Word: chamond
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...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...
...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...
...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. André 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...
Last week, in the magazine Realties, Pinay reported on some experiments, conducted by a staff of economists, which confirmed his own findings at Saint-Chamond...