PARIS LETTER
71
obtained &y their peculiar internal organization and the other worldly
nature of their faith. When Thorez laughs, all the Communist deputies
chuckle, when Duclos shouts "Come, come," it swells to a chorus. In
the same way, the MRP bloc breathes in unison with Schumann and
Bidault. Political life in France is now expressed in party congresses and
in the streets; the legislature, for the moment at least, has been reduced
to the formal, ceremonial role of the Japanese Diet.
Meanwhile, the president of the new government is a member of
no party and responsible to ... the Nation. When he feels the call, he
addresses himself to that mystical entity in the vague and lofty language
of which he is a master. His government enjoys an immense majority in
the· Assembly, and yet not a single party is willing to take full and
unconditional responsibility for it. His presence is providential, not in
the ominous sense in which the Right uses the word, but because each
of the three great parties, the "young" and "dynamic" MRP and the
"pure" S.F.I.O., just as much as the cynical Communists, are more inter–
ested, that is, in the coming elections (the Assembly's mandate is for seven
months) than in forming the effective majority for which the country
voted in October. When de Gaulle made his radio appeal to the nation
during the crisis, the Communists grew alarmed and proposed to the
S.F.I.O. a social- communist government in which they promised to take
the responsibility they have managed to shirk since the formation of the
provisional government in Algiers. The Socialists refused. "Such a gov–
ernment," they cried in terror, "would be a government of combat!"
And then, as inconsequential bands of students took their cue and began
to play the r0le o£ the "turbu ent populace," we had the nasty consulta–
tions, decisions, revisions and general concert of face-saving, culminating
in that prize package: the government of national unity, with two war
ministers and no navy, with the newspaper of the minister of National
Economy attacking the minister of Finances, with the minister of state
Thorez subversively calling for the suppression o£ the portfolio of his
colleague, ex-comrade and severest critic, Andre Malraux.
That is why the law nationalizing credit was voted without the
important amendments proposed by the Socialists and Communists–
though the latter together have a clear majority in the Chamber. That
is why Leon Blum, the object in 1936 and 1937 of a bitter, personal
almost pathological hatred on the part o£ the bourgeoisie, has suddenly
become an elper statesman, universally respected ("un homme d'enver–
gure," a right-wing editor said to me the other day, "oui, et je pese mes
mots, un
grand
homme'")
All this ancient history would be farcical, were it not for the people
who are freezing tonight, in the ruins of Le Havre, Rouen and Dun–
kerque.
