Word: franc
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...would need results, not arguments, to convince the National Assembly, which reconvenes next month, that his government can keep its promise to balance the French budget without raising taxes. At first, Pinay did remarkably well (TIME, April 21 et seq.), but by last week his "save-the-franc" campaign had fallen afoul of man and nature. Foot-and-mouth disease, raging in central France, had ravaged cattle herds, sent beef and veal prices soaring. A hot, rainless summer reduced butter and cheese production, ripened a grape harvest so abundant that the bottom fell out of the wine market. Rearmament cutbacks...
Britain recently confronted Washington with the disturbing news that perhaps one full division of the British army in Germany will have to be withdrawn unless the U.S. helps pay for its upkeep. France was still bogged down in the billion-franc-a-day war in Indo-China, which is consuming officers and NCOs faster than they can be trained. None of the 12 German divisions hoped for by 1953 is yet in sight...
...Barrachin's group noisily insists that they are still Gaullists at heart, and that they would resist the Schuman Plan and the European Army as bitterly as De Gaulle himself. But on economic issues, about which Pinay cares most, the Barrachinistes would do their best to save the franc. They proved it last week by standing by Pinay in a confidence vote on the échelle mobile, a cost-of-living bill which ties wage hikes to price increases. It was the last vote of the Assembly's summer session and Pinay won it handily...
Since 1946, when Le Grand Charles walked out of his job as President of France because he could not get the authority he demanded, the "hour of catastrophe" has seemed so close, so often, that the weakling Fourth Republic has learned to live with it. But, as events turned, it was the waiting R.P.F., the biggest single voting bloc in the Assembly, that showed the first signs of crumbling. Last March, 27 of its 118 Deputies flouted party discipline to confirm commonsensible Antoine Pinay as Premier (TIME, March 17). A month later, in another test of strength, 34 Gaullists voted...
Deputy Edmond Barrachin, a fast-talking and well-to-do Parisian columnist, was up on his feet in a flash. Supporting Pinay, he cried, was "not a question of right or left. It was a question of saving the franc when the state had only 4 billion francs [$11.5 million] in its coffers." What riled Barrachin most was that the R.P.F.'s policy of wantonly toppling cabinet after cabinet in an effort to provoke their national catastrophe often led to diabolical alliances of Gaullists and Communists. Barrachin's colleague, Deputy Andre Bardon, had already resigned from R.P.F...