FRANCE: Brave Old Wheelhorse

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In Algiers, where Third Republic parliamentarians were trying to give some democratic substance to De Gaulle's skeleton administration, Auriol's years of experience in the Chamber were invaluable. He became more than a parliamentary tactician. Long experience and his reflections after the defeat had made the Auriol of Algiers a wise elder statesman, who forced himself to think deeply about the fundamental defects in the parliamentary system he had served.

To the young men of the Resistance he talked the talk they liked to hear. There would be a new France, he told them. Standing in a corridor, surrounded by a little group, he would analyze rigid party structures that had kept young men from the top. The new Fourth Republic, said Auriol, must have new leaders. In fact, the Fourth Republic has turned out to be a continuation of the Third, with the same defects and many of the same leaders, including Auriol.

Auriol was as disgusted as De Gaulle by the rottenness of the "République des Petits Copains" (the Republic of Pals) or government by a Chamber that had itself become a vested political interest far divorced from the people who elected it. In his book, Yesterday—Tomorrow, written during the war, he wrote his own epitaph for the Third Republic. "The old teams," he wrote, "moving slower & slower, went in & out 'making the little tour,' always with a little more skepticism, always with a little more discredit." Of ministerial crises he noted: "At the first hot episode the cement would melt and everything would have to be done over again . . . Sometimes the government was overthrown on the very day it presented itself to the Chamber." Of the presidency that he would later fill, he wrote: "The President faithfully represented and expressed the national will only on the day following a great election, when he confided the task of forming a government to the chief of the victorious party . . . In truth, he regularized political disorder."

"37 Chambers, 6 Presidents." Though Auriol recognized the faults of the Third Republican system, he had neither the inspiring power of leadership nor the right political allies to translate these thoughts into action. Back in Paris after the Liberation, the old leaders forgot the ideals of Algiers and returned to their old ways. There was a difference, however. The Assembly that met in Paris contained a greater proportion of Communists than had ever sat in a French parliament. The Reds were not interested in playing the game of ministerial musical chairs the Third Republic's politicians loved so well. But they were quite content to let the "third parties" exhaust themselves—and France—at the old game.

Much in Auriol's own parliamentary tradition cried out against a strong executive, the apparent alternative to his disorganized "government by parliament." For instance, Auriol, like most of his fellow deputies, resisted any plan to elect the head of the French state by direct vote of its people. They were afraid of what Auriol called the "atavism" of the French people, which might lead them to vote a "strong man" into power, as they had voted for Napoleon I and Napoleon III. The "strong man" they worried about five years ago was Charles de Gaulle.