Foreign News: The Hard Bargainer

All week long, a sour little man in a rumpled blue suit, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, darted among the Homburg-hatted diplomats of the West and flummoxed them. France's Pierre Mendès-France was something new to postwar diplomacy. He made no effort to appear obliging, did not seem to care whether anybody liked him personally or not. He had little to bargain with except the hopes he himself had aroused by pledging his troth to Western European Union in London. Now, with all the invitations issued, the guests on hand, the church bells pealing and the altar in sight, he was using that hope as a lever, threatening to balk unless he got his way on just one little matter.

The Germans arrived in Paris in high spirits. "Since the French did not want us to have an army, we agreed to EDC. Now they don't want us to have EDC, so we will oblige them by agreeing to have an army," cracked one German. "I've come with great hope," said Konrad Adenauer. But Mendès soon let Adenauer know what his little matter was. It was the Saar.

Hope & Cold Flame. To broach the matter, Mendès invited Adenauer out to a small 17th century château near Versailles which French kings had maintained for favorite mistresses. In a small chamber warmed by a fire on the hearth, the two faced each other across a narrow table: Mendès, hooded, saturnine, a man like a cold, dark flame that cuts through difficulties or friendships with impartial efficiency; old Konrad Adenauer, German man of good will, behind whose craggy face still loomed the memory of his nation's blood-ridden record.

"We've got to take all the dossiers out of the drawer," said Mendès. He began that afternoon with hope. He spoke of a Moselle canal to link Lorraine's economy with the Ruhr, of a Rhone canal to open the Mediterranean to Germany, of joint arms plants, of joint German-French companies to develop France's North African territories. The Saar, Mendès indicated, could be just a small item in a new, sweeping Franco-German era of partnership.

At 5:30 the two Premiers took a break to stroll around the pond in the autumn dusk. Then Mendès broached the question on which the week's success (and German sovereignty) depended. The French Assembly would not tolerate any economic isolation of the Saar from France, Mendès said bluntly, or agree to its political union with Germany. It must remain "European-ized," even if there was no longer any European community to which to attach it. Adenauer was reluctant to renounce all claim to the Saar as German territory. Mendès conceded that any agreement reached would be provisional pending a final German peace treaty. But until then, Mendès insisted, the agreement must be "definite." There could be no agitation for return to Germany. The Saar Landtag must pass laws punishing anyone who wrote, spoke or acted against the agreement, making it as sacrosanct as the Swiss policy of neutrality (a Swiss may not agitate against neutrality).