Gorbachev, in Paris, Urges East-West Initiatives : Calls for Programs to Speed Disarmament, Build ‘Common European Home’

PARIS —  Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, beginning a three-day visit to France, called Tuesday for major new initiatives by both East and West to accelerate disarmament and to build what he calls a “common European home.”

Gorbachev, relentless in his foreign policy initiatives, proposed an all-European summit to mark the conclusion of an expected agreement reducing the conventional armed forces--a pact that would fundamentally alter the long confrontation between East and West.

But he drew a cautious, even guarded, response from French President Francois Mitterrand, who reminded the Soviet leader of the West’s concern for human rights and for well-grounded, carefully negotiated agreements on disarmament.

‘Community of Free Peoples’

The barriers remaining between East and West in Europe must be broken down, Mitterrand told Gorbachev at a formal state dinner, before his hope of a “common European home” can be realized. This, the French leader said, means “a community of free peoples, of citizens protected against arbitrariness and intimidation, free to go and come and to develop their cultures and their own ways of life.”

France would like to see much broader progress before it agrees to participate in such a summit, presidential spokesman Hubert Vedrine explained. But he said Mitterrand also favores steps to accelerate the disarmament process in Europe, provided they did not destabilize the political and military situation on the Continent and were “useful.”

New negotiations on reducing conventional armed forces in Europe have only begun. But the Soviet Union is so confident of early success that Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze suggested to Roland Dumas, his French counterpart, that parallel negotiations be undertaken for a summit of neutral countries, as well as North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Warsaw Pact members, at which the agreement could be ratified and other European issues discussed.

The Warsaw Pact is expected to reply at its annual summit this weekend to a package of NATO proposals and ideas on the future of Europe that was put forward in late May at a NATO summit in Brussels.

Gorbachev is expected to lay out more of his own ideas on the “common European home” when he addresses the Council of Europe on Thursday in Strasbourg.

Although detailed proposals will not be on the negotiating table until September in the conventional forces talks in Vienna, Western diplomats say they see what a senior NATO ambassador in Moscow last week called “the clear contours of an agreement.”

“We should not be overoptimistic, for there is a lot of nitty-gritty negotiating to do,” the ambassador remarked. “But we can see the very real possibility of major progress in the months ahead.”

Vedrine, summarizing the first day’s talks, said Jean-Pierre Chevenement, the French defense minister, and Gen. Mikhail A. Moiseyev, the Soviet armed forces chief of staff, had reviewed the negotiations in detail. He said they examined the likely ceilings on tanks and other armored vehicles, as well as the more difficult issue of limits on warplanes, and felt they had narrowed their differences.

“NATO desires to accelerate the talks on conventional arms, and so do we,” said Gennady I. Gerasimov, the Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman, and “we expect that this meeting between the Soviet and French leaders will contribute significantly to this. . . . We have some further ideas, and we will be putting them to NATO at the appropriate times.”

Gorbachev renewed the Soviet call for the opening of negotiations on reducing and eventually eliminating tactical nuclear weapons from the arsenals of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact, warning that failure to do so would undermine other arms control agreements. But, mindful of French pride in their own small nuclear force, he did not press the issue.

“We can accept the French argument that it is waiting for serious reductions (by the United States and the Soviet Union) before it begins its own involvement in the disarmament process,” a Gorbachev aide explained later Tuesday. “We expect that France, as well as Britain, will join this process after we and the United States have reduced our arsenals by 50%, then perhaps by 50% again and even again. The French nuclear arsenal is not the main question facing the world.”

The first day of talks between Gorbachev and Mitterrand--lunch, an hourlong private conversation and then dinner--involved a broad review of international affairs and bilateral relations, according to French and Soviet spokesmen, but the most recurrent theme was the future of Europe.

Speaking at the dinner in his honor at the Elysee presidential palace, Gorbachev said that Europe now has a historic chance to move beyond divisions that had resulted from World War II.

‘A Stable Peace’

“The postwar period is over,” the Soviet leader said. “Today, a way toward a stable peace is opening before us, based not on a balance of forces but on a balance of real and correctly understood interests. Europe holds this chance in its hands.”

Mitterrand said that problems remain before Gorbachev’s idea of a “common European home” can be realized but that it is a hope that he also shares.

“Between the two halves of Europe, there are still many obstacles to clear away, distrust to dissipate, barriers to knock down before the inhabitants of the future home can feel at ease and confident there,” the French president said.

Gorbachev’s Paris visit, however, has failed to stir the French in the same way that his visit to Bonn last month aroused the West Germans to a near-frenzy of what was quickly dubbed “Gorbymania.”

The crowds were thinner, the banners and placards fewer and the press far more skeptical, questioning the Soviet leader’s prospects for political survival in advance of his arrival on Tuesday.

But for Gorbachev, the French president--a socialist hardened in the political battles of postwar France--is one of the few Western leaders whom, aides say, he feels fully understands the import of the reforms under way in the Soviet Union. A total of 15 hours of talks, most of them one on one, are planned.

Earlier Tuesday, the Soviet leader went to the birthplace of the French Revolution at the Place de la Bastille. A few thousand people, including an odd mix of French communists and American tourists, waited for him behind police barricades.

“Where is the Bastille?” asked a frustrated Gorbachev, his view blocked by a surging wave of photographers.

Shortly after he, his wife, Raisa, and Dumas, the French foreign minister, stepped from a long black Soviet limousine, they were stormed by a mob of 200 Soviet, French and foreign journalists, who would have fit in with the rioters who stormed the Bastille prison in 1789.

Visibly angered at the unruly journalists, Gorbachev was finally able to elude them by getting into the limousine, driving away and then doubling back to the site of the old prison, which was torn down by the Parisian masses later in 1789.

Times staff writer Rone Tempest contributed to this story.