FRANCE: Brave Old Wheelhorse

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"So That's What He Thinks?" Eight times since he took office, President Auriol has been faced by a cabinet failure and the need to form a new government as quickly as possible. His procedure is always the same. When a confidence debate in the Assembly nears the boiling point, Auriol switches on a loudspeaker in his office to hear how it is going. (By law, he is not allowed to enter the Assembly.) He listens sharply to a speaker, jots down notes on a pad, occasionally snapping out a testy, "Oh, so that's what he thinks, is it?" By the time a red-faced Premier has arrived in the presidential office to make the formal announcement of his downfall, Auriol has already been thinking over the likeliest candidates for his successor—and a few tart remarks about how the Premier might have avoided the crisis.

The shifts in governments are made inevitable by the system of proportional-representation elections, which encourages the existence of four or five fair-sized parties, militates against any of them getting a working majority. Like every President since 1870, Auriol can find a temporary majority in the Assembly to handle a specific issue. What he cannot get is a coalition firm enough to handle a whole set of issues.

"Le Système D." In spite of political instability, France has put its $2 billion worth of ECA aid to good use. Production is at a record level. In January, French mills turned out 830,000 tons of steel, as against a monthly average of 721,000 in 1950, 140,000 in 1945 and 518,000 in 1938. January's coal output of 4,814,000 tons is the highest on record.

But the benefits of increased production can never be fully exploited without a stable government. "Le système D" (from "se débrouiller"—to extricate oneself)—what the individual Frenchman terms his efforts to "muddle through"—has been fatally exemplified by French governments. In the absence of any strong domestic economic policy, wages & prices have run away with themselves. In one month—January 1951—the price of food rose 10%.

Last week a wave of strikes against the rising cost of living threatened to tie up France's transport system. Auriol could not even find a train to take him to his ship. He motored to Le Havre. The feeble government he left behind (headed by Henri Queuille, who has been a minister in 28 cabinets) achieved another patchwork settlement. Unable to promise to halt rising prices, it agreed to higher wages, (which will create still higher prices). The government's own share of the wage increase will be 60 billion francs. That sum is not provided for in the budget, and nobody has any clear idea where it is coming from.