detected a tendency of Communism "to orient itself toward truly democratic formulas." To most connoisseurs of Communism, such talk is dangerous nonsense. But French Socialist leaders insist that they have high hopes for a possible deal with the Reds for a single candidate to run against De Gaulle.

The Communists love the idea. They are saying reassuringly that they would not make France pull out of the Common Market or NATO as the price of "workers' unity." That is the same sweet line the Communists are taking in Italy, where the Reds' longtime allies, the leftist Nenni Socialists, are on the verge of entering the government.

While French Socialists are cozying up to Moscow, Charles de Gaulle is making sheep's eyes at Peking as part of his strategy of the higher politics. He would like to revive France's dusty influence in Asia. Commenting on the coup in South Viet Nam, Information Minister Alain Peyrefitte last week renewed De Gaulle's proposal, plainly designed to embarrass the U.S., of a united and neutral North and South Viet Nam "free of foreign influences." A five-man group representing the Patronat, the French equivalent of the National Association of Manufacturers, has just returned from a month's trip to Red China encouraged by the prospect of increasing trade. Also bound for Peking was ex-Premier Edgar Faure, who has long urged French diplomatic recognition of Red China. Though traveling "unofficially," Faure carried a message from De Gaulle to Mao Tse-tung that reportedly deplores Communist China's isolation. While ruling out formal recognition in the near future, Premier Georges Pompidou remarked that it was ridiculous not to recognize that Red China "exists."

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