A Reprieve, Not a Mandate

Just before last week's final ballot, Socialist Franc,ois Mitterrand offered a wry description of how French voters approach an election. "On Monday you throw artichokes at the prefecture," he said. "On Tuesday it's potatoes. Wednesday you put up roadblocks, and on Thursday you break windows. You tie up downtown Paris on Friday and boo the Minister of Finance. I don't know what you do on Saturday, but on Sunday you vote for the government."

So they did. Despite the polls, the widespread dissatisfaction over inequities in French life and the staleness of President Georges Pompidou's Gaullists after 15 years in power, millions of French voters were still not ready to try the radical alternatives offered by Mitterrand's resurgent Socialists and his Communist allies. When the final results were in, the Gaullists and their coalition partners had lost 90 of the 365 seats that they held in the old National Assembly, but they still held 275 seats (out of 490), and a majority of 29.

Even so, there were no smiles on the faces of the ministers and aides who emerged from the black Citroens that filed through the gates of the Elysee Palace on the day after the election. "There was no triumph in Gaullist circles," TIME'S Chief European Correspondent William Rademaekers reported from Paris. "Instead there was a universal belief, unspoken but very much there, that an old Gaullist era had ended and a new uncertain period in French politics had begun. The election was a reprieve for the Gaullists, not a mandate."

Pompidou, who at 61 is having trouble controlling both his weight and his smoking, did his best to cast the results in a positive light. At a Cabinet meeting three days after the election, he insisted that the voters had shown "confidence in the great political movement born out of Gaullism." In fact, the Gaullists had run a largely negative campaign aimed at the fear many French voters have about the left and "chaos." Even then, they barely edged the left in the popular vote, but gained seats in gerrymandered districts. Said the conservative Le Figaro: "The large parliamentary majority does not accurately translate its real position in the country."

First Foray. If anything, the election results showed that French voters want new faces. Two members of Pompidou's government, Foreign Minister Maurice Schumann, 61, and Justice Minister Rene Pleven, 71, were turned out of once safe districts. Fully 174 of last week's winners are entering the Assembly for the first time; 100 of them are making their first foray into politics. Not one of the new Gaullist Deputies wears the rosette of De Gaulle's Resistance movement.

Since the election, Gaullist officials have been talking in sweeping terms of what Pompidou has called "bold reforms" in social policy. Still, there are no clear indications of what those reforms will be, or who will carry them out. Pompidou is not expected to announce his new government until the first week in April, when the new Assembly convenes. Caretaker Premier Pierre Messmer, 57, the frosty ex-soldier who replaced scandal-wreathed Jacques Chaban-Delmas last year, is a strong candidate for early retirement, even though Pompidou may keep him on for a few months for the sake of appearances.

Veteran Gaullist Olivier Guichard, 52, a baron and longtime Pompidou protege, could be in line for Messmer's job. Schumann's spot at the Quay d'Orsay could go to his smooth-mannered deputy, Andre Bettencourt, 53, who was named Acting Foreign Minister last week when Schumann resigned.

Washington was pleased at the outcome, although it would have preferred a stronger performance by nonleftist center parties led by Publisher Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and Rouen Mayor Jean Lecanuet, who do not share the Gaullists' traditionally prickly attitudes toward the Common Market, NATO and the Atlantic alliance. Though the centrists emerged with a disappointing 31 seats in the Assembly, the Gaullists have been suggesting that they might be offered a role in the new government. In a testy post-election TV appearance, Lecanuet made a bitter reply: "We ask nothing. You have no need of us." As the Gaullists study the election results, however, they might find that French voters do not agree.

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