FRANCE: Anarchy or Dictatorship

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Into the seething French political situation, General Charles de Gaulle dropped a sizzling torpedo last week:

"The present draft of the constitution [TIME, Sept. 23] would establish an omnipotent assembly and government . . . such a regime would risk leading us finally to anarchy or dictatorship. ... I believe that the direction followed up to now . . . is not the right direction. All my wishes go, then, to those who present themselves as candidates pledged to follow another direction."

In effect, he had asked Frenchmen to reject the coalition constitution when they vote on it next month. In effect, he had said: this assembly has failed, elect another. He had also openly repudiated the majority M.R.P., the party which had backed him until his resignation from the presidency last January. The beautiful marriage of De Gaulle and the M.R.P. seemed to have gone permanently on the rocks. But he coyly refrained from betrothing himself publicly to the growing Gaullist Union, headed by René Capitant, which had announced that it would fight the constitution, put up candidates in the next elections.

Direction committees of France's three major parties scurried into conference. Burly Communist Leader Jacques Duclos made a frantic appeal to reluctant Socialists for left-wing unity. Leaders of the M.R.P., which stood to lose the most members to the new Gaullist party, hastened to make further changes in the constitution to appease waverers. Then the Assembly adopted the draft constitution on its first reading. Now it was up to the people.

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Not all French political marriages were breaking up. At the town hall of Asnières, a Paris suburb, Léopold Senghor, deputy from French West Africa, and Mlle. Ginette Eboué solemnized another kind of Gaullist Union (see cut). Mlle. Eboué is the daughter of the first African to espouse General de Gaulle's cause in the Lake Chad region in 1940.