An Ordinary Frenchman

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Late in the morning the stocky man stirs in the old-fashioned featherbed, and demands his cafe au lait. He dumps in three lumps of sugar, shrugs into an old bathrobe, then sprawls on the bed again as he scans the morning papers. Soon he is dictating orders, directives and notes to his black-haired wife, her typewriter propped on a suitcase beside the bed. Before he is dressed, cars come honking down a narrow street usually disturbed only by the clump of a cart or a delivery boy's whistle, and men in leather coats and caps, or in ill-fitting tradesmen's suits, knock on the door of the big red brick house. A grocer who is now a Deputy of France lets them in, where they find their leader munching on a breakfast of bread and a tangerine.

This house in Ablon, a quiet backwater seven miles outside Paris, is the headquarters of Pierre Poujade, the cocky, handsome ex-bookseller who at 35 is the most talked about political figure in France today.

From this house, lent by an admirer and crammed with marble cherubs, potted palms and framed needlepoint, this brash young man directs a dedicated army of 800,000 followers from Calais to Algiers. By lifting a phone, he can organize a rally in a provincial town 400 miles away, have the region plastered with posters in 48 hours, dispatch two, ten or 20 Assembly Deputies there as if they were errand boys. Every day, new memberships pour into his new offices in downtown Paris, new readers subscribe to his two newspapers.

Politics of Protest. The power of Pierre Poujade has grown monstrous in the short two months since he parlayed a taxpayers' strike into 2,600,000 votes and 53 Deputies sworn to do his bidding. Then, a senior politician dismissed him as "an episode." Last week, getting stronger all the time, Poujade boasted: "New elections--next month, next week, tomorrow--would give me five to six million votes, and perhaps 200 Deputies."

The newly elected French Assembly already seems as bad as the old, and nearly as bad as Poujade said it was. The new government of Socialist Guy Mollet started with high hopes, but bogged down into immobilism even faster than most of its predecessors. The Assembly's attempt to bar Poujade Deputies on flimsy, legalistic grounds outraged even some of Poujade's critics and created a wave of sympathy for him and fresh disgust at the Assembly's petty men.

Pierre Poujade. with his kinetic oratory and his toilet-wall slang, has better than anyone else harnessed the French citizen's growing discontent with the Fourth Republic. He seized attention by his fight against taxes, but his popularity reflects a deeper discord in the France of 1956. That discontent became hurtful with the loss of Dienbienphu. agonizing with the rebellions in Tunisia and Morocco. Now, confronted with the crisis in Algeria, the Fourth Republic faces a crisis in the existence of the parliamentary system itself.

Pierre Poujade's instrument is not reason but resentment, not plans but protest. It is the resentment of the provincial against sophisticated Paris, of poverty against the prosperous, of nationalism against the crumbling of empire, of common man against politicians. He raised the ancient French rallying cry, "We are betrayed." He called the Assembly "the biggest brothel in Paris." called the Deputies "piles of ordure," "pederasts" and "phonies." "The empire is destroyed," he cried, and demanded hanging for the "traitors" who were responsible.

The Ordinary Frenchman. Pierre Poujade looks like a peasant and makes the most of it. He avoids ties in favor of turtleneck sweaters or open-throat shirts. His shoes are often unshined, his pants unpressed, his nails dirty, his light beard unshaven. He prefers his country red wine to champagne, the kitchen to the living room, and he drinks his soup from his plate. He boasts that he has no book learning. "Why should I study books? I know more already than the people who wrote them." He tells crowds: "I'm just le petit Poujade, an ordinary Frenchman like you."

On the platform he mocks politicians with a peasant's shrewdness, mocks Paris with a provincial's scorn, mocks himself with rough humor. "We have been too long on all fours." he shouts. "That way we were perfectly placed to get kicked." He brags. Puffing up a paper bag, he bursts it with a bang, and explains: "If I did that in the Assembly, six or seven Deputies would be trampled to death in the stampede for safety." Once, returning from Paris lugging two huge suitcases, he quipped: "It's nothing much--just a couple of Cabinet ministers cut up in little pieces."

The Nondescript. If Pierre Poujade belongs in the category of demagogues or dictators, he is a strange specimen. He exudes none of the magniloquence of a Mussolini, the cold power of a Stalin, the megalomania of a Hitler. Instead, there is an engaging air of cafe table simplicity about him. Even his features are nondescript and the despair of caricaturists. "Look me in the eyes, and you will see yourself," he cries to his listeners.

It is true, and it is a big truth. But Poujade speaks for a France which is not the tourist France, the country of the arts and graces and gaiety, the France that was once the world's greatest power. Poujade's France is the France of the baked-dirt squares where men play boules on summer evenings, the France of old ladies in black sitting in overstuffed rooms shuttered against the summer sun, of peasants in faded blue work clothes, of the little stores tended by the middleaged women shuffling out of the backrooms. It is a France which distrusts Paris and its frivolities and its politicians and its intellectuals and its big modern businesses.

It is the bourgeois' France, which won its birthright in the Revolution and has been hanging on to it grimly ever since. It is the France which widened the streets of Paris to discourage new revolutions, set up guilds to prevent overproduction, equated smallness with self-sufficiency, and self-sufficiency with independence. Generations of French children were brought up on the adage: my glass is small, but it is my own.

In former days the little shopkeeper might not earn much money, but he was content because he had "independence," the chance to take life easy, leave his wife behind the counter while he went hunting in winter or fishing in summer. The wine was cheap, food was good, and the rest of the world could go hang. "Je me defends," was his motto.

Nobody was more coddled. The little shopkeepers got concessions, the little artisans (working with no more than one "companion") were exempted from production taxes, the peasant probably paid no tax at all because his family farm was obligingly assessed on ancient land values. Result: 150 years after the Industrial Revolution, nearly half of France's working population is still self-employed v. one in six in the U.S. And while Paris and the industrial north thrived, Poujade's France lagged, clinging desperately to a way of life a century out of date.

Last week France as a whole was booming. Industrial production last year was 60% above prewar, 20% over 1954. Wages have risen 19%, while prices (though very high) have remained stable. Even the birth rate has reversed the long decline of the 19303--population increased last year by 280,000.

It was a prosperity Poujade's France watched with rancor. The prosperity of the other France was not their prosperity; in fact, it threatened to destroy them. Provincial artisans could not compete with its mass-produced goods, provincial storekeepers with its chain stores and their big turnovers. Even the tax system, which so long had coddled them, now threatened to crush them. So they cheated on their taxes, and pleaded it was simple necessity.

Almost everybody in France cheats on his taxes as a civic right. The state expects it. Disputed taxes are based on the "visible signs of wealth," and tax forms, making a presumption of deceit and preparing for it, demand the horsepower of the family car, number of dogs, number of keyboard instruments. Shopkeepers, not trusted to report their true profits, pay on their turnover.

But disastrously for France's hard-pressed shopkeepers, the tax law forces them to pay whether they make money or not. For them, cheating had become a matter of simple survival for a business that had no economic right to survive at all. In 1953, when a zealous tax expert ordered a crackdown, shopkeepers all over France rebelled--a bewildered, angry explosion of despair and unreasoning protest against the forces which condemned the good life to economic death. "Je me defends," they cried, and their voice was Poujade's.

Too Many Shops. Heartland of the taxpayers' revolt and Poujade's power is the region south of the River Loire. Typical as any is the small town of Saint-Cere in Quercy, where Poujade was born. Once, Saint-Cere was a thriving medieval town of spires, turrets and picturesque houses. Now empty houses sag into ruin. Since 1800 population has dropped from 5,000 to 3,000. Its 13 mills, ten brick and clay factories, four tanneries shrank to two leather works and three small distilleries. Today the main industry is tourists (mostly French) who come to see the nearby caves with their prehistoric drawings, to dance at the casino, or to linger on candlelit terraces late into the velvet evenings over Saint-Cere's specialties--truffles, goose, freshwater crayfish.

But when the tourists leave and the winter comes, Saint-Cere, swaddled in sweaters and overcoats, shivers in its ancient houses, in a monotony relieved only by a weekly movie.

Saint-Cere has 218 shops--roughly one for every three families. There are 32 cafes, 30 groceries, eight butchers, seven bakers. Many are run only as sidelines, tended by wives while men work as masons, farmers or salesmen. The richest man in town is a Communist who owns the movie house and casino. The young leave, the old dream of happier days.

The youngest of eight children of a penniless contractor, Pierre Poujade was born here on Dec. 1, 1920. His father's ancestors were serfs, his mother's, impoverished landowners. Widowed when Pierre was only seven, his mother took in washing, kept chickens in the backyard. In school Poujade doted on history and the glory that was France. His favorite character was Napoleon. At 13 he got so youthfully enthusiastic about the fascist movement of Jacques Doriot that he flunked his school finals. He spent the next three years wandering Southern France, working in vineyards, on docks ("I wanted lots of muscles"), in a road gang.

After France fell, Poujade leaped enthusiastically into Petain's Companions of France, an organization that was loaded with team spirit, stern slogans and close-order calisthenics, all of which Poujade loved: "That was real French fraternity." But when the Allies landed in North Africa and the Germans moved into unoccupied France, Poujade hit out for the Spanish border.

Interned, he spent five miserable months in a Spanish jail before making his way to Portugal and thence to Morocco. His body was covered with boils and sores. At Rabat airbase, Chief Nurse Yvette Seva grimly nursed him back to health. Two years later she married him. Daughter of a French tax functionary ("Imagine, my own father-in-law a tax collector!") whose family had lived in Algeria for 120 years, Yvette is a strong-minded woman, vigorously antiSemitic, and firmly dedicated to the proposition that what's good for the colon is good for Algeria.

Once his health mended, Pierre was shipped to England, where he ended the war as a chairborne sergeant with the R.A.F. He went back to his mother's .drafty old house (no bathtub or flush toilet) in Saint-Cere and sent for Yvette. Their problem: how to make a living.

After two years of selling books as a traveling salesman, Poujade leased a twelve-foot shop on Saint-Cere's main street and opened a book and stationery store. While Pierre's mother minded their four children, Yvette tended shop and Poujade peddled books on his route in an ancient Renault. He got a taxi license, drove summer tourists on sightseeing trips, conducted guided tours for summer visitors. As a Gaullist, he was elected to the town's 24-man municipal council in 1953.

But Poujade himself was barely keeping alive. "If I paid my taxes, I would have gone broke," Poujade insists. "I had to pay out more than I made. It was the same thing for everybody in Saint-Cere and all over France. We could only keep going by fraud."

The Revolt. One day in July 1953, a local blacksmith and municipal councilor named Georges Fregeac got a tax notice: controle (inspection of his books) next day. Twenty-six other shopkeepers and artisans of Saint-Cere got the same notice. Blacksmith Fregeac was behind in his taxes, of course, and he could not pay. Hurriedly, he summoned his fellow councilors to an emergency meeting in a cafe. Early next morning, two inspectors faced a hostile crowd of some 300 shopkeepers in slippers and aprons. "Get out of here," yelled the mob. The inspectors left. Pierre Poujade had found his cause. Poujade wrote later: "It was David against Goliath. It was justice against the inquisition. It was liberty on the march. It was the pure French tradition."

Poujade had not started the revolt of Saint-Cere, or even organized it. But Poujade swiftly exploited and expanded it into a national force. He took off in his car, scoured the depressed countryside with his new doctrine of discontent. He ignored his business and forgot to sell his books. He transformed Saint-Cere's refusal to pay taxes into a patriotic duty. In cafes and village squares, Poujade cried: "We must refuse to pay tribute to a corrupt system which breaks our backs while sparing the giant profiteers who are pillaging France. Only by united resistance can we force them to reform the rotten regime which now threatens France with ruin."

Warning Bells. For 1,000 francs ($3) a year dues, Poujade offered cash benefits in the form of taxes unpaid, coupled with a mutual insurance system to prevent reprisals because of mob action against inspectors. "I talked until my throat was so sore that I was spitting blood," says Poujade. In its first year, Poujade's Union for the Defense of Shopkeepers and Artisans (UDCA) organized 500 ''oppositions" to tax collectors, recruited priests to ring church bells as warnings of inspectors approaching. When delinquent taxpayers were seized, Poujade packed the auctions to buy back their belongings for next to nothing (1-c- for a sofa, 1/2-c- for a radio). Sometimes Poujadists roughed up tax inspectors to discourage their zeal. Soon Poujade could boast: "In 70 departments, we are the bosses."

Poujade sped around France, talking, always talking. "In 1945 we liberated France," he shouted. "Now we are going to liberate the French." He demanded cessation of tax inspections and forgiveness of tax violators, sent an ultimatum to Premier Edgar Faure himself. While Poujade watched scornfully from the visitors' gallery, the Premier and Deputies of France caved in, gave Poujade not all but most of his demands. When Poujade took off his coat preparatory to donning a sweater and leaving, the Assembly president was so nervous that he pushed the riot-call button, which summons the Republican Guard on the run and locks all the Assembly doors. Today Poujade has only to take his coat off and look around for the Garde to get a laugh from his crowds.

Alarmed at last, Premier Faure sent an emissary to Poujade to try to buy him off, with money from the secret funds French Premiers have always used to buy off trouble (as Colonel Franc,ois de la Rocque of the prewar Croix de Feu was bought off). Faure's offer (according to Poujade) was $280,000 and a seat on the Economic Council of the Republic. Poujade refused. Belatedly the government brought suit against him for "organization of collective refusal to pay taxes." With this authority, detectives rummaged through Poujade's files, ransacked his offices, tapped his phones, even searched his mother's house in Saint-Cere. Faure hoped to turn up some hidden and sinister backers of Poujade, but the detectives turned up nothing. The government lacked the resolution to press its case before election in the face of 1,000,000 maddened shopkeepers.

Campaign Commandos. Poujade prepared for the election by leasing a 30-room hotel outside Saint-Cere, where he ran ten-day training courses for hundreds of picked followers. He created an amateur army of commandos who flung vegetables and abuse at rival speakers or broke up their meetings. He broadened his appeal, organized affiliates for peasants, youth, workers, professionals. He preached only discontent, "throw the rascals out." As it wore on, his campaign grew vaguer. "My program is to have no program," he declared. He put up 819 candidates, made each take an oath never to take a position not approved personally by Poujade under penalty of "all the punishments reserved for traitors." What punishment did he intend? "Very simple, hanging," said Poujade breezily, and grinned.

The Assembly had never seen a group like the 53 Poujadists elected. None had ever been in the Assembly before. They ranged from hard-boiled ex-paratrooper Jean-Marie Le Pen ("I suppose I am different. I like women") to voluble Andre Gayrard, director of the national confederation of butchers. Some had been Resistance fighters, other collaborators or members of the fascist Croix de Feu. Most were small grocers, bakers, mechanics, shopkeepers; and each of them obeyed Little Pierre. Poujade leased a small hotel near the Louvre to house them, held a three-day conference to teach them parliamentary procedure. "See, my boys, now you listen to Little Pierre," he told them. from the gallery.

When he returns to Saint-Cere, where a housekeeper takes care of his two youngest children in a new house he has rented (no central heat, no bath, meals in the kitchen), the town elders glance up from their cards and shrug: "It's only Pierrot." But his organization men, waiting in the backroom, are excited and cordial, report happily of hundreds of new dues-paying members since election, listen while Poujade regales them with a bit of gossip from the big city and a lot of Poujade propaganda.

He explains his new theory on Algeria: "Big Wall Street syndicates found incredibly rich oil deposits in the Sahara, but instead of exploiting the discovery they capped the wells and turned the Algerians against us." He discourses on France's alliances: "All this is a great diabolic scheme to dismember France. Already the Saar is gone, and soon the Italians will want Corsica." He adds slyly: "As for those who are against us, I need only say: let them go back to Jerusalem. We'll even be glad to pay their way."

About the collaborators and ex-fascists on his staff, Poujade is abrupt: "I'm tired of people looking for lice in my hair. I fought the Germans and I know what resistance is. I don't need anybody to give me lessons in patriotism." Asked one man at a recent Saint-Cere meeting: "But what about tax reform?" Snapped Poujade: "That's precisely what we're fighting for, but to achieve real basic reforms we must reform the whole system."

Widening the Front. The truth is that Poujade has not mentioned tax reform since election, and he no longer talks of hanging. He is now intent on winning more moderate Frenchmen who are disgusted with the regime but dismayed by violent methods. He wants to live down the nickname hung on him in the campaign: "Poujadplf." Cagily, Poujade refused to join patriotic groups in a display in support of the Algiers demonstrations against Premier Guy Mollet. "They wanted Poujade to march on the Champs Elysees so that they could provoke the crowd and smash a few faces. The next morning every newspaper in France would be screaming, 'Poujade, fascist!' I'm not as stupid as I look."

Poujade now aspires to create a new "authentic French fraternity" which ranges far beyond shopkeepers. He has been assiduously wooing labor, dines union leaders 40 and 50 at a time. "When the workers listen to me, they say: 'Poujade is not so bad; he is not against us at all. He is against our enemies, the big trusts.' " The big trusts themselves are interested. Textile Tycoon Marcel Boussac, biggest of French businessmen, owner of race horses and the fashion house of Dior, sent an emissary to sound out this new political phenomenon. "He tried to pull the worms out of my nose," was Poujade's characteristically inelegant reaction.

In the early days, Poujade welcomed even the Communists. But as he felt his own power grow, he rigorously excluded them, rejected overtures from Jacques Duclos himself for an alliance. The Communists find him just as useful as an opponent. He enables them to raise the old cry of the left against the "Fascist Right," and the Communists raise it at every opportunity. Last week Poujade dispatched ten Deputies to a rally in industrial Toulouse. The Communists quickly organized a counter demonstration and enlisted the support of the Socialist mayor.

When Poujadist Jean-Marie Le Pen and his nine comrades got to the hall, they were besieged by a mob of 5,000, beaten with knuckledusters, bottles, lead pipes and crowbars. Le Pen broke up a chair to make a club, battled his way clear. Only after the police decided the Poujadists had learned their lesson did they intervene. "In Toulouse, as in all France, Fascism will not pass," orated the mayor, and led the crowd in the Marseillaise and the Internationale.

Back in Paris, ex-Paratrooper Le Pen pointed the moral: "While Socialists in the government fumble, the Communists are taking over control of the crowds and leading them into the streets. This is the popular front forming at the base. Poujade knows what is coming. He'll be ready to take right action at the right time." In other words, only Poujade could save France from a Communist-dominated popular front.

Passing Fancy? Whoever won in any such contest between thugs of the right and left, the center voices of moderation would be likely to lose. In France, the moderate's voice is getting harder to hear. Every day, as the Mollet government fumbles, Frenchmen die in Algeria, French anger and disgust swells, Poujade's dynamic appeal grows more persuasive to many disillusioned Frenchmen. "It is getting painful to be French," observed Novelist Albert Camus recently.

Is Poujade an unrecognized Hitler, or a nuisance that will pass? The prevailing Parisian opinion is that Poujadism is a passing fancy. There have been tax revolts before, and demagogues to capitalize on them. There have been protests before against a parliamentary system which seems increasingly unable to reach a decision, or to let anyone else reach one. De Gaulle (rigid in his dislike of parliamentary palaver but no demagogue) polled nearly twice Poujade's vote only five years ago. Old hands in the French Assembly, unexcelled in cynical wisdom, have seen to the corruption of other hot incorruptibles.

But then the Fourth Republic faced no such testing time as it now faces. The anguished question of Algeria--the possibility that it may become another Indo-China, closer to home--is the one unknowable in all comfortable calculations about the future of parliamentary democracy in France. In such a crisis, Pierre Poujade, who now waves an uncertain banner before his followers, may lose them to a leader of hardier intent, or discover his own opportunity for power.

"Pierre," an old friend asked him recently, "what are you trying to do? The papers say you want to take power and overthrow the Republic?" Poujade grinned. "Why not?" he said. "But . . ." his friend began. Poujade cut him off brusquely. "Why not?" he snapped.

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