Word: pinay
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Hero. His amnesty proposal provoked the most serious opposition. Self-righteous Communists denounced it as "immoral"; Gaullist Deputy 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...
...singularly ordinary Frenchman who runs a tannery in Saint-Chamond, the shoelace capital of France, Antoine Pinay celebrated his victory by staying up until 2 a.m. in a middlebrow beer parlor on the Seine's Left Bank. At week's end he left Paris for the French Riviera, intent on getting back his lost nine pounds...
...become, almost overnight, the most popular politician in France. "Everywhere I go," reported Minister of the Interior Charles Brune, ". . . Pinay is applauded in the newsreels. He is the first politician since De Gaulle who has received spontaneous applause...
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...
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...