Aux Armes, Automobilistes!

France, which came to terms quite easily with jet planes and nuclear weapons, last week conceded it cannot cope with the horseless carriage. Some 5,000 irate citizens jammed Paris' Palais des Sports--and 10,000 more were turned away--for the first meeting of the newly formed Syndicat National des Automobilistes. Their purpose: to protest the government's indifference to the motorists of France.

Napoleon's Width. What rubs salt in the wound is that the French claim to have invented the automobile, either in 1873, when one Amedee Bollee built a steam car that was driven from Paris to Bordeaux, or in 1891, when Rene Panhard and Emile Levassor placed a German Daimler motor on a chassis and thus created the first true auto. France remained the center of the automotive world until World War I, when the U.S. forged ahead. But the ardor for cars has never dimmed, and with today's prosperity, French automakers sell every car they can build.

This merely contributes to the outrage of French motorists. France has an exquisite network of roads, lined with noble colonnades of trees. They run straight as arrows from one picturesque village to another. But these blacktop paths are nearly as narrow as in Napoleon's time (when they were designed), and are totally inadequate to the 10 million vehicles now struggling to get from place to place.

A 1951 law was passed to finance road building through the use of 22% of the gasoline taxes--which in France are the highest in the world. If used as specified, the money would have provided 1,700 miles of superhighways, but the money went elsewhere, and at the end of 1963, France had only 217 miles of superhighways, less than the length of the Los Angeles County freeway system. So heavy are the many and varied automotive taxes that a French motorist is estimated, within three years' time, to pay the government as much as a new car would cost.

Queue de Poisson. Even more ominous is the death toll, which has jumped from 7,166 in 1953 to 10,103 in 1962, with 229,485 injured. If U.S. motorists killed at a similar rate, U.S. traffic deaths would amount to 120,000 a year instead of the actual 42,600 annually. The road slaughter is not completely the fault of inadequate highways, but often results from French elan. It is common in France to speed up as soon as you discover that the car behind you is trying to pass. The unofficial code of the chevalier de la route then requires that the second car must relentlessly pursue the first until it can finally get by, preferably by cutting off the first car with what is called a queue de poisson--fishtail. This is considered so deep a humiliation that the insulted motorist may chase the other driver for miles just to pay him back in kind.

What is difficult on the highways is nearly impossible in such cities as Paris. During rush hours, traffic is even slower than it was in the days of horse-drawn carriages. As monstrous jams clog the boulevards and bridges, cars and their drivers overheat, radiators and tempers boil over. The great rectangle of the Place de la Concorde has space for about 1,000 parked cars and 400 moving ones; yet a daily average of 120,000 cars must struggle through it.

Cars on Rails. Last week's mass meeting at the Palais des Sports was sponsored by the biweekly L'Auto-Journal, whose editors founded the Syndicat National des Automobilistes, and have, since October, received 370,000 applications for membership. The syndicat's immediate goal is to "put an end to the scorn with which public powers treat the fundamental highway and traffic problems." The meeting started 30 minutes late because, as the announcer pointed out, of "slow-moving traffic," and ended tumultuously when the hall was darkened and the audience was suddenly showered with thousands upon thousands of official-looking traffic tickets that fluttered down from the domed ceiling in the glare of the spotlights.

One reason for the government's indifference is that it favors the government owned railway system, which has inaugurated a plan to provide auto-train accommodation for motorists going south or returning. Under the plan the autos are placed on freight cars while their drivers sleep in passenger cars on the same train. When the service was extended to five new cities last fall, a jokester writing in Le Figaro saw it as a step toward the ultimate solution of driving problems in France. By hauling cars everywhere by rail, he pointed out, there would be an end to highway accidents, driver fatigue, and wear and tear on highways. For those who dislike driving in town, the old city streetcar lines could be reactivated to permit the hauling of cars by rail. Best of all, it would also be possible to remove perishable items like tires and batteries, and even motors. "Thus," Le Figaro concluded cheerfully, "the circle of progress would be complete."

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