The Great Gamble

(See Cover) At No. 5 rue de Solferino, on Paris' Left Bank, there is a shabby old building, not far from the decayed elegance of the boulevard St. Germain and only a stone's throw from the grey stone pile of the National Assembly. Although three or four young bodyguards, who look like cyclists or soccer players, lounge at the entrance, there is nothing outside the building to identify it--no plaque, no flag, no Cross of Lorraine. No. 5 rue de Solferino is the headquarters of Charles de Gaulle's Rassemblement du Peuple Franc,ais, which he claims is not a party but a "movement."

There, six weeks ago, the executive committee of the R.P.F. held the most fateful meeting in its brief history. Most of the twelve men were smoking and the air was a thick blue haze. De Gaulle smokes like a chimney in moments of stress; so do his political theorist, Novelist Andre Malraux (Man's Fate, Man's Hope} , and his chief administrator, swarthy, bespectacled Jacques Soustelle. Charles de Gaulle said, "Messieurs, je vous ecoute" (Gentlemen, I am listening).

The Man Who Was Right. The question: Should the R.P.F., which was not quite six months old, risk its prestige and its future by putting up candidates in the October municipal elections? Ten of the twelve spoke against it as premature. The movement, they said, was not sufficiently organized, candidates for all municipalities could not be found in time, a defeat at the polls would be fatal. Malraux proposed a compromise: an R.P.F. slate in two cities only, Paris and Algiers. Then the eleven lieutenants looked at the tall, slow-moving, impassive man who had galvanized and symbolized France's will to live through her wartime travail. He thanked them, flicked ashes from his blue suit, ended the meeting.

Next day De Gaulle announced his decision: the R.P.F. would put up a fight in all French towns of any size. With some misgivings but without demur his committee accepted the decision. Perhaps De Gaulle, who had been right so many times in the past, would be right again.

He was. Six million voted for the R.P.F. candidates. The Communists, who had been France's most heavily supported party, dropped from 5,500,000 to 4,700,000. Though Foreign Minister Georges Bidault's Popular Republicans lost most heavily, De Gaulle picked up votes from all parties, including at least a quarter-million from the Communists themselves.

The Reds & the Systeme-D. With a lover's passion and a surgeon's skill, Charles de Gaulle listens closely to the heartbeat of France. No doubt many of those who voted for him did so simply because they believe he is always right, as a diagnostician of the present and as a prophet of the future. He seemed to be right about the Communists, who had once pretended to prefer the welfare of France and of French labor above all things. De Gaulle called them "Separatists"; he said that they were agents of a foreign power, that they could have no place in a French government. And it was true that the Communists were now denouncing the Marshall Plan, obviously on orders from the Kremlin. More & more members of the C.G.T. (national labor federation) and their families were becoming disgustedly aware that the Communist leaders were not interested in improving the workers' lot but in using them as tools of Russian foreign policy.

De Gaulle seemed to be right when he called for strengthening the "legal and moral authority" of the state. Inflation and corruption were still unchecked. The people were tired of the Systeme-D and its ubiquitous practitioners. The Systeme-D stands for debrouillardise, an extremely French word which means, roughly, cooking one's own potatoes over any handy fire, even if it is a neighbor's burning house. The French people are not docile, and they do not consent to herding and regimentation unless there is good reason for it. But they love something called I'ordre, which to them means freedom and individualism within healthy limits laid down and enforced by law. As individualists, the French participate in the black market rather than succumb to a maze of strangling regulations; as lovers of I'ordre, however, they are ashamed of the black market.

They may not want a "strong" government, but they want one stronger than the Reds or the racketeers.

The Stakes. In screaming headlines and derisive cartoons the Communists accused De Gaulle of planning a dictatorship, of stooging for the U.S. (see cut). Socialist Premier Paul Ramadier has made, the milder charge that De Gaulle will upset France's traditional procedures and institutions. Socialist Elder Statesman Leon Blum declares him "a seeker after personal power."

Since the end of Napoleon III in 1870, autocracy has had an ugly sound in France, and the Vichy regime under the Germans made it uglier. Millions of French who voted for De Gaulle realized that they were taking a great gamble, but they thought that they must gamble. They staked a possible loss of freedom and a possible civil war against the near-certainty of bankruptcy, prostration and chaos. They were gambling on Charles de Gaulle's integrity. He has professed to be a democrat, and the evidence indicates that he would like to be one--unless "events" force him to be something else. He has talked a great deal lately about the inexorable pressure of "events."

Why They Voted. Last week TIME Correspondent Andre Laguerre went to an R.P.F. meeting on the Left Bank. He cabled:

"Along the walls four long red, white and blue banners were stretched. One said simply, 'Dissolution!' (an invitation to the National Assembly). The second said, 'Union around a strong state!' The third, 'Bar the way to the Separatists!' The fourth, 'De Gaulle to power!' Three speakers took the platform, each for about 20 minutes. The crowd did little more than applaud politely, but there was no mistaking their rapt attention. They seemed like people who were half won over but still wanted to be convinced that this De Gaulle business was really serious.

"Afterward I walked a block with Henri Millet, who operates an electric saw in a children's toy plant. He said:

" 'I don't think De Gaulle wants to be a dictator--surely he could have seized power long ago if he had wanted--but I am not sure about the men who support him. It seems to me that the old Petain-ists, who loved themselves more than their country, are backing him too strongly, and they are no good for the Republic. But when De Gaulle speaks about France I feel in my heart--my old heart of a soldier of Verdun--that he is sincere. He is a real Frenchman, taking orders from no one.' "

TIME Correspondent Henry Tanner had his hair cut in the Hotel Crillon. Said his barber, 44-year-old Rene Gustave Duval: "I voted for De Gaulle because I was tired. Que voulez-vous?--we have had four years of occupation, and three years of disillusion. And we don't forgive those who let the Germans in, nor those who made promises and didn't keep them. De Gaulle always keeps his promises."

TIME Correspondent Fred Klein found two elderly ladies gathering firewood in the Vincennes forest. One was a retired schoolteacher, the other the widow of a French Army colonel. On their meager pensions they could not buy coal. They both voted for De Gaulle. They said: "De Gaulle is an honest man. He saved us once; he will save us again."

The Alternatives. After the municipal elections, there was a new, uncertain, rather livid light over France. Frenchmen wondered whether it was the dawn of a new, stronger, better and more comfortable nation--or whether it was the zero hour for battle.

French Communists Maurice Thorez and Laurent Casanova had flown to Moscow, ostensibly to help celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Revolution (see Russia), more probably to thrash out the differences between them and to get a decision from the Soviet policymakers on the French problem.

Thorez is the conciliator. At a Central Committee meeting in Paris, before taking off for Moscow, he said: "France is a bourgeois country, and unless and until we control the police and the Army, only bourgeois methods will succeed here." So far, Comrade Thorez' bourgeois methods --that is, attempting to win power at the ballot box--have failed. And his chances are slimmer now than they were six months ago when De Gaulle emerged from retirement to mobilize the R.P.F.

Casanova is the old-style revolutionary, hungry for action. Called I'Oeil de Mos-cou (Moscow's eye), he has had a fast rise, now commands his party's "paramilitary forces"--which means potential storm troops which cannot be so labeled just yet, and which may well have stores of arms sequestered after the liberation. If Casanova comes back with orders to make trouble, De Gaulle may come to power very soon; an alarmed Assembly might, as he has urged, dissolve itself by a two-thirds vote (which would require the assent of almost every non-Communist member) and order new national elections. On the other hand, Moscow, afraid of a fearless and forthright De Gaulle, may decide to try appeasement in the hope that failure of the Marshall Plan will improve Communist chances. In that case, De Gaulle will be content to wait until next May, when new national elections are possible under the present Constitution. Inflation is still soaring, the winter will be hard, and the swing to De Gaulle seems bound to continue.

Thus, although his return to power is almost inevitable, its timing depends largely on the Communists. It is their move, and the choice facing them is a tough one. If they make trouble, De Gaulle can use a strong arm (he might, for example, suppress the party and jail its leaders) with the backing of all non-Communist France. If they lie low, his path to power will be smooth, however great the difficulties that would face him once he takes office.

The Program. Some of De Gaulle's ideas for France's future have been freely aired. He deprecates power without responsibility: the power of parties in the Assembly to throw out a Premier without taking the onus of what the new Premier does. He wants the Constitution changed to prevent that. He wants both labor and capital to be free from political interference, and he believes that a strong government, by balancing the budget, can promote private enterprise and lift state controls which nearly all sectors of French opinion abominate as dirigisme. He has some foggy notions about vertical groupings of industry in which workers will hold stock.

As part of the budget-balancing effort, he would shoo 350,000 civil servants out of France's teeming bureaucracy (of about 2,000,000), absorb them in overseas territories or in the greater industrial capacity which could result from renewed confidence in the franc. Since he believes in small, highly trained armies of professional soldiers, he also hopes to reduce the military budget.

Economics has always bored him, but he has recently put his brilliant political, military and historical mind to economic study. He has shown a willingness to take the advice of experts, has plumped for the Monnet Plan, devised by Jean Monnet, a cognac magnate who has had vast but unpublicized experience in international economics, and who counseled the De Gaulle provisional Government after liberation. The possibilities of new production methods were explored in innumerable conferences between the Monnet planners and the factory staffs. The money outlay represents one-fourth of the national income, but De Gaulle may persuade the thrifty French to invest some of it, and he believes he can get the rest in a loan from abroad, which means the U.S.

The Choice. The U.S. State Department last week was contemplating De Gaulle's rise with rather mixed feelings. Washington, which committed some errors in judgment about the tall Frenchman during the war, hopes that resentment will not make him any more stubborn and difficult than he was then. The Washington diplomats would prefer a continuation of Socialist Ramadier's coalition Government, but they realize that it is too weak to last. If the choice is between De Gaulle and the Communists, the U.S. choice is, of course, De Gaulle.

The Lieutenants. The No. 2 man in the R.P.F., its titular Secretary General, is Jacques Soustelle, 35, a heavy, slow-moving character who came to De Gaulle from the far left. He is an ex-professor (a Sorbonne-trained ethnologist), and joined a group called the "Vigilance Committee of anti-Fascist Intellectuals." In 1940 he joined the Free French movement in London, became its Minister of Information. An able organizer, he is a probable future Minister of the Interior (police).

The most interesting of De Gaulle's lieutenants, the one with the strongest intellectual and emotional influence on him, is Andre Malraux, director of Propaganda and Information. A tough man in European letters (where the catch-as-catch-can rules make U.S. champions look feeble), Malraux also came from the far left. He has an extremist's temperament but too much intelligence to be taken in by extremist ideology. In the Chinese Nationalist Revolution of 1927, he fought with the Communists, and in the Spanish Civil War with the Loyalists. His flame burns for freedom and the human values of the individual man. He says that it is not he who has changed, but the world. He broke finally with Communism at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939.

In the French Army when the Germans invaded France, Malraux was captured, but escaped and, under the Resistance name of Colonel Berger, organized a Maquis section in the provinces east of Bordeaux. It was hit-&-run guerrilla warfare, dynamiting stores, ambushing convoys. In 1945 he advanced with the French Army into Germany, and there first met Charles de Gaulle, whom he had long admired. The two men took to each other at once.

Malraux's press attache is Diomede Catroux, 31, nephew of General Georges Catroux, who was a notable Free French leader in Africa and the Near East and is now France's Ambassador to Moscow. Young Diomede has the manner of a languid intellectual, but he is a graduate of St.-Cyr (France's West Point) and had a fine war record as an infantry captain. Young Catroux, however, still has much to learn about newspapermen.

The Social and Professional Action Department is headed by a volatile, ambitious young man named Jacques Baumel. A big figure in the underground operating around Lyon, he became a member of the first Constituent Assembly after liberation. His R.P.F. job is national indoctrination "in depth, not on the surface." He has organized R.P.F. groups by classes and professions--for women, for veterans, for doctors, writers, artists, civil servants. It is his man-sized job to get French labor to trust De Gaulle.

The Inner Life. Charles Andre Joseph Marie de Gaulle has traveled a long way since he was "born in Lille, 57 years ago, the son of a philosophy professor. He early acquired a love of reading and learning, and at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, where he has a country retreat 125 miles southeast of Paris, reading is still his main diversion. He reads and rereads the French classics, such writers as Montaigne, Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo.

His life at Colombey is the simple one of a dedicated, single-minded man. He gets up at 8, breakfasts on cafe au lait, brown bread, a little butter and jam, then tackles his mail and newspapers. The food served at lunch is simple and the wine is an inexpensive vin rose served from a carafe, but the meal is a leisurely one, lasting one and a half or two hours, and topped off by brandy, cigars and conversation. Malraux or Soustelle is often there, and nearly every top Government man from Ramadier down has been to Colombey at least once in the last eight months. Mme. de Gaulle is the ideal wife for a dedicated man: devoted and self-effacing. (His three grown children live elsewhere.) When the General is engrossed with one visitor, she chats with the others.

On election night in October, De Gaulle was in the tower which he uses for a study, playing solitaire. De Gaulle snapped the radio on occasionally for early election returns, but went to bed at 2 o'clock with no clear idea of the results and left his telephone receiver off the hook. Next morning he got congratulatory calls from people who had been trying to get in touch with him all night.

Since the flight from Bordeaux to England on June 18, 1940 which made him famous, he has been an enigma to many. Once, however, he painted a revealing self-portrait : a passage in his remarkable, prophetic book, The Army of the Future,* published by Colonel de Gaulle in 1934. He wrote: "The depth, the singularity, the self-sufficiency of a man made for great deeds is not popular except at critical times. Although when in contact with him one is conscious of a superiority which compels respect, he is seldom liked. Moreover, his faculties, shaped for heroic feats, despise the pliability, the intrigues and the parade through which most brilliant careers are achieved in peacetime. And so he would be condemned to emasculation or corruption, if he lacked the grim impulse of ambition to spur him on. It is not, to be sure, that the passion for rank and honors, which is only careerism, possess him, but it is beyond doubt the hope of playing a great role in great events!"

"Ah, Great People." Is that exalted attitude a preface to dictatorial tenden cies? Perhaps; but De Gaulle understands the danger of dictatorship well. He has said: "What is dictatorship? Doubtless its first steps may seem attractive. Amid the enthusiasm of some and the resignation of others, amid the rigor of the order which it imposes and with the help of spectacular staging and one-way propaganda, dictatorship can at first assume a dynamic aspect which contrasts agreeably with the anarchy which preceded it. But it is the fate of dictatorship to exaggerate. . . . The nation becomes a machine which the master progressively and frantically accelerates. ... In the end the spring breaks and the grandiose edifice crumbles in sorrow and blood."

Undeniably, De Gaulle is a fanatic. His obsession is love of his country. In De Gaulle this love is passionate, almost carnal, always fiercely proud and tenderly compassionate. Listen to De Gaulle on le peuple Franc,ais:

"Poor people who from century to century bear the burden of sorrow. Old people whose vices experience does not eliminate, but who always find new stores of hope. Strong people who, if they grow dazed through caressing their dreams, are still invincible when they have undertaken to reject their chimeras. Ah, great people, created for example, for enterprise, for combat, always in the van of history whether they be tyrants, victims or champions, and whose genius is in turn negligent and terrible."

A man who could write that might be a fool or a genius, a prophet or a poet. He could not be an intriguer. A dictator? Only if blinding self-love and disregard of what the people really are have ceased to be elements in a dictator's makeup. If Frenchmen take a chance on De Gaulle it will be because they understand that he and they love the same France--and know it to be untamable.

* In this book De Gaulle accurately predicted the nature of what later came to be called Blitz krieg, airplanes. with The massed French tank General formations Staff shrugged supported off by his ideas as a collection of "witticisms." It was not De Gaulle's fault that the Germans made far better use of his ideas than the French did.

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