Word: pinay
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...cabinet does not want to fall," said Antoine Pinay, "but if you should choose to relieve it of its heavy responsibilities, it will be consoled." In this take-it-or-leave-it fashion, the Premier of France last week demanded a vote of confidence from the National Assembly. When the votes were cast, a precarious margin of nine-300 votes to 291-granted Antoine Pinay's government one more reprieve from the fate that comes with maddening regularity to all who try to govern modern France. The slimness of the majority was a portent of crises to come...
...Unfamiliar. The vote was also a testament to the remarkable staying powers of a mild, methodical leather merchant and provincial politician from mid-France who, last February, was summoned from obscurity to accept the perishable honor of providing France with her 17th government since the Liberation. Antoine Pinay is a small (5 ft. 7 in., 155 lbs.), trig man who, in unguarded moments, resembles Charlie Butterworth with a mustache. He might be the man the French lexicographers meant when they defined petit bourgeois in the dictionary-respectable, thrifty and discreet; at home with account books but uneasy with the great...
...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...
...What Pinay proposed to do was neither world-shaking nor highly original, but in the way he proposed it Frenchmen found adrenalin for their flagging spirits. He brought France its first right-of-center government since the war, forming it out of a hostile and mistrustful Parliament, without the help of the vacillating Socialists. So quick was Pinay's popularity with the French public that hostile deputies, suddenly reminded that they had constituencies as well as parties to serve, voted against their inclinations time & again because they feared to tumble him from office. "A most disconcerting fellow," explained...
...Never Asked." Nine months and 14 confidence votes later,* Pinay still sat at the head of the table. It is in the nature of French politics, however, that a Premier-even the most stimulating and effective Premier since Liberation-may be an ex-Premier before the ink is dry on tomorrow morning's newspaper. No one was more aware of that than Antoine Pinay himself. "I never asked to be Premier," he remarked recently. "I see the question very simply. I am there to carry out a policy. If there is to be a different policy, I shall...