PARIS LETTER
87
to be strangled in August 1954. There is a paradox in this, although
few Frenchmen are aware of it, for P.M.F. is intellectually if not tem–
peramentally well disposed to European integration, and it was only
his grim vendetta against Bidault and the M.R.P. which, by forcing
him to seek Gaullist and "moderate" allies, gave his whole movement
an anti-European cast. Most people have forgotten that in 1936, when
he first rose from parliamentary ranks as one of Leon Blum's junior
ministers, M endes-France published a book happily predicting the
eventual economic and political federation of Europe. A few of today's
Europeans, by the way, notably the extreme right-wing fringe around
Fabre-Luce's weekly,
Rivarol,
were fervent admirers of Hitler and Mus–
solini in those days; and it is rather odd to watch them slip into the
old anti-Semitic leer when they denounce Mendes (always without the
France)
as a reactionary nationalist. All of which proves something,
I'm sure, but the point I'm insidiously getting at is that the ferment
around P.M.F. is a complicated phenomenon, full of hidden gimmicks
and capable of altering the atmosphere considerably in the course of
the next few years. For this is not a merely political ferment.
Throughout most of the country, Mendes-France appears as a
thoroughly
radical
politician in a new style, i.e., he seems to provide a
new rhetoric (inevitably derived from the old revolutionary slogans)
for the familiar provincial conservatism; which is the sort of combina–
tion the great Radicals have always achieved. But in Paris, the move–
ment around P.M.F. has been boiling and swirling with a dozen different
-and specifically Parisian-currents, and the influence of these may
end by generating more social and cultural energy than any non-Com–
munist movement since the war. To describe this confluence would be
to explain how Paris--our glittering village-mingles the milieux of
government, theater, litera ture, Sorbonne, journalism, and business; and
that, alas, would require nothing less than a
Comedie Humaine.
...
But at least I can tell you about
L'Express.
L'Express
began as a weekly journal of opinion, some months be–
fore Mendes-France came to power in 1954. It was organized and
edited by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, youngest member of a dynasty
which has built a fortun e on a solid, conservative financial newspaper
called
L es Echos.
From the very beginning, the new weekly, whose poli–
tical leaders were P.M.F. and Fran<;ois Mitterand, was a source of
scandal, and its success was assured when the Interior Minister of the
Laniel government seized one issue for publishing an allegedly secret
document on Indochina. Shortly after Mendes-France formed his gov–
ernment, the editorial board moved-literally-into the Quai d'Orsay;
