De Gaulle's Super-Party

Northern Advocate, 9 April 1947, Page 5

De Gaulle's Super-Party

(Rcc. 10.30 a.m.) LONDON, April 8. General de Gaulle has created the groundwork for a new political superparty, which will be called the French People’s Alliance, says the Evening Standard’s Paris correspondent. Supporters in Strasbourg formed an organising committee and regional and local committees are being formed in other centres. General de Gaulle himself will not hold an official position in the organisation, whose leader is Jacques Soustelle, formerly General det Gaulle’s Minister of Information. BITTER CONTROVERSY LIKELY j General de Gaulle yesterday cast j aside the trammels of an official per-. sonality which he had assumed on Sunday . for the Franco-American | ceremony when, at the Strasbourg > Town Hall, he made a speech of open opposition to the existing French regime, says the Paris correspondent of The Times. The Times says in a leader that General de Gaulle’s sudden descent into the political arena, which he had so long affected to despise, is likely to prove the beginning of a long and bitter controversy in France, because his opponents can be relied upon to give as good as they get. General de Gaulle, since he returned j to France in 1944, has moved far to the Right. He is now an open enemy of the Communists at home and an open sceptic of Russian intentions abroad. If his challenge should so reduce the mutual confidence of the coalition parties that the Ramadier Government falls, he may succeed only in excluding from power those parties which stand closest to his own conceptions. DANGER OF CHALLENGE The danger of his challenge is that he may persuade too many Frenchmen —his enemies no less than his friends —that medicine is vain and that it is time for surgery. ‘•What docs General de Gaulle want? All he wants is for the French people to rally round his own name,” said the leader of the French Socialists (M. Leon Bluin') in an interview with the Daily Herald’s Paris correspondent. M. Blum added that General de Gaulle wanted to destroy present institutions which had been ratified by a free vote.

He wanted to suppress or compress the Parliamentary system, entailing the abdication of national sovereignty. “The Socialist Party,” M, Blum said, “is on the side of the Republic,” The Communist newspaper Humanite described the speech as an aggression against the French Republic.