T B B T A B L E T , March 11*4 , 1980

THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

PRO ECCLESIA DEI, PRO REGE ET PATRIA

VOL. 195, No. 5729

FOUNDED IN 1840

LONDON, MARCH 11th, 1950

SIXPENCE

PUBLISHED AS A NEWSPAPER

FRANCE IN EUROPE The Visit o f the President o f the Fourth Republic

THE FATE OF A KINGDOM Tomorrow’s Vote in Belgium. By John Eppstein THE COLLAPSE OF THE UTOPIAS

Through German E y e s : II. By F. A . Voigt

A LETTER FROM SCOTLAND

By Frank Macmillan

THE MYSTERY OF KEATS

By T. S . Gregory

THE FRENCH T HE people of London, who gave M. Vincent Auriol a tremendous welcome, only underlined the fact that the war has not changed anything in the traditional feelings between the two countries. But the French President comes here at a difficult time for his country, swept by strikes and by social unrest, and it is only natural under such circumstances that the newspaper comments inspired by the State visit should pay much attention to internal developments in France. That, too, is but another proof that the British have become accustomed to look upon the difficulties o f their French allies as upon something which concerns their own country.

ft is surely a paradox that a Communist should sit on the Commission o f Inquiry which has been established to find out how a French military document passed into the hands of the Indochinese Communist rebels. It is now generally believed that the Vietminh received the document by the intermediary of the Communist woman-Deputy Mme Autissier. Yet her Communist colleague, M. Kriegel-Varlimont, is a member of the Commission, and he succeeds in turning his presence in this body to a considerable advantage. It was he who betrayed the secrecy o f the hearings, by giving the full texts of certain documents to his paper VHumanité ; and it was he who developed a technique o f questions by which a number of witnesses were induced to bandy as many names as possible ; it did not matter that people thus named had nothing whatsoever to do with the case. An irresponsible Press did the rest, and the public, willing to believe the worst, soon places them into the category o f chèquards—people who have received money.

The scenes which occurred in the Chamber of Deputies on Friday, March 3rd, will be long remembered. The Communists have always used Parliaments as playgrounds, behaving like unruly schoolboys who are determined to turn the class into a circus. Last week, however, they played the supreme prank : while a vote was being taken, they occupied the rostrum, and M. Herriot, the Speaker, had to suspend the session and to retire. When the session was resumed, they still held their position, and finally the gardes mobiles had to be called to dislodge them from their stronghold. In the afternoon the scene was re-enacted, with the police once more invading the Chamber and dragging the insurgents out. M. Herriot is reported to have sighed : “This is the end of the Parliament . . . the end.” Indeed, who could have ever foretold that one day M. Herriot would call the armed forces into the House, as did Napoleon on the famous 18th Brumaire ? Yet M. Herriot had no other alternative.

In their newspapers the Communists explained that their action was intended to preclude the voting o f the antisabotage law. It is a sign o f the Government’s weakness that they thought it necessary to submit this law to Parliament, when the existing laws quite sufficiently meet the need for more energetic steps against the fomentors of industrial

COMMUNISTS disorders. Thus, for instance, the incitement to sabotage, as it appears daily on the pages o f VHumanite, comes clearly under the provisions o f the anti-Anarchist laws o f 1893 and 1894 : I f the authors o f such incitements have never been arrested, it is not the lack of legal provisions that should be blamed, but the Government’s lack of determination to apply them.

The same weakness on the part of the Government has appeared in their dealing with the wages situation. In most industries where the strikes have already begun, or where they are threatened, the gap between the union wage demands and the management's offers is large, and additional confusion is created by disagreements between the CGT and the other unions. But the strikes started very slowly, and there were many signs that the workers were hoping for a settlement—in fact only the die-hard Communists were eager to strike. The employers, however, as well as the Government, were far too indecisive, and their slowness created a situation which has been rapidly worsening, and which will not be easy to mend. The Predicament of the French Press

Of the many nationalizations achieved in France since the Liberation, the least known is the Nationalization of the Press, achieved at one blow in the days of liberation, when, all newspaper buildings and all printing presses were seized by teams who used these properties to produce new publications, while the problem o f ownership was left to be settled by coming Parliaments. The solution chosen was to confiscate the property of such newspaper businesses which could be found guilty o f unpatriotic conduct under the Occupation, while those found innocent would suffer expropriation (many have been found innocent ; property has, however, not been either restored or paid for). While the old press was thus moved out of the way, the new press arose on its spoils. It was a tripartite press, Communist, Socialist and M.R.P. Before the war there had been four Communist dailies ; after liberation there were fifty-two. In the same manner the Socialists increased the number o f their dailies from four to thirty-four, and the M.R.P. acquired twenty-five beyond the two it had before the war. The Conservative, Independent, Radical, or non-party press was swept out o f existence. Since then, however, more than half the dailies founded at the Liberation have gone out of existence and a large portion of the survivors have moved to Conservative, Liberal or non-party attitudes.

Still the new press has not succeeded in recapturing the whole of the pre-war public. The failure in this respect of the Paris dailies is very conspicuous. Paris dailies printed 5,750,000 copies before the war, of which twelve to fourteen per cent went unsold. In 1949 the new Paris dailies printed only 3,800,000 thousand copies, of which as much as twenty