The Hungry Government

Last week, French Premier Paul Ramadier stared long and hard at the stiff political guarantees attached to U. S. economic aid, turned around, ruefully contemplated a starving nation pockmarked by 36,000 Communist cells, and promptly resigned. His government had failed in every political and economic crisis. France was on the verge of a civil war that would preclude any American aid. Ramadier's successor, ex-finance minister Robert Schuman, is charged with an immense task--that of tramping Communism under a vigorous and potent democracy. His success or failure might well set the future pattern of current American plans to choke off Russian expansion, for France is the keystone in the Marshall Plan.

M. Schuman faces exactly the same problems that defeated the Ramadier regime: a grossly inflated economy that has scaled prices fifty percent above normal with only a twenty-five percent wage increase and a suicidal factionalism among France's myriad political parties. To replace the vacuum that characterized Ramadier's ten months in power, Schuman proposes stringent budget supervision, a wholesale stabilization of national currency, and an all-out war against Communist-inspired strikes. His purely economic solutions can be effected through prudent government alone, but when M. Schuman intends to crush the present widespread strikes, he must deal with unions that are controlled by a Communist party opposed to any U. S.-dictated recovery. Maurice Thorez has precipitated a 1,500,000 man walkout for higher wages in the hope that either an expanded currency or low production will push inflation to the bursting point. Schuman favors a general wage increase of $32 per month. Unless this much needed salary boost can be instituted without the evil of correspondingly higher prices, the government will come close to accomplishing the Communists' purpose.

In a nation that bases its entire political structure on a shifting and complex mass of minor parties, any coordinated government becomes a highly dubious proposition. France is the home of such small fry. Its National Assembly is composed of every political shade from rabid red to gouty blue. M. Schuman must compose these squabbling factions if he even dreams of a successful regime. His only real hope lies in the tremendous mandate of 412 votes to 184 awarded him by the Assembly.

This vote indicates a hasty scampering to the right and a desperate attempt to maintain the type of government deemed necessary for U. S. aid. French politicians have never agreed on anything for very long, and whether they can too the United States' line long enough to secure France for the Marshall plan is the question of the hour.

The current French government represents the first real attempt by European democracies to organize a nation along U.S. State Department policy lines. It is the first and crucial test of Secretary Marshall's plan to dehydrate world communism. If a rightist government can be made to stick and operate efficiently in a country that traditionally mixes its politics with its wine, then the prospects for successful remote control of other countries such as Italy look very bright.