FRANCE: The Road to a Comeback

Pierre Mendès-France was back in the news, tanned, rested, fit and ready for a fight. He had learned a hard lesson in his fall from power last February. It was not enough to have public favor; he also needed a secure political base in the French Assembly, and he knew that that called for a fight.

Mendès-France's own party, the large (75 Deputies), lumpy, "moderate" Radical Socialist Party often seems less a party than an agglomeration of individualists, whose main bonds are anticlericalism, wine and good eating. The Radicals include able Premier Edgar Faure, who fears a Mendes comeback. They include such other ex-Premiers as slothlike Henri Queuille, the father of immobilisme; Edouard Daladier, the appeaser of Munich; 82-year-old Edouard Herriot, who fought German rearmament tooth and claw. And they include two diehard conservatives, Léon Martinaud-Déplat and René Mayer, who engineered Mendès' downfall. The Radical Socialists come close to being the fulcrum of French politics.

Pierre Mendès-France, planning his comeback, asked for an extraordinary party congress to decide the party's pos ture before the 1956 general elections. Implicit purpose: to oust Léon Martinaud-Déplat as the party's administrative boss. Martinaud-Déplat yielded to the demand but spitefully made the bleakest arrangements possible: he scheduled a daytime congress last week in Paris' dreary, colonnaded Salle Wagram, knowing that a wrestling match was due to begin at 6:30. "If Mendès wants to fight," said Martinaud-Déplat sourly, "let him stay on and fight against the fighters."

Vim & Vin Rouge. The congress itself soon fell to wrestling. Mendès-France's adherents in the gallery — young students and girls with ponytail hairdos, as well as portly elders — were equipped with police whistles. Mendès quickly won his first victory when the executive committee voted, 96 to 87, to replace Martinaud-Déplat by a seven-man administrative committee. Back from lunch came the delegates, full of vim and vin rouge, for the rest of the battle. When Mendès took the rostrum, there was a crashing ovation. A fist fight broke out on one side of the hall.

Mendès sipped water and calmly waited for quiet. The new committee, he said, should reform the party machinery, start up a vigorous propaganda campaign in the provinces, prepare a platform of "five or six clear ideas" for the 1956 elections. "Our party has differences of opinion," he said, "but it wants to go forward, to remain a party of the left. Our duty is to respond to the drive for fresh ideas which has been awakened all over the country." The delegates broke into La Marseillaise.

Livid with rage, his eyes bulging behind their glasses, sweat gleaming on his bald pate. Léon Martinaud-Déplat took the rostrum to answer. "The passion which has been expressed here, the hate on certain faces," he cried, "is plain for all to see." He sneered at the "new left," which. he said, goes from sectarianism to collectivism, with a whiff of Gaullism. Some of his speech could hardly be heard over a chorus of whistles, groans, boos and shouts of "Resign, resign!"