THE ECONOMIC SUMMIT : French Indignities at Summit Stir Resentment : Americans Collide With Gallic Indifference

There is no getting around it: The French love affair with all things American does not color their conduct of summit conferences. The nation that 200 years ago gave the world liberte, egalite et fraternite might have also contributed this modifier: “but not for La Maison Blanche, “ especially that bit about fraternite.

That, at least, is the grumbling view of some Americans in Paris with President Bush for the 15th annual summit of leading industrial nations.

Senior White House officials, exposed to such indignities as insufficient tickets to watch the annual Bastille Day parade and weapons checks as they arrived at their hotel (while lesser aides entered through unguarded doors), have run up against a wall of Gallic indifference.

While such incidents may have no impact on Bush as he attends his first international economic summit conference, they may sour the outlook of those working beneath him.

Once again, as they have in the past, White House aides must console themselves with the fact that each nation’s turn at hosting these extravaganzas comes but once every seven years. That means they won’t be back here until 1996--and that next year, the French will have to play the economic summit on an American field.

‘Wait Till Next Year’

And so each time the French throw a curve at the overwhelmingly huge U.S. delegation, the implied retort--sometimes said aloud, more often muttered and occasionally just thought--is clear: “Wait till next year.”

The summits, which bring together the heads of the seven leading industrial democracies, are veritable salades mixtes into which such issues as international politics, economics, Third World debt, global deforestation and East-West relations are all thrown into a large bowl for 48 hours and tossed around by two presidents (the United States and France), four prime ministers (Britain, Canada, Italy and Japan) and one chancellor (West Germany).

The chefs, invariably, get along fine. But the sous-chefs, and the kitchen help who run everything from motorcades to herds of reporters, have their contretemps.

Bush spent his first day and a half in Paris, for the bicentennial of the French Revolution as well as the summit, in mostly ceremonial activities. On Friday, for instance, he spent much of the morning standing behind a bullet-resistant plate of glass, along with the president of Ivory Coast, the prime minister of India and about 30 other world leaders, as a ballistic ballet of French military might came down the Champs Elysees from the Arc de Triomphe and paraded before them at the Place de la Concorde.

“They had bleachers up and down the Champs Elysees,” complained a senior White House official. “Do you know how many tickets we got? Fifteen. And that included the President and security.”

That official watched the parade on television.

One-Block Trip

A brouhaha also erupted between U.S. and French security agents after Bush arrived Thursday at the residence of U.S. Ambassador Walter J. Curley, his quarters while in Paris, after a one-block trip down the chic Rue du Faubourg St. Honore in his new armored Lincoln limousine.

It seemed that the security vehicles that trail the presidential limousine everywhere, even for one-block trips, were nowhere in sight when Bush was ready to leave the Elysee Palace for the embassy after a luncheon with French President Francois Mitterrand and the other world leaders who have converged on Paris for the bicentennial. And it was clear that U.S. Secret Service agents were unhappy with their French counterparts, who were controlling the streets around the Elysee and the movement of every vehicle in the neighborhood.

As a result of an apparent mix-up, the presidential limousine was forced to proceed without the normal trailing vehicles, including a follow-up Secret Service truck loaded with a small arsenal of weapons and at least one or two other vehicles providing communications and logistical support.

Agents ran alongside the limousine until it turned in at the heavy gates of the ambassadorial residence--the vehicle and Bush apparently none the worse for the incident.

The grumbling was not limited to White House officials and Secret Service agents.

‘We Regret the Excess’

As Paris preened itself for the weekend, Deputy Mayor Jean Tiberi was quoted by the International Herald Tribune as saying: “We regret the excess, and that this show is far too big. That these events came together, the 14th (Bastille Day) and the summit, is not a good thing. People are questioning the wisdom of it and they are right.”

In these days celebrating the Revolution and the Rights of Man, there is a certain distaste for the royal life. Indeed, the monarchy is not well represented here as the capital celebrates the 200th anniversary of the events that were to lead to the guillotining of Louis XVI.

Nevertheless, that hasn’t kept the world leaders who have gathered here from living in a style fit for a king.

At the Musee d’Orsay, a two-year-old museum in a transformed train station featuring works of Romanticists, Impressionists and post-Impressionists, the leaders dined on stuffed lobster, artichokes from Brittany, lamb from Quercy, terrine of Roquefort cheese and almond milk ice-cream in apricot sauce. The wine was from Bordeaux, a Chateau Montrose 1918.

Actually, it is not entirely correct that no royalty was represented. George Bush was there. According to Burke’s peerage, London’s genealogy specialsts, the President’s family roots stretch directly back to England’s King Henry III. That makes him a 13th cousin, twice removed, of Queen Elizabeth II.

“Without any shadow of doubt,” Harold Brooks-Baker, Burke’s publishing director, said last year, Bush is “connected to more imperial, royal and noble houses than any President of the United States including the previous holder of the title ‘most royal,’ George Washington.”