Word: ch
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...riot because the Cabinet of that stylish Paris Lawyer Maître Paul-Boncour was falling -on the issue of this year's budget which French Deputies have threshed with increasing futility for two weeks (TIME, Jan. 30). Final debate dragged through 22 hours. When famed Papa Henri Chéron, stubborn old Norman Finance Minister, demanded an "absolute [balanced] budget" at the cost of drastic tax uppings and salary slashes, he was met by arguments for what was called a "relative budget...
Deputy Léon Blum, leader of the Socialist Party whose votes had been vital in keeping the Paul-Boncour Cabinet in power, attacked Papa Chéron thus: "In a crisis like this all estimates need to be modified from one minute to the next. . . . The pursuit of a rigorous balance is the pursuit of a mirage. . . . If the violence of the remedy aggravates the ill, what will become of your rigid balance? There is nothing to do but approach a balance, and certainly meanwhile one must borrow...
Such reasoning had so obvious an appeal to the Chamber that Premier Paul-Boncour threw overboard some of Papa Chéron's most onerous taxes and economies. For a time the Cabinet seemed to have been saved. It won a vote of confidence 348 to 243. The Chamber voted 400 to 181 to sit all night and began to vote sections of the budget, voted 65 of the 150 sections. Suddenly up popped an item of 5% reduction in the pay of civil servants. Socialist objections touched off pandemonium. "My heart is torn," cried stringy-haired Socialist Blum...
...reflect too long. Chéron," chaffed a Cabinet colleague. "In the end you will accept!" Deliberately, ten minutes later, Papa Chéron accepted. French cartoonists rejoiced. Within a week M. Chéron was a national figure, a sort of Norman Coolidge, invincibly bourgeois. As Finance Minister he outlasted Premier Poincaré, carried on under Premier Briand, then under Premier Tardieu. When the latter fell (TIME, Feb. 24, 1930) Papa Chéron was found to have left in Jean Frenchman's long, woolen sock a treasury surplus of 19 billion francs...
Today, two short years afterward, France has squandered her surplus and faces a budgetary deficit of more than 10½ billion francs. Last month, when Premier Joseph Paul-Boncour succeeded Edouard Herriot, he begged Papa Chéron to come out of retirement and roll up a surplus again. After solemn thought (and probably some chest thumping) Chéron of Lisieux is Finance Minister again. Last week at a painful Cabinet session he told Premier Paul-Boncour & Ministers exactly what bitter pills must be swallowed if France is to have a sound, balanced budget again...