TO SURVIVE DE GAULLE
31
mas and Le Theule can maintain the personal confidence of their districts
(through attention to local needs in the old Radical style of the Third Re-
public, quips Le Thcule), the central party will have difficulty imposing tight
discipline in a post-Gaullist era. And those many UDR deputies who have
no strong local base may have difficulty surviving the passing of de Gaulle.
On organizational matters as on questions of economic policy, UD-Ve
leaders frequently are not of one mind. The second UNR Secretary-General,
Albin Chalandon, and the sixth, Jacques Baumel, greatly valued such paral-
lel activities as colloquia, study groups, and clubs, whereas the third man in
that post, Jacques Richard, gave more attention (with rather meager results)
to auxiliary organizations for workers, farmers, merchants, and other occu-
pational groups."' While Minister of the Interior, Roger Frey (whose en-
thusiasm for Colloquia and clubs was considerably less than that of Baumel
and his staff) proposed that the essential task in party organization was to
open the UNR to "those on the Right and on the Left who have not yet
joined us,” and to transform it into "an organized, structured party, such
as conceived by the Anglo-Saxons.”"" Apparently this Frey proposal of
March, 1965, was launched without prior consultation with Baumel and
his staff.15" The UNR Deputy General-Secretary for Organization and Im-
plantation, Claude Labbe, questioned the propriety of strict discipline in
a party seeking to hold a diverse majority together, and preferred recruit-
ment of the voters of other parties rather than of their politicians.’51 In 1967
the Frey proposal for “opening" of the party was implemented at the Lille
Congress, but not before Baumel had been removed as Secretary-General.
It may well be that once again the presence of de Gaulle as a potential
final arbiter prevented a more serious factional dispute.152
One of the key organizational problems for any party which gains a share
of power in a parliamentary system concerns relations between the govern-
ment, the parliamentary party, and the national party structure. In the case
of the UDR, the relationship between party and parliamentary group so
far has presented no serious problem. So long as such key figures in the
government as Frcy, Debrc, and de Gaulle’s representatives keep a strong
hand over both party and parliamentary group, there can be no real conflict
between them. In theory, the bylaws of the UNR National Council pro-
vided that one of that body’s duties was “to inform and to supervise the
action of the Parliamentary Groups of the National Assembly and of the
Senate.”152 In practice, the UNR group in the National Assembly seemed to
consider itself to be the party, as the British parliamentary parties tend
to do.151
More difficult by far than relations between party and deputies have been
those between the UNR group, now the UDR group, in the National