FRANCE: In Fear & Hatred

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A scarred, crippled man wearing not one but two hearing aids hobbled painfully to the rostrum with the help of a pair of canes. A tail-coated usher darted forward to help hoist him to the speaker's platform. There he grasped a table for support and then gulped a handful of pills. A hush fell over France's Chamber of Deputies as Georges Heuillard, deputy from the Seine-Inférieure, began to speak. His misshapen body and his scarred, waxen face were his honorable credentials.

"For two years," said Deputy Heuillard, "I was in a concentration camp. I saw die all my comrades in the Resistance network. I saw die in Flossenburg almost the entire shipment of prisoners who had come from Buchenwald ... We had sworn an oath among us that the eventual survivors would never permit Germany to recreate her military strength. Today, despite all these memories, despite all these material and moral ruins still yawning before us, we are about to recreate the German army ... Is our public opinion ready to accept the consequences? Ask those who were deported or the families of those who did not return . . . poor innocents! Ask the young men who helped to beat down military Germany, the eternal Germany, the Germany of all time!"

"I Am Going to Die." Choked with emotion and weak from standing, Heuillard swallowed more pills and looked sadly at Foreign Minister Robert Schuman.

"I am going to die, Monsieur le Ministre" he cried. "I am condemned. My election found me in a surgical clinic ... I am dying because of the German army. I would not want my sons or my grandsons to be enlisted alongside the tyrants and executioners of their father ... I have fulfilled my mission. I had promised my comrades to do it. I am happy that destiny today should have enabled me to replace the force which I lack with the energy to come and cry to you: Beware of Germany! Beware of Germany!"

In an oppressive silence, two ushers helped Georges Heuillard down the steps from the rostrum. Suddenly, from the Gaullists on the far right of the bright red horseshoe of seats to the Communists on the far left, the diverse and divided politicians of France leapt to their feet and exploded into applause. Ex-Defense Minister Jules Moch, whose hatred of the Germans is twofold (he is Jewish, and lost his son in the Resistance), warmly embraced Heuillard. Robert Schuman, whose efforts to sell German rearmament to his countrymen were the target of Heuillard's passionate attack, advanced toward him, tears -in his eyes, to shake the deputy's hand.

Caught in the Torrent. The crippled deputy was all but unknown in the National Assembly; his party was one of the motley collection of center groups which produce the passing parade of French postwar governments. But his choked, emotional voice was, that day last week, the authentic voice of France. Divided on almost everything else, Frenchmen united in fear and hatred of Germany.