REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK : Even Little Guys Get Spotlight; a Freeway Is Cleared for Visitors

It was tiny San Marino’s day of glory Tuesday at the 34-nation Paris summit.

The postage-stamp republic atop Mt. Titano on the Italian peninsula was represented at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) by a 37-year-old former high school teacher, Gabriele Gatti.

Although San Marino has only 22,361 citizens, CSCE rules give all countries equal status. By the luck of the draw, Gatti was selected to be the chairman of Tuesday morning’s session of the summit, presiding over the meeting attended by President Bush, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Helmut Kohl and all the other heavyweights.

Although clearly nervous, the handsome, curly-haired San Marinese, who speaks only Italian and a smidgeon of French, whizzed through the session without a hitch.

In the afternoon, he delivered a 15-minute speech--the same time allotted all the other leaders--that eloquently expressed the pacific dreams of the people who live on what he called “the happy mountain.”

“My hope and sincere wish,” said Gatti, “is that around Mt. Titano, upon which sits the little Republic of San Marino, and in all of Europe and the North American continent, one never again hears the sound of war. . . .”

Imagine shutting down the Pasadena Freeway for six hours begining at the evening rush hour just so a bunch of dignitaries can go to the ballet and have a nice dinner. That’s the rough equivalent of what French police and security officials did Tuesday night to permit world leaders and other guests free sailing on the A-13 autoroute to Versailles, the magnificent royal palace 20 miles from Paris where French President Francois Mitterrand hosted a gala ballet and dinner evening for 200 guests.

After watching a Tchaikovsky pas de deux, performed by the Opera de Paris company, the guests dined in the famous Versailles Hall of Mirrors.

The meal, prepared by the presidential chefs and served on Sevres porcelain plates depicting birds and pastoral scenes, was no less lyrical: cream of shellfish soup; spiny Brittany lobster; capon with goose liver; cheeses, and iced nougat in Grand Marnier.

The wines were a 1985 white Burgundy Puligny-Montrachet (about $60 a bottle), magnums of the 1978 classic Bordeaux Chateau Margaux ($225 a bottle) and Comte de Champagne bubbly ($230).

Senses sated, stomachs full, the invitees mounted their motorcades and returned to their Paris hotels on a carless freeway.

Needless to say, the freeway clearing did not go unnoticed and uncriticized in the popular French press. “34 Heads of State Give Themselves a Freeway,” headlined the Tuesday editions of Le Parisien, a lively tabloid, “And the Parisiens Are Paid Back with Traffic Jams.”

Most people agree that the Versailles Palace, with its stunning grounds and ample ballrooms, would have been an ideal place to hold the CSCE summit. The French government desperately needed a site after they were unable to book the UNESCO Conference Center that they wanted.

Instead, they were forced to renovate and expand the elegant but woefully small Kleber International Conference Center in the center of Paris, near the Arc de Triomphe. The Kleber renovation involved the construction of a massive, $25-million temporary annex, complete with fake marble walls and phony Corinthian pillars. After the three-day summit is over, it will be torn down.

The Palace of Versailles was never seriously considered as a summit site, said a French Foreign Ministry spokesman, because of the bad “symbolism” it posed for a summit aimed at ending the cycle of conflicts and hostilities.

In 1919, the palace was the site of the signing of the peace treaty between the Allies and Germany that ended World War I. The treaty demanded severe reparations from the Germans that Adolf Hitler later used as the focus of his National Socialist political movement.

Instead of Versailles, many journalists and political leaders have compared the current meeting of the CSCE to the 1814-15 Congress of Vienna, in which European countries gathered in the Austro-Hungarian capital to divide up the Continent after the defeat of Napoleon.

However, in a speech opening the Paris summit, Mitterrand made it clear he didn’t like this comparison either.

“Some people have referred to the Congress of Vienna,” he said, “but in Vienna in 1815, the victorious powers reshaped the map of Europe without concern for the peoples and their aspirations.

“The Paris Conference, I hope, will be an anti-Congress of Vienna, since around this table (the hexagonal white pine table at the Kleber Center) we have neither victors, nor vanquished, but 34 countries equal in dignity. . . .”

President Bush, normally a favorite here, and the American delegation to the summit have been taking somewhat of a beating in the French press.

Some of the criticism is simply the old Gaullist tradition of America-bashing. For example, the Quotidien of Paris columnist Jean-Louis Pourtet described the summit as marking “the sunset of America on the European scene.”

“This is a nostalgic visit for George Bush,” Pourtet wrote. “The American President must come here with mixed feelings. The end of an epoch has its melancholy moments. For 45 years America has dominated the European scene, often with great irritation of the interested parties.”

In its Tuesday editions, the Paris newspaper Liberation described Bush as a “traveling salesman” who was more interested in trying to sign up supporters for military action in the Persian Gulf than any of the European issues at play in the summit.

“Bush is a politician,” wrote Liberation journalist Francois Sergent. “He dutifully attended all the meetings of the CSCE. He was in all the class pictures. He even went to the ballet with Mitterrand. But he has, in fact, one sole goal, one single obsession: take advantage of the congress of nations to rally support from a maximum number of countries for a United Nations resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq.”

Le Monde, France’s most serious newspaper of record, took Bush and his team to task for announcing--and later canceling--a joint news conference by Bush and Gorbachev before the two leaders met to discuss the gulf.

“Has the United States committed the sin of excessive optimism?” Le Monde asked in a front-page article Tuesday. “The long meeting between Bush and Gorbachev Monday evening in Paris, almost completely dedicated to the gulf crisis, ended without any tangible result. The fact that the two chiefs of state preferred to cancel the joint press conference that was planned could only raise more doubts.”