Word: pinay
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Harsh Proposition. De Gaulle, and his conservative Finance Minister Antoine Pinay (a small-town tanner before entering politics) added two other anti-inflationary controls. To keep wages in line, they abolished the old system of pegging salaries to the cost-of-living index-though to compensate France's poor for increased food costs they decreed a 5.5% raise in the minimum wage. And by the removal of import quotas on a wide list of products. France's manufacturers would be exposed to so much foreign competition that it would be difficult for them to raise prices. Had these...
...picking a Cabinet together, De Gaulle and Debre are expected to keep much of De Gaulle's present team in office: Antoine Pinay as Finance Minister, capable Career Diplomat Maurice Couve de Murville as Foreign Minister, and safe Civil Servant Emile Pelletier as Interior Minister. One likely departure is Minister of State Guy Mollet, whose Socialist Party dislikes De Gaulle's new austerity budget. Mollet talks of the need to create a loyal opposition, so that resentment particularly among the workers, can be expressed through others than the Communists...
...Squeeze. All this, despite the fact that Britain has long been contemplating external convertibility, had the effect of putting a painful squeeze on France. Yet Pinay had not opposed the British and Germans; in fact, it was he who proposed advancing the date to Dec. 27. With the franc officially valued at 420 to the dollar but selling in the free market for 470 or worse, General de Gaulle's government was already faced with one harsh fact: unless the official value of the franc were brought into line with its true value, French products would be too highpriced...
...long and somber Cabinet meetings last week, De Gaulle and his Cabinet wrestled with these awkward realities. At last, hot on the heels of the London announcement, Antoine Pinay proclaimed France's course. Presumably buoyed up by promises of financial underwriting from West Germany, France followed Britain's lead, made the franc, too, externally convertible. At the same time the De Gaulle government devalued the franc by an unexpected 17.5%, established a new rate of 493.7 to the dollar...
...Gaulle and his ministers proposed to introduce gradually, between now and 1960, a new "heavy franc," equivalent to 100 present francs and roughly close in value (20?) to two of the world's most respected monetary units-the German Deutsche Mark and the Swiss franc. (Frenchmen, said Pinay, will soon get used to dropping two zeros from all their figures...