From Glory to Gloomy: That Is France

The French always seem so proud, confident and subtle that it is a shock to see a sudden crack across their facade. There is a large crack these days--the Greenpeace affair, a bungled and foolish adventure by French intelligence agents.

The adventure and its aftermath probably reflect some of the deeper problems of French society today. They deserve as much scrutiny as the affair itself.

The French Establishment has closed ranks over the Greenpeace affair to protect the national honor. Bernard Tricot, chief of staff of the late President Charles de Gaulle, wrote the report that cited the flimsiest of evidence to clear the Socialist government and five French intelligence agents accused by New Zealand authorities of blowing up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbor on July 10. Tricot did acknowledge that the agents had been sent to spy on Greenpeace and its planned protest against French nuclear testing in the Pacific. But someone else, according to Tricot, blew up the ship.

Despite widespread skepticism of the report, the most important conservative opposition leaders refuse to make political capital out of the Socialist embarrassment. Former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, leader of the center-right, justified his silence with a patriotic affirmation. “Whether it be wrong or whether it be right,” he said, “it is my country.”

Giscard’s choice of a slogan should have raised a few eyebrows. He was obviously echoing the famous toast made in 1816 by Stephen Decatur in Norfolk, Va. “Our Country,” Decatur said. “In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong.”

When Decatur made his toast, however, the United States was an untried nation, loading itself with sham self-confidence to make up for the fact that Europe looked on it as second-rate.

Giscard, on the other hand, was speaking as former president of a country that regards itself as guardian of one of mankind’s most advanced cultures, as the world’s third- or fourth-largest military power, as the prime mover of a revived and powerful Europe.

There is little doubt that the French these days are not as proud and confident as they seem. They have always ordered the world around them with the logic set down by their 17th-Century philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes. But, as the newspaper Le Monde put it in a recent comment on the Greenpeace affair, “The political-police soap opera of the summer resolutely refuses to lend itself to Cartesian analysis.”

The Greenpeace affair, in fact, is only one of several issues that have created a mood of pessimism and confusion in France.

In a recent survey, the French Research Center for the Study of the Way of Life reported that 65% of the French believe their standard of living is getting worse while only 17% think it is improving. In 1978, when the research center first conducted such polls, the results were the opposite.

This current French pessimism is largely because of the economy. After 2 1/2 years of the government’s tough economic policies, France is still in economic difficulty, with few signs of respite.

Unemployment continues to mount--2.3 million French, 10% of the work force, are looking for jobs. Only limited growth is expected this year and next.

French politics create as much confusion and frustration as French economics. There is little doubt about the unpopularity of those running the country--President Francois Mitterrand and his Socialist Party. Many rightists and centrists insist that the Socialists wrecked the economy. Many leftists feel cheated because, in power, the Socialists have behaved much like the rightists--the Greenpeace affair is a good example.

As a result, analysts are sure that the Socialists will lose control of the French National Assembly to the conservative parties in parliamentary elections next March. But the analysts are sure of very little else.

For the deputies will be elected by a new and complex system of proportional representation--a party will win a percentage of seats more or less in proportion to its percentage of national votes. A recent poll by Le Point magazine found that 60% of the electorate intends to vote for the conservative parties of the opposition. But that still did not make clear who would run the National Assembly.

Much depends on whether the two conservative parties--the right-wing Gaullist party of former Premier Jacques Chirac and Giscard d’Estaing’s center-right party--merge into a single party before the elections. If they do, according to the poll, they will win an overwhelming majority of 353 seats in the 555-seat National Assembly. But if they do not, Le Point said, the Gaullists could end up with 193 seats, the Socialists with 153 seats, and Giscard d’Estaing’s party with 132 . The Socialists would then be in a position to strike a deal with Giscard to share control of the assembly.

On top of this, proportional representation is sure to bring Jean-Marie Le Pen and his extreme right, anti-immigrant National Front, with all its unsettling rhetoric, into the National Assembly. Le Point predicted as many as 19 seats for Le Pen and his supporters.

There is yet another uncertainty about the March elections. The next presidential election is scheduled for 1988. France could thus have two years with a conservative National Assembly and a Socialist president. That kind of divided power, while common in the United States, has not happened before under the constitution of the Fifth Republic set up by De Gaulle in 1958.

As a result, there is continual debate in France on whether such “cohabitation” is possible. Former Premier Raymond Barre, a potential conservative candidate for president, has called on Mitterrand to resign if his Socialist Party is defeated soundly in March. Barre insists that it would be undemocratic for Mitterrand to remain in office in the face of such voter disapproval. Mitterrand, on the other hand, has announced that he intends to finish his term, no matter what happens.

For Mitterrand, the polls have been frustrating. For two years, they have shown that more than half the French are dissatisfied with him as president. At times, his handling of foreign policy has improved his standing. But foreign policy gaffes in the past year--the Greenpeace affair is only the most recent--have made it impossible for him to use his image as a world statesman to turn the polls around.

The polls, however, do not show much voter excitement about anyone else. Chirac and Giscard d’Estaing do rather poorly. In fact, of the politicians considered potential 1988 presidential candidates, the two most popular are Barre and Michel Rocard, a Socialist who resigned recently as minister of agriculture to protest the law setting up proportional representation. Neither is in the mainstream of a political party.

All these difficulties and uncertainties for France may be compounded if the Klaus Barbie trial begins, as scheduled, in November. The trial of the Nazi Gestapo chief of Lyon during World War II is sure to stir old, humiliating memories of French complicity in the Nazi occupation and in the deportation of French Jews to extermination camps. The French record during the war is not a proud one.

In fact, much of the facade of self-confidence was built carefully in the last two decades by De Gaulle and others to bury the humiliations of World War II. But a phenomenon like the Greenpeace affair makes it clear that self confidence is not firmly in place.