After 23 days without leadership, for her government, France seems to have settled her political turmoil--at least for the time being. On Friday, Georges Bidault, a leader of the moderate Popular Republican party, and his Cabinet appointments, were approved by a large majority of the National Assembly. What Bidault had succeeded in doing was resurrecting the coalition of moderates that has governed France since 1947.

This coalition had appeared to be in danger ever since the resignation of Premier Henri Queuille on October 5: the efforts successively of Jules Moch, Socialist, and Rene Mayer, Radical Socialist, to form acceptable governments had failed.

In spite of the excitement it raised among French politicians, the crisis was not a particularly acute one. The only danger lay in the possibility that a failure of the center parties to reunite would make national elections necessary, and that the extremist partics, the Communists and de Gaulle's RPF might then gain more scats. The collapse of Cabinets is a commonplace in French polities--in fact the Queuillo regime, which lasted a little over a year, was considered an oddity of longevity. Lack of Cabinet leadership delays only the top-level decisions, for the ordinary administrative bureaucracy goes on functioning as usual.

Furthermore, the issue on which the Quenille cabinet fell was not a crucial one--a stable government could have survived it. The issue was whether or not to lift the anti-inflation wage controls to give a bonus to the lowest income groups, in compensation for rising prices. The inflation in France is considerable, but the country is in relatively good shape in spite of it., thanks to ECA aid and to the initiative of her own industry. Production now equals that in the highest prewar year: 1920.

The real signiflence of the recent crisis is as evidence of the chronic weakness of French government, an ominous weakness in a country that is a key to Western European recovery. France is apparently incapable of a government with sufficient Assembly support and strong enough leadership to carry through a long range program. Typically, the regimes of the last twenty years have been weak coalitions of moderates, able to reach agreement on only a few immediate issues, and held together mostly by a common fear of extremists of the Right and Left.

Five Year Term

One of the factors behind France's instability is the five year term for members of the Assembly. With their security assured for so long a period, political discipline is lax: splinter parties can refuse to support the government and cause its collapse on unimportant issues without risking new elections.

Another factor, of course, is France's multi-party system--Queuille's Cabinet alone had representatives of eight different political parties. Since the Communists and the anti-government extremists on the Right control nearly half of the seats in the Assembly, a coalition of moderates requires the cooperation of members with wide differences of political sympathy, a range that in U.S. politics would extend from left-wing New Dealers to Senator Taft. There is no majority party, and for two years, the Communists, who have a plurality, have not been represented in the Cabinet. To add to the difficulties, the three parties in the center coalition, the Socialists, committed to a planned economy, the Popular Republicans, drawing support from Catholic trade unions, and the Radicals, devoted to private enterprise, are split on a whole series of issues.

All this does not promise well for Bidault's regime. The question on which the Queuille government fell has been partially settled for the moment with a bonus to low-income workers, but there is a strong chance that the new government will not survive the winter. And to the stability of Western Europe, the instability of France is a constant menace.