Main LA Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From Labor Action, Vol. 13 No. 46, 14 November 1949, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
PARIS, Nov. 1 – France now has a new government, and some add “just like the one before.” Actually, on two counts, the new cabinet represents a further gain in influence by big business.
This is true first of all because of what has happened to the two cabinet members involved in the noisy fight which broke up the old government. The Socialist Party’s tiny, cantankerous but rarely bold minister of labor, Daniel Mayer, and the jowlsy extreme-conservative finance minister, Maurice Petsche, were scrapping over the extent to which the burden of franc devaluation was to be put onto the backs of the working people.
Mayer, and some of his friends in the SP leadership, worried about the dwindling strength of that party as a result of its constant yielding to the conservatives, put up a strong resistance to the conservative attempt to put 100 per cent of the burden on the workers. Little Daniel did not dare propose anything that might protect the average French worker from rising prices (over 7 per cent increase since only September 1) but he did propose that the tiny segment of workers earning less than 15,000 francs per month – ten dollars a week – be brought up to that amount as a minimum. Ten dollars a week in France will not buy much more in France than in the U.S. – at any rate, damned little. But any talk of raising wages made M. Petsche come out of his cage roaring with rage.
When the dust settled, three governments later, Prime Minister Bidault announced that the new finance minister would be – Maurice Petsche. And in view of the SP’s kind assistance in voting in the new government, the new minister of labor was to be – no, not Daniel Mayer but another chap. Newspaper pictures of the new cabinet show Petsche smiling as broadly as if he had just swallowed someone.
If Daniel Mayer is not longer in the government, however, his place in the alphabetical listing is filled by that good friend of the House of Rothschild, the new minister of justice, Rene Mayer (no relation). This Mayer is a good friend of bankers in general, as befits a member of the conservative group that goes under the confusing name of the “Radical Party.’’
More striking evidence of a shift toward the right – or toward big business interests – in the government was the naming of Rene Pleven to the key post of minister of national defense. Pleven, who takes the place of the SP’s Ramadier, is best known for one thing: ever since De Gaulle began his bid for power two years ago, Pleven has been scurrying about trying to unite the old-line conservative groups with the newer, more brutal and less “genteel” Gaullists.
With the Foreign Ministry in the hands of the extreme conservative wing of the-Catholic party (MRP) in the person of knobby, ascetic old Robert Schuman (who looks as if he needs a good drink), and with the prime minister’s office in the possession of Georges Bidault (who always looks as if he had just had one to help him zigzag between his Catholic party and his old master, De Gaulle), it would seem as if the bankers and big-business interests should be able to sleep calmly – if only their economic system were not popping apart at the seams.
Should things get rough on the labor front this winter, due to the constant lowering of the workers’ buying power, the rich can bank on the reactionary De Gaulle admirer, Pleven, as the head of the armed forces. Of course, they have never lost any sleep over the fact that the Ministry of the Interior is in the hands of Jules Moch. (The Interior Department’s job is running the police, not the national parks as in the U.S.)
Moch is listed as a member of the Socialist Party, but having gone to France’s Polytechnic School – a combination of West Point and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – he is widely rumored to have exchanged his party card for a radio-operated blackjack. He is notoriously entranced with tossing troops of police about the country in radio-run trucks and helicopters to pit his wits against striking workers, “Moscow agents” (both real and imagined) and similar disorderly elements.
Moch is, of course, cordially detested even by SP and pro-SP union leaders, not to speak of the average worker to whom Moch is a symbol of strikebreaking. He has done more than any hundred Stalinists to lose face for the SP among the workers. But the SP, which allowed the conservatives to toss Daniel Mayer out for raising his little finger one millimeter to the left, continues to allow this ruthless and humorless “nightstick” (as Moch is often caricatured in the French press) to represent it in the French government.
The renewed lesson of the results of participating in a capitalist government has again, for the umpteenth time, caused some of the few remaining sections of the Socialist Party to raise the cry to get out of that cesspool. With so very few real labor elements left in the SP, that cry has probably even less chance of success at this moment than in the past.
In addition, one of the stronger elements pulling Socialists toward an independent attitude in recent times now appears to have given up fighting against the current. The important Paris newspaper Franc-Tireur, which for a time spearheaded the drive for the left position of the RDR, has apparently lost hope in the immediate emergence of the “third camp.”
Whether from galloping Stalinophobia, or from relentless pounding from pro-capitalist forces (not the least of these being those centered around the American embassy), or just from fear of being in the financially poorest of the three camps, the group running Franc-Tireur has gradually swung around to a pro-SP and even pro-government participation in favor of the pre-war two-round plurality system. The latter less democratic system makes it possible for the Socialists and conservatives to get together to elect one of their men instead of a Stalinist; it also makes it extremely tough for any new independent socialist movement to win an electoral victory.
Main LA Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 10 December 2022