AN UGLY PHENOMENON IN FRENCH POLITICS

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27917, 14 March 1956, Page 12

AN UGLY PHENOMENON IN FRENCH POLITICS

"4/0/. POU JADE"

[By JAMES CAMERON tn the “News Chronicle” l (Reprinted by Arrangement)

A man with a mission c~n be said to have arrived when th"? knock the capital letter off his name and turn him into an adjective. It was clear that Pierre Poujade's day had come when his curious disturbing crew appeared in type as “poujadists, and his own wild and formless proposition as "poujadisme.” It is easier in the French language. If Poujadc docs not give France a new mythology he has yet given it a new word. The other time it happened was when Quisling, the man, turned into quisling, the kind of man. Thus tne world is taught, brutally, to mind its Q’s and P’s. The one outstanding thing about Pierre Poujade is that he isn't. To meet this undistinguished - looking young man in the muffler and raincoat is to wonder how on earth this small-town stationer from the Lot ever managed to capture the minds of 2,500.000 rational voters and present an astonished Parliament with 52 new members specifically pledged to its abolition. Memorable Precedent Yet other political anachronisms have not failed as leaders because their look was commonplace: there is a memorable precedent for the muffler and trenchcoat: one can start as easily as a shopkeeper in France a? a house-painter in Austria. The alarming thing about poujadisme is the drabness of its mastermind: it is not the lucky caprice of an inspired demagogue; it is the desperate and inevitable result of an intolerable situation. Poujade did not create his moment: the moment created him. Poujadisme is the final fantastic act in the French Parliamentary circus; it rounds off the pattern of plans and plots and stratagems—just because it has no plan at all. no vestige of a design; the poujadist negation simply represents the need of a certain kind of Frenchman to solve his frustrations by exploding. "We did not go looking for Poujade,” said one of his acolytes, “the Civil Service .set him loose.” It is. after all, only two and a half years since’ this energetic and voluble fellow, then a 35-year-old father of four, developed his brainwave of channelling all the grievances and resentments of the small tradesman into what he called the UDCA. the Union for the Defence of Shopkeepers and Artisans. He struck a lode of enthusiasm that must have surprised even him. Incursion on “Rights”

For years the small man had groaned and groused at the increasing difficulty of avoiding taxation; more

and more was the Government inter, fering with the local businesmw B classic right to fiddle his books. More and more he felt himself surrounded by the enormous French Civil Service, whose equally classic duty to shower him with more and more in. comprehensible forms and demands. Pierre Poujade hit exactly the moment to rally his kind against tht “corruption of the State.” the “burden of politicians,” the “Jew Mendes.When the tax collectors showed up they were thrown out. It was | straight-forward defiance campaign. It is an interesting asnect of the French machine that not until four months ago was Poujade charged with incitement to disobedience—and still the case has not been heard, nor prebablv ever will. Illegal or not. it worked. It was ridiculed, and ignored: the UDCA candidates were represented by cartoonists as obese men in butcher g* aprons knocking at the Palais door But 52 got in. Not Poujade: he did not stand for election to what he insists is a disreputable and futile Chamber; he “controls from without." The nearest thing he has ever come to an expressed policy is his call for the ‘ States General”—an archaic corporative professional body, wholly un-' democratic in conception. t Memories! It is fair to say that when Poulade denounces the impotence and incoherence of French government he is only saying what has already been said by mimv better men. That he expressed it in’ a fashion both childish and dangerous is another matter. ♦ Now it has happened, people are remembering hard: it was the flabbiness of an Italian government that gave birth to the Blackshirts, it wag the helplessness of the Weimar Republic that bred a Hitler. The personal Poujade background has been erratic, to say the least. His political baptism was in the camp of Jacques Doriot. the pre-war Fascist experimenter. In the war he was a Petainist. until he abruptly changed sides and went to North Africa (where he met his wife, a forceful and compelling woman). He finished up in an R.A.F. camp in England. Today his personal vanity appears to be immense—he refers to himself as “Moi. Poujade”: he surrounds himse'.f with bodyguards and a service d'orure In the traditional pattern of men of destiny: the only town marked on the map of France which is his badge is his home town of Saint-Cere: he exacts from his team of greenhorn Deputies a sort of feudal homage and discipline quite extraordinary among the French He has even made hn delegates agree to be hanged if they betray his “cause.” whatever it is. Borrowed Trappings I think he has borrowed only the trappings of Fascism —the jargon, the anti-Semitism, the harsh slogans, the calculated coarseness, the xenophobia. The curious swastika-pattern of the claws of the Gallic cock in his device is. I am sure, accidental, a Freudian aberration none the less ominous for that. Yet his enormous poujadists rally in the Velodrome d’Hi ver carried one horrifyingly back to a prewar evening with Mosley in Olympia —even to the leather jackets, the welter-weight stewards. . . . And already one local UDCA president, in the Bas-Rhin. has publicly quit, announcing that developments are “trop hitlerien.” Now the ridicule is dying a waymore and more papers are reporting Poujade straight, even respectfully. A sinister move is the heavy pressure on liberal provincial newspapers, which are threatened with crippling losses of advertising if they attack the UDCA. For some people in other countries this sort of thing has interesting possibilities. Poujade acknowledges he has been invited to England (by whom?), to Norway and Holland. One begins to wonder. Playing for Keeps? For the middle classes it stands against Poujade that he is a shopeprer; a general would have been better. But there are yet those who say: “Better a boutiquier than the Popular Front—better Poujade than the Communists.” And everyone knows there are “those” behind him —the heavy support of the North African colonial lobby, a section of big business. Poujade is now playing for keeps. To anyone with memories even 20 'ears old this is a situation both idiotic and almost incredible. Poujade is not bv any standards a considerable man. He is a blowhard, an opportunist, a shrewd operator and a keen instrument for bigger things than he. The inflammation had to be serious indeed before it could come to a head in such as le p’tit Pierre. We have been warned.