Word: mollet
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...first few questions thrown at French Premier Guy Mollet as he descended from a plane at Orly Field last week were about his U.S. visit. Then French newsmen got down to what they regarded as more important: What would the Premier do about the bill in the National Assembly to raise the price of milk half a cent a quart? To an aide Mollet testily commented: "How can I return from high policy talks with Eisenhower and ask for a vote of confidence on milk...
There was only one characteristically French way to stave off such a humiliating anticlimax: the Premier called in the leaders of the dairy bloc and promised an eventual rise in milk prices, if they would not demand one now. Mollet had special reason to worry about milk; it is one of the 213 items on France's official cost-of-living index. For weeks the index has hovered around 149. The day it hits 149.1, legal minimum wages all over France will jump 5%, triggering eventual pay increases for about twelve million French workers...
...prices, French workers have launched an ominous series of strikes, in one of which some of the Finance Minister's own employees marched down the rue de Rivoli chanting "Hang Ramadier." Inexorably, the day is approaching when, if they want to keep their patient healthy and happy, Drs. Mollet and Ramadier will have to do more than ease his distress with a phony thermometer...
...Watch. But as his confidence grew, so did his ambition. He published a booklet, The Philosophy of the Revolution, which French Premier Guy Mollet calls Nasser's Mein Kampf, but the comparison with Hitler is unfair: Nasser came to power bloodlessly and, though a dictator, conducted no bloody Putsch of his political enemies. In his book he talked about Al Umma al Arabia-"the Arab nation"-which would extend from Cairo and Damascus to Baghdad and Amman, and of a role in the Arab world searching for a hero. It was a first warning to the few who read...
Personality: No socialite, prefers to dine alone in kitchen of his one-bedroom Paris apartment near Bois de Boulogne; still drives black Citroen which he has had since 1945; weekending in Arras he plays billiards or belotte with old friends in favorite bistro. Madame Mollet keeps tabs on his mayoral duties; they have two daughters, Jacqueline and Dolly, one grandchild. A confessed Anglophile, he chain-smokes Player's and admires British "fair play" (a phrase which, he points out, has no counterpart in French); in first three months as Premier lost 15 Ibs., has since regained nine...