"Only One Thing Counts"

General Charles de Gaulle, symbol of French resistance, stood up last week as the hope of French reconciliation. It was a role that promised to be as difficult, and in a way as important, as any he had yet essayed.

The General sat on the Government bench in the Consultative Assembly. Up for debate came the issue of the purge of collaborationists. Socialist Assemblyman Louis Nogueres shouted an accusation: Minister of State Jules-Jeanneney (President of the last Senate in the Third Republic) had helped the Vichy regime to power in 1940. Was it right that such a man should sit now in Government councils?

Charles de Gaulle rose quickly, angrily. His words cut across a legislative uproar: "With regard to the drama of 1940, there were many differences then between men and groups. I did not go to Vichy then, but many who were there believed they were serving their country in their own ways. It was possible to have different conceptions of serving one's country.

"Today there is only one thing that counts: acts and service to the country."

But men's passions die hard. Two days after the General's plea for tolerance, mobs struck at collaborators. At Alet, in southern France, a crowd harangued by Resistance leaders broke into a jail, seized four men under death sentence, summarily shot them. At Bourges, in central France, another mob lynched a man and a woman' who had been condemned to death, then reprieved by General de Gaulle.

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