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PARTISAN REVIEW
their capital abroad (some 10 percent of all potential French investment
money is believed to be in the United States and Switzerland), or at
least to invest it in North Africa, where profits are higher. It is when
one comes to the proposed remedies that this pragmatic assessment of
facts gives way to sharply diverging estimates of what is or is not
pos–
sible. For the real decision that will have to be made over the next
few years involves nothing less than a choice between genuine planning
and genuine
laisser-faire,
with the issue at stake not the satisfaction of
this or that sectional or class interest but the continued existence of
France as a great nation and a viable economic unit. Socialism, that is
to say, is going to present itself as an alternative to the present experi–
ment in liberal economics in such a way that the nation as a whole will
have to choose between different ways of insuring its survival in the
modern world. That, of course, is what the Communists are banking
on, and but for their allegiance to the interests of a foreign power they
would have a fairly good chance of carrying a majority along with them
in another "Popular Front" experiment; for on the issue of national
survival and social rejuvenation a great many Frenchmen who nonnally
have no faith in Communist slogans might nonetheless be tempted to
shut their eyes and take the plunge. Fortunately this danger has dimin–
ished with the increasing unattractiveness of the Soviet Union; but the
resulting void is not as yet adequately filled by the sectarian and unco–
ordinated attempts of Socialists, Syndicalists, Keynesian New Dealers,
Catholic democrats, and former Gaullists, to invent a rival solution that
will capture the imagination of Frenclunen. Hence the
thrill
which ran
through the country at the first sign that a majority comprising all these
reforming elements might come together under the New Deal banner
tentatively raised by Mendes-France last June.
The attempt turned out to be premature (as its chief protagonist
is said to have predicted in private), but it marked a turning point.
If
and when the present experiment in making French capitalism genuinely
competitive and efficient has failed-and no one on the Left doubts
that it will fail-the pendulum must swing back toward planning, though
dirigisme
still suggests unpleasant memories of postwar rationing, short–
ages and maladministration. In the end French nationalism-for so long
wedded to liberal middle-class concepts in economics-cannot tolerate
the spectacle of France becoming "a second Spain," as
J.
Servan–
Schreiber, perhaps the ablest propagandist of the French "New Deal,"
has
recently put it in a much discussed article. The revolt against this pros–
pect was at the core of Gaullism and continues to inspire those of its ad–
herents who are now finding their way to the Left, as well as many who
