The French socialist saga makes awkward reading for left-wingers. It has a wistful air of déjà vu.

"Oh God," Heinrich Heine wrote, "how big is your zoo!" This sentence kept popping into my head in June as I read the dispatches of my journalistic colleagues on Pope John Paul II's journey throug

Hardly had the Nobel Peace Prize committee announced that Solidarity leader Lech Walesa was its 1983 laureate but President Reagan and other cold warriors began praising the choice as another

Nothing is louder than the silence of intellectuals.

As the year opened in Paris, two stories dominated the news, one of them sad, the other funny. The first occurred at the Talbot auto plant in Poissy, just outside the capital.

On March 21, French President François Mitterrand arrives in the United States for a three-day state visit. When he was elected President in May 1981, he was the subject of great hope.

March 4. Hundreds of thousands of French citizens are marching today to defend "educational freedom"--that is, uncontrolled state subsidies for private Catholic schools.

The French Communist Party has no future in the government. Does it have a future outside it?

Recently, The Economist took out a full-page advertisement in the Financial Times of London boasting that it had predicted the coal miners'
strike six years ago.

From February 6 through February 10, more than 1,700 delegates to the French Communist Party's twenty-fifth congress met in the roofed-over sports stadium at Saint-Ouen, a suburb of Paris.