France: Calling Charles Back

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After dinner one night last week, Charles de Gaulle donned a blue dressing gown and retired to the study of his stone farmhouse at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, leaving orders that he was not to be disturbed. Perhaps with some foreboding (if he believed all the experts), De Gaulle turned on his TV set and concentrated on an election that might keep him in Colombey the rest of his days. When it became clear that the voting for a new National Assembly had turned into a landslide for Gaullist candidates, France's President could not resist making a jubilant telephone call to Georges Pompidou, the interim Premier whose government was toppled only last month by a rebellious Parliament.

"Ah, these French!" exulted le grand Charles. "I haven't even left—and already they call me back.''

Firmly United. Strictly speaking, De Gaulle had not even threatened to quit this time. But his ministers had repeatedly warned that a defeat for the Gaullist Union for a New Republic (U.N.R.) would result in an "immediate, grave crisis." At the Elysee Palace, De Gaulle's files were packed and ready for removal to Colombey; to friends, he pointedly remarked that he might soon start on Volume IV of his memoirs. After the October constitutional referendum in which, as De Gaulle privately admitted, he had won only a "flabby" victory, many observers predicted that the U.N.R. would lose up to half its 176 Assembly seats in the current elections. When the prestigious Institute of Public Opinion predicted a 30% vote for Gaullist candidates, editors were so skeptical that only one Paris newspaper, the Gaullist Paris-Presse, carried its forecast.

In fact, Gaullist candidates rolled up 31.9% of the popular vote—nearly twice the total they had won in 1958 when De Gaulle returned to power—and established the U.N.R., in Interior Minister Roger Frey's words, as "the first party of France."

The Gaullists got more votes than any other party in modern French history. The final outcome would not be known until this week, since the election is decided in two rounds. But in the first round, in which only those candidates who won a clear majority in their districts were elected, 61 of the 96 winners either belonged to the U.N.R. or were endorsed by the Gaullist Association for the Fifth Republic. Nine of the victors were ministers in Pompidou's government. In runoffs to fill the other 386 seats at week's end, Gaullists gleefully predicted that they would win a majority in the Assembly. In any case, they would attract enough strength from the other parties to ensure a Parliament firmly united behind the policies of Charles de Gaulle.

Magic Slogan. By their votes and by their abstentions (the percentage of stay-at-homes was the largest since 1881), the voters dealt a crushing blow to the "parties of yesteryear," in De Gaulle's scornful phrase; parties that represent no "doctrine" but only a "clientele." The election went far toward resolving the conflict between France's old. divisively individualist parliamentary tradition and the strong presidential system that De Gaulle believes is essential if France is to achieve stability and self-respect.