"Ca Me Degoute"

Next Sunday the weary French voters --most of them, anyway--will go to the polls (for the fourth time in seven months) to elect 619 deputies to the first National Assembly of the Fourth Republic. The prospect: a continuation of the present coalition government, in which the MRP (Catholic progressives) now leads the Communists by a slight margin, with the Socialists third. The plain people were not much agitated; the winter winds were beginning to blow in earnest around their scantily heated houses. They were much more interested in coal than in coalition.

Charles de Gaulle continued last week to attack the new constitution (which puts government power in the Assembly as against the President of the Republic), on the ground that only 9,000,000 out of 26,000,000 eligible voters had approved it (9,000,000 abstained). The morose military hero asked his followers to vote for parties which opposed and would try to change the constitution. These adjurations helped the Radicals (centrists) and the rightists, but this political sector, though expected to gain some strength, was still far too weak to threaten the leftist coalition.

Both the MRP and the Communists were expected to drop a few seats. If the MRP lost more, as many observers foresaw, the Communists might give their big rivals a close race for Assembly leadership. The Socialists, even though they may not lose heavily in this week's election, are a dying party--suffering from too much highminded good will and not enough dynamism. "Their tragedy," said TIME Correspondent Andre Laguerre, "is that everyone in France--or almost--is a socialist with a small s. But on election day everyone votes leftwing Socialist (Communist) or rightwing Socialist (MRP)."

One Communist poster showed a scene of bucolic bliss, bent old shepherds with kindly faces, happy children in smocks, trim gardens, bright cottages with cream walls and strawberry roofs. Overhead hovered menacingly a black, evil-eyed eagle. The bird was labeled "Trusts"; the Red politicos claimed that any resemblance to the American eagle was purely coincidental. Last week, after scrutinizing a row of garish, importunate posters of several parties at the Porte de St. Cloud, a man in a flimsy raincoat spat eloquently, "C,a me degoute" (That burns me up), he said.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.