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Uneasy Balance of de Gaulle's Republic:
Left, Right, and Underground
- Abstract
A LITTLE over a year ago in the outskirts of a small southern French town I stopped my car beside a group of four men and a woman to ask a direction. It was a few minutes after ten in the evening. At once fists were clenched, cudgels appeared, and lights were flashed into the car. When they saw I was alone and the car foreign, they relaxed. Apologetically, they told me they were Communists awaiting a delivery of anti-Gaullist leaflets which they intended to spend the rest of the night distributing. They had thought the car contained a band of fascist provocateurs. (A few weeks earlier a clash between Communists and right-wing bill-stickers in Toulouse had ended in a fatal shooting.) The woman and her husband were in their late fifties, grandparents, and owned a comfortable business. “This is the anti-fascist struggle of the 30′s all over again,” they said. “Within a year France will be a police state, but at least we’ll have our self-respect: we’ll be able to answer our grandchildren’s questions without blushing-which is more than Guy Mollet can say.”
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