Man with a Voter's Face

FRANCE Man with a Voter's Face (See Cover)

"The cabinet does not want to fall," said Antoine Pinay, "but if you should choose to relieve it of its heavy responsibilities, it will be consoled." In this take-it-or-leave-it fashion, the Premier of France last week demanded a vote of confidence from the National Assembly. When the votes were cast, a precarious margin of nine--300 votes to 291--granted Antoine Pinay's government one more reprieve from the fate that comes with maddening regularity to all who try to govern modern France. The slimness of the majority was a portent of crises to come. It was another sign of the malaise of confusion and instability which dogs France's every effort to regain greatness.

The Unfamiliar. The vote was also a testament to the remarkable staying powers of a mild, methodical leather merchant and provincial politician from mid-France who, last February, was summoned from obscurity to accept the perishable honor of providing France with her 17th government since the Liberation. Antoine Pinay is a small (5 ft. 7 in., 155 lbs.), trig man who, in unguarded moments, resembles Charlie Butterworth with a mustache. He might be the man the French lexicographers meant when they defined petit bourgeois in the dictionary--respectable, thrifty and discreet; at home with account books but uneasy with the great books; shrewd and commonsensical, and sometimes, underneath the humdrum exterior, imaginatively simple. He slipped into the premiership of France like a little-known guest emerging from behind the draperies into the babbling center of a Parisian literary salon.

No one quite knew why he had been invited. His name was not on the familiar, tattered guest list of acceptable Premiers. There was little in his past to indicate that Monsieur Pinay, the tanner from St. Chamond, could last long or do well.

What Pinay proposed to do was neither world-shaking nor highly original, but in the way he proposed it Frenchmen found adrenalin for their flagging spirits. He brought France its first right-of-center government since the war, forming it out of a hostile and mistrustful Parliament, without the help of the vacillating Socialists. So quick was Pinay's popularity with the French public that hostile deputies, suddenly reminded that they had constituencies as well as parties to serve, voted against their inclinations time & again because they feared to tumble him from office. "A most disconcerting fellow," explained one deputy. "He has the face of a voter."

"I Never Asked." Nine months and 14 confidence votes later,* Pinay still sat at the head of the table. It is in the nature of French politics, however, that a Premier--even the most stimulating and effective Premier since Liberation--may be an ex-Premier before the ink is dry on tomorrow morning's newspaper. No one was more aware of that than Antoine Pinay himself. "I never asked to be Premier," he remarked recently. "I see the question very simply. I am there to carry out a policy. If there is to be a different policy, I shall not be there."

Pinay got "there" because none of the old hands was willing to shoulder the responsibility last February, when the Treasury was empty and the budget unsolved. France, where Crisis is a word rarely out of the headlines, was drifting into the Worst one yet. The country might collapse completely without a U.S. dole. The Indo-China war was going from bad to worse. In the precious North African colonies, the corks were beginning to blow. Finances were in a nightmare tangle.

The whole mess was an affront to the small-town businessman who stepped into the middle of it. Back home in St. Chamond, a small town (pop. 14,500) which prides itself on being the shoelace capital of France, Antoine Pinay had made his small tannery (50 employees) bigger and more profitable than when he inherited it from his father-in-law. There was no reason, he confided to an intimate, why a man could not run France the way he runs a business.

The business of governing France has vast and subtle domestic and global complications which never intruded into Pinay's leather business or crossed the mayor's desk at St. Chamond. But he tucked those toward the rear of his mind, to concentrate on the one problem which his Frenchness told him was closest to the center of France's illness. Andre Siegfried once remarked of the petit bourgeois that "his heart is on the left, but his pocketbook is on the right." Pinay built his policy as Premier around one object--the Frenchman's pocketbook.

"Currency reflects the image of the country," said Pinay. "When the franc has regained its position, France will soon recover its rank."

Breaking the Locks. Starkly simple as it was, the crisp, one-track sound of Pinay's program had a decisive effect in the Assembly. Opposed by the two biggest blocs in Parliament--the Socialists and the Communists--Pinay nevertheless assembled a majority willing to join him in the battle of the pocketbook.

More surprising was the reaction in the country. From the ornate rostrum of the Chamber, beneath the stone-eyed gaze of Attic beauties, the prosaic tannery-man from St. Chamond ticked off the things he proposed to do: fight inflation, which had shrunk the franc to one twenty-fifth of its prewar value. Bring down prices, not by dirigisme (the Frenchman's word for government controls) but by persuading the big industrialists and the countless Antoine Pinays of France to be content with more reasonable profit margins. Balance the budget, not by his predecessors' resort to higher taxes, but by slicing expenditures and borrowing on a businesslike basis. Seduce out of hiding the estimated $4 billion in gold concealed in the socks of French peasants and petits bourgeois.

In almost every proposal was a barb that brought squeals of dissent from some faction of the Assembly. But Antoine Pinay, who understands the common Frenchman, was reaching beyond the Assembly to the public. "The remedies are neither of the right nor of the left," he said. ". . . They are technical measures to be taken in a climate of political truce."

Better Than Orson. Suddenly Pinay was a hero. Frenchmen began to compare him with Raymond Poincare, who won fame in the 1920s not because he had been both President and Premier of France, but because he had saved the franc. In newsreel theaters, flashes of the dignified little man in plain double-breasted suit and the homburg provoked wild applause--"the first politician since De Gaulle who has received spontaneous applause," reported an impressed minister after an afternoon at the movies. At the autograph exchange in the gardens of the Palais Royal, the signature of Antoine Pinay went to the top of the priority list. "Even before Jean Marais [the actor]?" Pinay asked incredulously when he learned of it. "Even before Orson Welles," he was told.

One Cheese, Two Prices. Pinay moved his office to the ornate Hotel Matignon, the official residence of Premiers. But he refused to move even a toothbrush or clean shirt into the comfortable apartment maintained there for the chief of the government; he preferred to stay in his unpretentious five-room apartment, to save himself the rigors of the moving-out day which comes to all who move into the Matignon. As was his habit when a Deputy, he locked up his desk almost every weekend and took off to St. Chamond, to look in on his tannery and, as plain His Honor the Mayor, chat with his townspeople.

The new Premier browbeat some segments of industry into chopping prices (wholesale prices dropped 7.7%). He poked into shops and department stores to watch prices and buying habits. In one food store, he watched as a shopkeeper cut a Camembert cheese in half and then priced each half differently. "Always--you hear me, always," Pinay reported indignantly, "the women asked for the more expensive piece." The story is told that Pinay, unable one weekend to get his customary haircut at St. Chamond, went to a Paris barber, and was shocked when he was charged twice what he usually paid back home. Now there is a price ceiling on haircuts. He eased the mistrust of France's cautious peasants by combining a general amnesty for past income-tax evasions with a novel bond issue which could be cashed for gold: it drew more than 34 tons ($42 million) out of cellars, socks and mattresses all over France.

Waste of Time & Money. These homely activities made sense to the France that bred Antoine Pinay--not the American tourist's France of roasted chestnuts and rhinestoned poodles on the Champs-Ely-sees, "Allo darleeng" in the Place Pigalle, pressed duck at the Tour d'Argent, bikinis at Biarritz and baccarat at Nice--but the provincial France of hard-scraped farms, gnarled vineyards, smudgy little factories; of closefisted small shopkeepers, scuff-knuckled farmers and black-stockinged bakers' daughters. It is a France tradition-bound, slow to change, as stolid, solid and unspectacular as the pallid, stucco-faced building in the small town of Saint-Symphorien-sur-Coise where Antoine Pinay was born 61 years ago. His father was a drygoods merchant, his mother a steel-willed matriarch who trusted sternly in God and the franc.

With his sister (now a nun). Pinay got his early schooling at St. Symphorien. He was a lackluster scholar: at ten he announced to his father: "I was made not to obey, but to command." The principal of a boarding school told papa Pinay one day: "Frankly, it's a waste of time and money." At 16 Pinay's formal schooling ended and he was shipped off to a relative's metallurgical plant to learn something about business.

Compulsory military service and World War I interrupted. In September 1914, Pinay was a sergeant in charge of a 75-mm. gun crew on the Aisne front. During a ferocious German attack, Pinay stuck to his gun and turned back a cavalry charge; a few minutes later he was struck down by a direct shell hit which almost severed his right arm. He lay on an operating table in Chartres military hospital, a nurse standing by with the ether cone and the scalpels, when a remarkable coincidence saved his arm. The doctor who planned to amputate was transferred, and his replacement thought he could avoid amputation. After seven painful operations the arm was patched together. (Today it occasionally gives Pinay acute pain and drives him to the soothing waters of Aix-les-Bains. With the two fingers that still work, he can handle knife & fork, and he writes only with difficulty.) It was not until eight years later that the slow process of French bureaucracy provided Pinay with his reward--the Medaille militaire, France's highest accolade for bravery in war.

Out of uniform, a young man with a crippled arm, a feeble education and no visible means of support, Pinay looked a poor risk for success. But there were few young men about; they were dying at the front in the great hemorrhage from which France, almost four decades later, has not yet recovered. To a St. Chamond tanner named Fouletier, Pinay seemed a good prospect to marry his daughter Marguerite and become heir apparent to his leather business. In the customary way--through mutual friends --a marriage was arranged for one day in April 1917. Pinay showed an aptitude for the tannery business, and was able to take it over when his father-in-law died five years later.

Steel for the Spirit. The Pinays prospered, their family grew (two daughters, then a son), and the leather profits bought a solid ten-room house and costly Empire and Louis XVI furniture. But Pinay's happy home life ended abruptly in 1928, in a way which, those who know him believe, may have added the final, necessary strain of steel to Antoine Pinay's makeup. His wife fell victim to an incurable mental disease. For the past 22 years she has lived almost continuously in a mental home.

Left lonely and shaken by his wife's illness, Pinay was grateful when the people of St. Chamond invited him to be their mayor. He built the town a 300-bed hospital, when materials and construction workers were almost impossible to come by. When the treasury got low he did not increase taxes, but scraped around for fresh ways to raise revenue--loans, housekeeping economies. When professional idlers came to town hall in search of handouts,

Pinay would find them jobs; they went to work or moved on.

For 22 years Pinay has been St. diamond's mayor, while also going to the legislature of the Loire Department (1934), to the Chamber of Deputies (1936) and to a seat in the French Senate (1938). For a short while, right after the war, he was out of office--kicked out by the newly dominant Resistance because he was one of 225 Senators who voted state powers to Petain in 1940. Pinay had not joined the Resistance; it offended his conservative sense of law & order. But villagers have since related that as mayor during the occupation, he hid Jews and issued false papers to Frenchmen hunted by the Gestapo. Shortly he was back in the Assembly, and within two years was mayor again.

Message on the Train. Ever the provincial, he orders his clothes not in Paris, but from "the best tailor in Lyon"; in his occasional travels he chooses not the first-but the second-class hotel. When cabinets fell, he always got on a train for St. Chamond instead of staying in Paris with the perennial hopefuls who clustered around the President's palace in the hope that, by chance or default, they might be tapped to form a government. He was a second-echelon minister--Economic Affairs--in the Queuille cabinet; in four successive cabinets he was Minister of Public Works, Transport and Tourism.

When the Faure cabinet fell last February, Pinay trotted off as usual to the Gare de Lyon. He was on the way back from St. Chamond a few days later when a messenger clambered into his compartment at Dijon with President Auriol's invitation to take a fling at forming a government. He had the brashness to try.

A Rainbow of Chaos. The National Assembly ranks with pousse cafe as a peculiarly French concoction. The pousse cafe is one of the most unnecessary drinks in the bartender's manual--a frivolous combination of liqueurs and cognacs, one poured gingerly atop the other to avoid blending them together. Each ingredient forms one bar in a rainbow of alcoholic chaos, each flavor nullifying the taste of the next, all falling into murky disarray if jiggled by a shaky hand. The Assembly is the pousse cafe of parliament.

More than a dozen parties fan across the fancy red horseshoe of the Assembly in dogmatic disorder. On the left sit the 97 Communists, the second largest bloc in the Assembly; they do not even believe in parliamentary democracy, and are interested only in killing it. Next sit 104 Socialists, the largest bloc. To the far right sit the 85 followers of embittered Charles de Gaulle (there were 29 more until they splintered off this year), who have long been under orders from the general to cooperate with no government until the French people vote themselves a new constitution. Between the Communists and Gaullists (both sworn enemies of the Fourth Republic) sit the Socialists and 330 Deputies of the center and conservative parties, which range from the moderate leftist Catholic M.R.P. to the 45 Deputies of Pinay's own Independent Republicans to the horny-handed shellbacks of the Peasant Party. Under a constitution which breeds too many parties and entrusts all power to the Assembly, this was the mishmash which French voters sent to Paris shortly after the war, and. with few shifts, returned in 1951.

Not until 55 days after the 1951 elections was the Assembly able even to agree on a new cabinet, and then it was stuffed with men who had been rejected once, twice, or three times before. With rare exceptions, French politics is a machinery of blocs, not individuals, of party regulars more interested in Gallic theories than in Spartan responsibilities.

Weekend Reflection. Antoine Pinay walked into this domain of canny tacticians and dialectical dancing masters with a misleading double-gait. In the eyes of the public, he was no politician, but to the Assembly he proved to be as wily a one as had come along since the war. He put his proposals to the country as fast as he put them to the Assembly, then calmly told the Deputies: here it is; approve it, or give the responsibility to someone else. The reaction from back home suddenly sounded louder & clearer than the Parisian sidewalk cafe arguments so dear to French politicians.

Pinay capitalized on the rule that a demand for votes of confidence must be followed by a 24-hour intermission. He usually asked for votes on Friday, so the votes would generally fall on Tuesdays, when the Deputies would have had a weekend to learn that the folks back home liked Pinay's proposals. He won vote after vote, ten of them in one day.

The Missing Element. After the first enthusiasm of "the Pinay Experiment" wore off, his critics began to say that his remedy was essentially a set of short-term fiscal manipulations that soothed the skin but did not reach to the disease.

Physically, France is sound--as sound as a dollar and sounder than the franc. Unlike Britain, France can feed herself, and well. With a fertile country, a smiling climate and 42 million intelligent and reasonably hard-working people, France should be able to earn her own fat living. French industrial output is running 13% ahead of the record year 1929.

Yet civilized France is an unhappy, frustrated country; the whole is less than the sum of its parts, and the nation is more in need of a psychiatrist than a physician. In their moments of candor, the French recognize the missing element in themselves: it is civisme, a sense of community responsibility. Divisions are as old and as deep as the French Revolution. At the root is a profound lack of faith in government, an individualism carried almost to the point of anarchy.

This corrosive individualism expresses itself politically in a multiplicity of little parties, huddles of special interests. It shows itself in the big industrialists and businessmen who resist alike the productive imagination of U.S. capitalism and the legitimate aspirations of labor, and prudently send their capital out of the country. And the resultant despair shows in the 5,000,000 Frenchmen, 25% of the electorate, who voted Communist (a survey by France's FORTUNE-like Realties showed that most were "seeking an energetic and dependable champion who would improve their material lot . . . The U.S.S.R., despite a vague sympathy, gets on their nerves a little . . ."). The Frenchman who spends some 60% of his income for food, and lives four in a room because neither government nor business will build him houses, cannot quite get his heart into La Marseillaise when he comes to the line: "The day of glory has arrived."

The nation which once reached for the sun at Austerlitz would settle now for a world which would leave France alone-- though it knows that this cannot be. The dream of 1789--"Liberte, egalite, fraternite"--has given way to a less stirring one: "Securite, stabilite, tranquillite."

Voice of France. Abroad, the France of 1952 is represented by--and often mistakenly epitomized in--Foreign Minister Robert Schuman, with his dedicated internationalism, his willingness to join cause with the despised Boche, his gentle spirit of compromise. But France is far more the country of Antoine Pinay, the methodical, untraveled provincial. Schuman is a liability to the Premier, who keeps him in the cabinet only because to fire him would lose Pinay the vital support of Schuman's colleagues of the M.R.P. party.

Pinay is in many ways the Stanley Baldwin of his generation, little tutored-- and even less interested--in foreign affairs. A practical man, not an idealist, Pinay would like to pull France out of the costly mire of Indo-China if only there were a way to do it without visiting chaos on the whole democratic alliance and shame on France. He is dragging his feet on French ratification of the European army treaty which would rearm Germany. He ordered the adamant French boycott of U.N. discussion of the troubles in French Morocco and Tunisia.

To attribute all these impulses to mere political expediency would be to miss the point: this is the way most Frenchmen want it. This truth is not lost on American diplomats who have to deal with France. "Our feeling," explained a State Department official, "is that anyone who represents the way the French feel is the kind of official with whom to deal. Pinay represents something in France. Robert Schuman sees eye to eye with us--but he does not represent typical French opinion."

"Yours--Ropes!" When Antoine Pinay stood before the Assembly last week, willing to carry on but not begging to, the inevitable fate of every postwar French Premier stared him in the face. Ahead of him lay interminable wrangles, and tense votes of confidence on that traditional trouble spot of Premiers--the year's budget. A lot of the sheen of promise had rubbed off the Premier's fiscal program--some prices were down a bit, but others had risen. The black-market price for the franc had helpfully fallen (from 480 to 400), but there was still far too little gold with which to plate the currency printing presses. Businessmen were complaining of a recession. Actually, Pinay's nine months could be classified as a definite success--for the first time since the war, a government had kept France's sickness from getting any worse, and had brightened up the hospital room immensely. But even success was a handicap, for it made others eager to aspire to the Premier's quarters in the Hotel Matignon.

For an hour and a half Antoine Pinay waded through the dry, tricky intricacies of the budget problem. France, said he, had a right "to seek some relief [from] our allies" in Indo-China. There were "grave difficulties" to be faced in foreign trade. October had set new production records, and November had topped October. From the left a Communist rose to heckle Pinay, and made a tactless sneer at Pinay's leather business.

"Monsieur Denis," snapped the little businessman, "each man earns his living in his own line. Mine is leather. Yours--ropes!" From the Communists came embarrassed sputters, from the rest of the chamber, laughter. Soon after, the Assembly again gave him its shaky confidence.

This week Antoine Pinay was back on the rostrum to face more confidence votes, his crinkly hair neatly combed down, his left hand tugging primly at his waistcoat in a characteristic gesture. Another crisis was at hand. Antoine Pinay was gladder than ever that he had left his toothbrush at home, and not in the Premier's palace.

* Pinay has outlasted all but two other postwar Premiers: Socialist Paul Ramadier, who survived 302 days in 1947, and Radical (which means conservative) Henri Queuille, the farmers' friend, who lasted 390 days the first time around in 1948-49, but only two days on a second try, 123 days on a third.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.