Word: pinay
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...Lords, is a withered arm of government; it can delay 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...
...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...