FRENCH NEW DEAL

Evening Star, Issue 22775, 9 October 1937, Page 21

FRENCH NEW DEAL

BEGINNING OF REVOLT ANALYSIS OF,POSITION Down near Les Halles, in Paris, is a smoky little bistro frequented by gourmets of the extreme Left, writes Anne O’Hare M'Cormick to the * New York Times.’ The patronno of the place may be called Mere Marianne, because she is so typical of her species, the inevitable and incomparable women who run the small businesses of France. Nothing makes a dent in the hard, sharp, and conservative mind of Mere Marianne. For her small and discriminating clientele she cooks as subtle food as can bo enjoyed in Paris. Because they appreciate her cooking she puts up with their revolutionary talk, and because of her culinary genius her customers respect her bourgeois opinions. No Frenchman is really radical at the table.

Seven nights a week almost the same group of Socialist and Communist deputies, journalists, and .C.G.T. leaders gather to plan a_ more equitable world /under the inspiring influence of Mere Marianne’s fillets and burgundies. They soak the rich in her sauces and. fight, the Spanish war to the damage of her . red-and-white tablecloths. Or did until lately. One bleak evening in March they arrived to find a tart notice on the locked door. Mere Marianne announced that owing to the five-day week she was obliged to close her restaurant on Sundays and Mondays. Worse, than being hit in a vital spot by the new laws, the habitues of the bistro immediately noticed a deterioration in the quantity and quality of their repasts. Artist though she is, Marianne is nob philanthropic, and when last seen by the writer she was informing her guests in a loud and angry voice that with a five-day income and higher prices she could not do herself justice. “Be prepared to like the loaf you have mixed, gentlemen,” she retorted to their complaints.

THE MIDDLE CLASS RESISTS. _ Marianne does not belong to the association of employers who threaten to close the hotels, restaurants, and cafes of France unless the Government modifies the decree applying the 40-hour week to all waiters and hotel employees. Nor does it seem likely that the threat will be carried into effect in the middle of the tourist season. Both Right and Left extremists are still Frenchmen, as practical at bottom as they are fastidious about their food. But even the threat, with the' exasperation of millions of standpatters like Marianne, is_ a sign that tho French New Deal strikes home. It begins to meet the flint of middlo-fclass resistance, and this, in a country as full of small owners as France, is tho test of the Popular Front programme. Behind tho financial crisis which caused M. Blum to step behind M. Chautemps, as adroit a manoeuvre to gain time as the Socialist leader has

yet executed, is the rising murmur of a voice counting the cost of reform and experiment. This_voico is not against the Government. It voted it into power and may do so again. But it is an increasingly questioning and restraining voice, and M. Blum heeded it when he put a more conservative front on what is still his Cabinet. It is a mistake to suppose that the labour struggle which churns up France is the same as that agitating the United States. When Blum came into power on a wave, of revolutionary strikes in 1936 French labour was underpaid, overworked, and poorly organised. 'The General Confederation of Labour, now 5,000,000 strong, had a membership of only 1,500,000. The economic condition and social position of the French worker were, end are yet, so far behind the American that there is no basis for comparison. And the psychological difference is greater than the material. _ Anyone who has attended labour rallies in Paris and in Detroit or Youngstown feels at once the contrast in spirit and objective. The French Confederation includes the Communist Union and is frankly Socialist in aim and leadership. The French worker is out to overthrow the capitalist system. His temper is revolutionary, AMERICAN WORKERS CAPITALIST

To go from one meeting to the other is to realise how strongly American workers are impregnated with capitalist ideas. The majority believe m the system they serve. They organise not to- destroy capitalism, but to get & larger share in its profits. They have' the capitalist mentality, and whether they fled from Europe 300 or 30 years ago, they fled from being fixed in a class or pigeonholed in a category. The revulsion against Old World stratification sticks. Only pig-headed stupidity on the part of the managers of industry or a power complex on the part of its leaders can prevent the American Labour movement from developing within the American framework and supporting the American system. In France the outlook is more obscure, because the French Labour movement is bound up with the whole European crisis. Unlike ours, it cannot develop independently. Played on by so many currents outside of France, it is doubtful whether it can develop according to the special genius of France. But what happens to it is enormously important, because the eye of the anxious observer of world events cannot stray long from the country that holds the key of Europe. When Mussolini announces, officially or unofficially, that Italy intends to remain in Spain until Franco wins he takes advantage of a show of weakness inside France, and thus emphasises once more that the war over Spain is primarily a struggle between its neighbours, and only secondarily, and through France, a conflict with Britain or Russia. Thus the influence of Mere Marianne on the internal policies of France may affect the destinies of Europe.