Word: gaullists
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Burning actuality took up most of his time. Beginning with the 1967 election preliminaries, Pompidou assumed close management of the Gaullist party, personally selecting many of its candidates and maintaining ties with the winners in Parliament. His control became dominant in the crisis-ridden atmosphere of last spring, when he even advised De Gaulle not to follow through on his promise of a personal referendum. Instead, Pompidou cannily proposed the alternative of parliamentary elections, on which only Pompidou's?not the general's?prestige would be staked. "If you lose the referendum, Mon Général, the regime is lost...
...less disturbed by the news than anyone else; he simply removed his favorite modern oil paintings from Matignon, set up an office on the Left Bank and waited for life to come to him. Or seemed to wait. Actually, he made a point of keeping in close touch with Gaullist friends, listening sympathetically to their complaints and quietly gathering up loyalty for the future...
...Poher asked Interior Minister Raymond Marcellin to reduce the number of policemen blanketing Paris on riot standby. He thought that they were a partisan element as well, tending to give credence to De Gaulle's oft-proclaimed prophecy that after his departure chaos would ensue. Then he dismissed Gaullist Jacques Foccart as Secretary-General for African Affairs. Knowledgeable Frenchmen were delighted: Foccart's African designation was in fact a façade for his job as boss of the Gaullist "Barbouzes," a thuggish lot of secret police and informers...
Understandably, Poher's first Cabinet meeting with the Gaullist government was, said a Minister, "glacial." Poher's aides gaily replied that if the Ministers had found the meeting frosty, Poher had warmly enjoyed himself. The interim President was not amused, however, when a few hours later news agencies carried the remarks of Foreign Minister Michel Debré made at the meeting, that "France suffered a defeat last Sunday." Poher's office issued a sharp rebuke, noting that Ministers were not authorized to disclose the Cabinet's secret deliberations...
...Paris, the Communists astonishingly called off their traditional parade from the Bastille to the Place de la République, charging that a conspiracy of students and "Gaullist thugs" would have turned the route into a battlefield. The government followed through by banning all demonstrations and parades, and student protesters were nailed as they emerged from subway cars...