Word: franc
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...legislation passed by the Lower House, but cannot stop it. Nonetheless, elections in the Senate give one measure of French opinion. This week half of the Senate's 320 seats were up for election. Result: Premier Antoine Pinay, the commonsensible businessman who has cut prices and strengthened the franc, picked up nine seats for his moderate rightist Independent Republicans and Peasants. Most of them were at the expense of General Charles de Gaulle's French People's Rally, which lost nine of its 36 seats. Once again Antoine Pinay had proved that he can dent De Gaulle...
...André Diethelm called it "a pact with the devil." Pinay fought back. From his notes in a big cardboard folder he drew some startling statistics. Example: French peasants and the petit bourgeois have hoarded more than 15 times as much gold as there is in the Bank of France. The obvious reasons: 1) Frenchmen distrust their own paper currency, which seems to buy less every day; 2) many wealthy Frenchmen have avoided paying taxes for so long that they no longer dare invest their money for fear of being found out. By restoring confidence in the franc...
Frenchmen like Pinay because he boldly attacked the problem that troubled them most: high retail prices. In his four weeks in office, butter prices had fallen from 880 to 760 francs per kilo; milk and cheese were down 15%. Pinay had worked no miracles (meat prices are still rising). As a right-wing businessman, he had merely consulted the men he knows best: France's business leaders. He persuaded department-store owners to back a price reduction campaign. He called it "Save the Franc." Some cynical shoppers thought the price cuts were more apparent than real; still, they were...
Double or Quits. By fortunate coincidence, French gold is flowing back home from riot-torn Tunisia, and industrial production is at an alltime high. Result: the franc is growing stronger (the dollar bought 36 francs fewer than it did the week before). No longer did people talk about the inevitability of devaluation...
This did not mean that France was back on its feet, or that Pinay had succeeded. But he had already passed one political miracle: proving that the hitherto solid Gaullist bloc could be split, and that a government could be formed without kowtowing to the Socialists (TIME, March 17). Now he was gambling, double or quits, on a return of confidence. If tax dodgers went on dodging, if France's hidden capital stayed in hiding, if stores raised prices and labor pushed up wages, the defense of the franc would collapse. Pinay had done his best; the rest...