FRANCE: Brave Old Wheelhorse

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Said the President of France:

"They represent us as a country divided and discouraged, as a country which would not fight for its independence, as a country which has abandoned itself. All this is not true . . . We know invasion, aggression, occupation well enough not to let ourselves be seduced by sophisms or fooled by lies. We would fight and be in the front ranks."

This week Jules Vincent Auriol, 66, first President of the Fourth Republic, would arrive in the U.S. for a ceremonial visit. He hoped to persuade doubtful Americans that France would be a strong and steadfast ally against Communism. "France," says Auriol, "will fight for the victory of common sense." Auriol's career and his present position exemplified some of the main arguments for both an optimistic and a pessimistic view of France's future. On the plus side: his integrity, his Resistance record. On the minus side: his identification with the feeble "third force" that has failed to arouse France against Communism.

French diplomats thought that President Auriol would be just the man for Americans to listen to. A cheerful, bubbling extrovert with a good, plain-spoken word for everybody, Auriol looks and acts like the mayor of a thriving French town (which he was for 15 years) or like a man who would enjoy a musical evening with Harry Truman. (Auriol plays the violin.) On his only previous visit to Washington, as a member of the 1925 Franco-American War Debts Commission, Auriol shocked his superiors by running up and embracing the doorman at the French embassy, who turned out to be an old school chum. "If you please, Vincent, behave yourself," reproved the commission's president, stiff-backed Joseph Caillaux. "Hey, President," laughed Auriol, "what would you do if you met an old pal from Mamers?"

Easygoing Vincent Auriol is the sort of incumbent the French public wants (but has seldom had) in the presidential Elysee Palace, a genial, approachable man who possesses enough native dignity to give his job as chief of state just a wisp of kingly bearing.

"Vote for the Stupidest." Haunted by the fear of both Bonaparte and Bourbon restorations, the Frenchmen who reconstituted the Republic after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 reduced the powers of the President to almost honorary dimensions. Thereafter, the jealous deputies usually selected as President the kind of man who would not try to broaden the scope of his job.

At the election in 1887, Clemenceau summed up this view of the presidency by growling at his colleagues, "Vote for the stupidest." His fellow deputies paid him a backhanded compliment 33 years later, when they decisively voted him down for the same office.*