FRANCE: Awaiting the Verdict

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Precisely at 3 o'clock one afternoon last week, unseen hands pulled aside a pair of raspberry silk curtains in the Elysee Palace's jampacked Salle des Fêtes and, as if propelled by clockwork, a looming, cigar-shaped figure appeared in the royal box overlooking the room. For the fourth time in the two years since he took power in France, Charles de Gaulle had summoned the press to hear him expound his policies and plans.

De Gaulle's prose seemed as ringing as ever as he began with a proclamation of national self-confidence: "Agitation, spreading throughout the world and tremulously reflected by all the media of information, has become the characteristic of our age. But however resounding these commotions may be, obviously they could not succeed in upsetting or intimidating France. We are today solid enough, balanced enough, sure enough of ourselves not to be impressed either by logomachy* or gesticulations ... On each of the great questions we have set our course and we will keep on firmly in that direction." But as the 800 newsmen present began to press him for specific statements on the great questions, De Gaulle's Olympian certitude deserted him. For the firsf time since he took power, his voice showed signs of an old man's hoarseness. He was by turns belligerent, defiant, sarcastic, and sometimes even seemed to be almost pleading.

When the Knife Speaks . . . Obviously most embarrassing to De Gaulle was the unstanched hemorrhage of the Algerian war, which he clearly feared would produce a jolting diplomatic defeat for France in the U.N. General Assembly session beginning next week. In the last General Assembly a resolution condemning French policy in Algeria failed by only one vote of winning the necessary two-thirds majority. This year, with the U.N. to be enlarged by 15 new African members, the chances that a similar resolution will pass are vastly increased.

Anticipating defeat, De Gaulle served notice that France would pay no heed whatever to any U.N. vote on Algeria, "because if it is true that one can find in this organization a majority made up of totalitarian states, states without cohesion, states without information or for whom international life is made up of invective ad infinitum, France does not recognize for such an eventual majority any sort of qualification to say what is right and what is the law."

With unconcealed bitterness De Gaulle snapped: "It has sometimes been said that it is De Gaulle who can solve the Algerian problem and if he does not do so, no one will. Then may I be allowed to do it? I ask nothing more." Angrily blaming the rebel F.L.N. for the breakdown of last June's abortive truce negotiations, he rasped: "So long as the knife speaks, we cannot talk policy."