FRANCE: Georges Bidault's Week

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As the dread African Goums marched into the Place de la Concorde, ending the great Resistance Day parade, the unity that the Resistance had brought France seemed to falter. Young hotheads started yelling: "Vive De Gaulle! De Gaulle to power!" A Parisian moblet caught the fever, broke police lines. The flics—recalling fatal rightist riots on the same spot in 1934—laid about blindly with their iron-buttoned capes and arrested a handful of battered demonstrators. Other hotheads besieged Communist headquarters, burned

Marxist books and smashed windows. Next day half a million disciplined Reds tramped past the scene, chanting "Down with the fascist assassins!" and "A 25% wage rise for all workers!"

Frenchmen felt a chill. The outbreak, the first riot since liberation, showed that deep and dangerous passions lurked under the surface of coalition politics.

"Above Party." And the bright legend of Charles de Gaulle, the liberator, was shaken. Two days before, in Normandy, on the second anniversary of his D-day landing, he had said the "perpetually divided" nation needed a strong President "above all parties," and implied that he was willing to take the job.

Leftists promptly blamed the rightist riot on De Gaulle's speech. In the Chamber of Deputies, Jacques Duclos shook his fist, cried: "Let me warn you. Where the rioters started . . . last night . . . Adolf Hitler started over twenty years ago!" Pravda's correspondent fished farther back in history, likened De Gaulle to President-Emperor Louis Napoleon. Leon éBlum, De Gaulle's most lenient critic, shook his head. "In France the step from presidential to personal power is all too short. . . ." Not a single responsible party leader defended Charles de Gaulle's gravest political mistake.

Harassed but unruffled, graceful Georges Bidault commuted with a dancer's step between the Foreign Ministers' treaty talks at the Luxembourg Palace (see INTERNATIONAL) and the Palais-Bourbon, where the French Assembly had made him provisional chief of state. To complicate Bidault's task of Cabinetmaking, the Communists egged on the labor unions to demand inflationary wage increases to meet rising living costs.