The Leader Is Right

Tell a typical Frenchman what is going on today and he’ll think it is a bad joke. “I am non-political. Monsieur,” he will say, and let it go at that

In France this year winter went on and on. You wondered if good weather would ever come again. During the long winter you grew accustomed to several strange things: after the first few times you took it as routine, showing your papers to the armed CRS men; the roving convoys of security troops became an ordinary sight and you were not surprised if you saw units of the Garde Mobile in the evening stationed for blocks up and down a main boulevard; you gave them hardly a glance the morning you saw a column of tanks near the Cité Universitaire. At first it was difficult learning what you could talk about in the cafés, but that came in time, too. (You still remember a girl at a dinner party who was seated between an elegant young man from the Premier’s office and a former colonel of the Foreign Legion. In the end she gave up talking entirely and ate through five of seven courses in silence.) Conversation, in fact, became fairly easy once you had accommodated yourself to the rule: Avoid the subject of Algeria.

GP

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George M. Pepper

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Tell a typical Frenchman what is going on today and he’ll think it is a bad joke. “I am non-political. Monsieur,” he will say, and let it go at that

In France this year winter went on and on. You wondered if good weather would ever come again. During the long winter you grew accustomed to several strange things: after the first few times you took it as routine, showing your papers to the armed CRS men; the roving convoys of security troops became an ordinary sight and you were not surprised if you saw units of the Garde Mobile in the evening stationed for blocks up and down a main boulevard; you gave them hardly a glance the morning you saw a column of tanks near the Cité Universitaire. At first it was difficult learning what you could talk about in the cafés, but that came in time, too. (You still remember a girl at a dinner party who was seated between an elegant young man from the Premier’s office and a former colonel of the Foreign Legion. In the end she gave up talking entirely and ate through five of seven courses in silence.) Conversation, in fact, became fairly easy once you had accommodated yourself to the rule: Avoid the subject of Algeria.