WORLD IN BRIEF : FRANCE : Mitterrand Seeks to Cool Racial Tension

President Francois Mitterrand tried to cool racial passions in France after a right-wing opposition leader touched off a storm by portraying Arab and black immigrants as noisy, smelly welfare mongers. “We must avoid excessive, emotional or demagogic answers,” Mitterrand said in the town of Issoudun in response to a speech by former Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. Even some party supporters of Chirac, a presidential candidate, were dismayed by his speech, in which he cited a French worker who lives in a low-income apartment next door to a “father, his four wives and a score of children.” Chirac said the Arab father makes three times as much as the worker through welfare payments.