Word: mends
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Each night, wherever he went, former Minister of the Interior François Mitterand was pelted with aged pears, tomatoes, oranges and occasional root vegetables selected for their hardness. Ex-Premier Mendès-France, breezing out of one rally to address another, narrowly dodged a left hook and threw one off-target in reply. The leader of the Union for Defense of Shopkeepers and Artisans, a motley, rowdy party standing against all candidates and most taxes, swore his followers to accept summary punishment up to and including death if found guilty of violating the party line. Another ex-Premier...
...left flank, a knight in half-polished breastplates and only part-plumed helmet that he had not expected to use until spring, rode Pierre Mendès-France. With him were allied the Socialists, numerically strong but not strong enough, the pundits guessed, to carry Mendès to power. The Communists, though reduced in numbers and caught in contradictions of policy, rode the guerrilla trails in confident expectation of gaining 20 or 30 seats. Also present were roughhousing bully squads organized by brash young Anti-Taxer Pierre Poujade to tear down candidates and break up opposition meetings, Fascist-style...
Speech & Contradiction. Ambition-driven Mendès-France not only had little time to get started, but he was also the chief target of systematic hecklers from the right and left, including the strong-arm Poujadists. At a Left Bank rally in Paris, students hooted: "Mendès to the lamppost! Feed him to the jackals!" In his home department of Eure, he urged, in five or six speeches a day, an end to colonial wars abroad and "immobilism" at home. He was constantly interrupted. Usually Mendeès ignored the burly hecklers who make race-hate their specialty...
Challenge & Reservations. Like elections everywhere, local needs and local personalities loomed large. But Mendès-France one day last week demonstrated, in perhaps the most important utterance of the campaign, that "tomorrow's secret" might hold consequences pertinent to France's future as an international power and as a Western ally. Mendès, looking for votes on the left, made a move to woo voters away from the Communists-and did so by bending his policy to appeal to pro-Communist voters...
...Express, a daily devoted to his cause, Mendès published an editorial taking sharp issue with the recent NATO finding that the new Soviet activities in the Middle East and Asia pose "a new challenge to the free world." Mendès maintained that the new Soviet activity represents merely "economic expansion" of the kind Western nations practiced a century and less ago. The recent Soviet-bloc arms deals with Egypt, added Mendès, were provoked by "the unlucky Baghdad pact, which constituted for the West a blunder ..." Antoine Pinay's signature on the NATO communique...