800,000 Iron Curtains

One afternoon last week, although it was a weekday, Paris looked like Kansas on Sunday. Some 75% of the city's shops and cafes were closed--the junk dealer at the Bastille, the exclusive hosier in the Rue de Rivoli, the cheap stationer in the Faubourg St. Antoine, the swank Champs Elysees barber. It was not a strike; it was a protest. Many of the indignant proprietors had gone to a mass meeting of the classes moyennes, the middle classes, at the vast and dingy Velodrome d'Hiver. The protest was not local; throughout the nation 85% of small business establishments were closed.

Liaison & Action. That same day Premier Robert Schuman's new inflation remedy, the "supertax" on incomes over 450,000 francs ($3,798), became law when it was rubberstamped by the toothless Council of the Republic (upper house of the legislature, replacing the old Senate). Communists and Gaullists in the Assembly had been against the supertax. Now this formidable new grouping of the classes moyennes, most of whose people were probably Gaullist voters or sympathizers, was out to do battle against it.

The classes moyennes were organized. Small and medium businessmen, doctors, lawyers, architects, chemists, artists, writers had been loosely united ten months ago by the National Committee for Liaison and Action of the Middle Classes, which counts 7,000,000 French men & women in its fold. Its spokesman is a 54-year-old Parisian named Leon Gingembre, whose name matches his personality (gingembre means ginger). Tall, thin, grey, dynamic, Gingembre, a small manufacturer of pins & needles, has bushy eyebrows and the eyes of a zealot, switches his wide smile on & off like a lamp.

"I know," he said last week "I am an authoritarian type, and unpopular. I don't want to be popular, I want to do a job. . . . Our members own 800,000 places of business in France. The government knows we can ring down 800,000 iron curtains."

Revolt, Almost. At the Velodrome d'Hiver, 30,000 people wedged in and more tried to. Dapper doctors and smart young women in furs sat next to seedy old men in skullcaps. A young blonde who had a perfume shop near the Trocadero told a reporter that her hat had cost 28,000 francs ($235) at Lanvin's. She sat, vibrating with anger, until a speaker mentioned Schuman's Finance Minister Rene Mayer, whereupon she stood up, brandished her fist, and shrieked: "That man is an idiot! Let's have some action!"

Gaullist agents in the top balconies showered pamphlets on the crowd. From the prizefighting ring which served as a speaker's platform, Leon Gingembre said: "This super-fiscality will kill our economy by braking production. ... If you can't pay your taxes, send your tax forms back to your deputy and ask him to get you out of the mess he got you into!"

This was revolt, almost. Premier Schuman, beset from left & right, knew that his government could not survive a sustained revolt of the bourgeoisie. Conferences were quickly arranged between Gingembre and Finance Minister Mayer. M. Schuman announced that the government would try to cut the budget by 10%.

An old force in French politics had found a new way of expressing its will; the middle class had a new grip on its pocketbook.

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