162
PARTISAN REVIEW
he has been the official civil chief, has become President. Nobody had
any longing for his return, but he represented the last chance of the
Third Force and was voted in. Everything is now as it was before ex–
cept for the occupants of some ministerial seats. Necessity and hair–
splitting calculations continue to rule. The budget has a deficit of some
two billion dollars, and the French are getting ready for new taxes.
On November 25 there was, as you know, a half-successful general
strike whose main interest consisted in the fact that it had not been
launched by the Stalinists but by their bitter enemies, Force Ouvriere.
The issue of the strike was a government-approved 2300 franc ($9)
bonus for those who earn less than 15,000 francs ($43) a month, the
price of a mediocre winter coat. The government wanted the bonus to
be just a little present given once and for all while a new wage policy
was being studied by The Experts. Force Ouvriere wanted the bonus to
be extended to everybody and to be paid monthly until an agreement was
reached on the new labor code. As far as the ordinary citizen knows,
things are now as they were before the strike. But Force Ouvriere had
to show that it was as capable of launching a strike as the Stalinists
(who, by the way, are very scared of strikes at the moment.)
In the meantime, the election of a new factory committee at Citroen
in Paris has given a hint of the growing apathy among the working
class. Of a mass of about 16,000 workers only 8,700 participated in
the voting. Which provoked a labor official to comment that the biggest
union now seems to be the union of non-unionized workers.
The Bidault Government has found itself confronted with the
touchiest of all foreign issues and the only one to which the French peo–
ple at large are really sensitive, namely, the German question. Now it
is obvious that if one conducted a referendum among the French peo–
ple on the question: "Should Germany be rearmed?" the overwhelming,
if not unanimous, answer would be a resounding "No." On the other
hand, if one put the question in a form more consistent with present
reality and asked: "In case of war who should get killed on the Elbe
-the French or the Germans?" the answer, not less overwhelmingly,
would be: "The Germans." Responsible people like Fran<;ois-Poncet,
the French High Commissioner for Germany, generals like Koenig, con–
servative newspapers like
L e M onde
are practically reconciled to the
unavoidable, and tend to state the question of German rearmament in
the second form. The government, however, seems unable to afford
such directness. All its pronouncements on the subj ect are based on the
assumption that the only question that matters to the French people
is the second one, that since answering it in the affirmative would un-
