Shedding the Shell

"If your grandfather is only 75, turn over your affairs to him for seven years."

This harsh and sarcastic message from France's Socialists appeared last week on auto windshields across the nation, and nobody doubted for a minute who was the target. It was that well-known septuagenarian Charles de Gaulle, who faced an increasingly critical electorate for a second term as President of France. The satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine portrayed the general alongside the outmoded French "75" cannon of World War I.

In fact, it was open season on France's haughty ruler, so delicious a spectacle that it was fashionable in Paris to devise social engagements to include the televised political speeches of the evening. Charged Catholic Centrist Candidate Jean Lecanuet in one of his poised and Kennedyesque talks: "France is last among European nations in production, growth, construction of housing and salaries, leading Europe only in inflation and taxes." Leftist Candidate null Mitterrand aimed his best shot of the week at the force de frappe--"a waste of money that would be better spent on schools." Rightist Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour denounced Gaullist parsimony at home while French francs are flowing into foreign aid. "We need better telephone service to Lyon," said Tixier, and "better roads in Brittany."

A Blow from Business. Most of all, the candidates hammered at De Gaulle's obstruction of European unity and his intransigence on the Common Market, the wellspring of the Continent's prosperity. Said Moderate Lecanuet, whose campaign star is rising fastest: "French initiatives have almost destroyed the Common Market. To ad vance, we must organize our Continent to achieve this larger dimension. Nothing is more important for the future of France."

That was the shrewdest blow of them all and the one to which Charles de Gaulle, the master tactician, reacted the fastest. French farmers and business men, someone may have told him, consider that his crockery smashing on economic cooperation is hurting their pocketbooks. Shedding his shell of ice, the general hobnobbed for an hour in Paris with Britain's Tory Leader Ted Heath, discussed possible British admission to the Common Market, which De Gaulle himself prevented in 1963. Then he met with his Cabinet and had the word put out that "a certain number of obstacles . . . are diminishing."

Cryptic as that utterance was (and it committed France to nothing), it was a well-timed political gesture. Predictably, it sent a glow across both the country and the Continent. Behind the maneuver lay an uncomfortable fact: with the Dec. 5 voting just around the corner, De Gaulle's once commanding lead in France-Soir's respected Public Opinion Institute poll had shrunk by 4% (from 61% to 57%). Other polls showed that France's 29% "undecided" vote was breaking in favor of every candidate but the general.

A Lift from Science. All the attacks and polls also nudged the hitherto disdainful De Gaulle into more campaigning. At midweek he reversed an earlier decision to fill all but eight minutes of his allotted two hours of television cam paign time with classical music and documentary films. This week le grand Charles himself will take to the tube twice. Even the scientists gave his belated campaign an extra lift last week as the first French satellite--a 92-lb. candy-striped "bonbon called A-l--soared into victorious if not quite perfect orbit from the Algerian Sahara.

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