FRANCE: Cabinet of Premiers

(5 of 5)

Even so Frenchmen might not have loaded their pistols and marched to the barricades but for a few facts unimportant in themselves but of great psychological significance. Since October France has had two frightful train wrecks, one major airplane disaster, all with appalling loss of life. All these were blamed on Government operation. Also it has been the coldest, most uncomfortable winter since 1923. Paris has the same latitude as Newfoundland and even in warm winters little sunlight reaches its streets from November to April. With the Seine frozen, the wind bitter, taxes and prices high and the chauffage central out of commission, nerves have been raw.

Francism? When a people grow disgusted with their Parliament, Fascism is the most obvious alternative. Correspondents in Paris last week promptly discovered an organization of French Fascists who wear funny shirts and black berets, issue mouth-filling pronunciamentos, and in a play on words like to call themselves Les Francists. A form of Fascism may come to France, but the odds are heavily against the Francists having much to do with it. What the average Frenchman wants is a Parliamentary government that will work efficiently and at the same time preserve his individual liberty. Frightened at the Fascism latent in the Doumergue emergency Government, all France registered unmistakable protest in a nationwide one-day general strike.

Except for the Communists, there was little bloodshed. Emergency squads kept power and light plants going. Army and Navy engineers moved into telephone and telegraph offices. Excited correspondents calling New York were liable to get Prague or Buenos Aires but it worked moderately well. The railroads continued to run. But beyond that the tie-up was almost absolute. High spot of the day was a mass demonstration of 25,000 Socialists and Communists in the Cours de Vincennes, where a few daring youngsters climbed the statue of the Republic and affixed a red flag. Then the crowd marched slowly in to Paris shouting together "Unity, Unity, Unity, Down with Fascism!" Stalking along in the van, wrapped in a towel-like toga, his big bare blue feet clad in sandals, pounding the cobbles, was Raymond Duncan, erratic brother of the late Isadora Duncan. Parisians cheered him as he passed. Vegetarian, dress reformer and Utopian, Raymond Duncan has been completely out of the news since that day in 1930 when he collected ten tin buckets of sea water at Manhattan's Battery, made salt from it to honor Mahatma Gandhi.