FRENCH POLITICS
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real problems, and luckily there is a vast amount of potential energy
and talent ready to be applied to what, in the words of one of the best–
informed observers in Paris, is "essentially a functional disorder." The
same man has on occasions irritated both French and foreign disputants
by claiming that France has no real problems. This may be an exaggera–
tion, but it is a good deal nearer the truth than some of the despairing
talk now current. The harshest critics of the present system are precisely
those who contend that France can lift itself by its own bootstraps. It is
true that to do this a more realistic balance must be struck between
productive capacity and international obligations. Here is the point on
which the critics of Mendes-France- both Frenchmen and Americans–
angrily or sorrowfully fastened in the days after his near-successful bid
fOT
power: he was, they said, advocating pacifism or neutralism, and
this despite his firm defense of the Atlantic Pact which automatically
threw the Communist vote against him.
But the man whom many regard as France's leading economic
expert (he was de Gaulle's Finance Minister at the age of 38, before
resigning in protest against the Provisional Government's inadequate
policies and becoming French representative on the International Mon–
etary Fund) made it clear in his challenging "inaugural" on June
3 that in his view the disproportion between means and ends has plagued
France for a century. The country's economic growth has not in modern
times kept pace with the burden of arms it has had to bear since Ger–
many was unified in the last century and became a menace to the rest of
Europe. Two world wars have shaken French self-confidence, destroyed
a great deal of accumulated wealth, disrupted the traditional balance
between town and country, and enforced speedier industrialization in
a climate of savage social conflict. Yet the country remains potentially
the richest in Europe, and its hold on North Africa ideally permits the
construction of a Eurafrican economy,
if
centrifugal tendencies can be
overcome and the sterile Arab League threat beaten off. Finally Western
Europe can only be organized around France, a truth which, to their
credit, even the Germans seem
to
have understood at long last. The
break with past habits will, however, have to be sharp, for France is
dangerously close to losing the race against time. In trying to answer
the question whether the right response is likely to be forthcoming, one
ShOuld look both to current signs of revival and to past experience of
similar challenges being partly or wholly overcome. Every community
builds up its own traditional way of reacting to shocks and defeats; that
of France is on the whole encouraging. French history is strewn with
challenges of the sharpest kind, and on the record it may be claimed
