Word: pinay
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Dates: during 1952-1952
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...Currency reflects the image of the country," said Pinay. "When the franc has regained its position, France will soon recover its rank...
...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...
...Pinay got "there" because none of the old hands was willing to shoulder the responsibility last February, when the Treasury was empty and the budget unsolved. France, where Crisis is a word rarely out of the headlines, was drifting into the Worst one yet. The country might collapse completely without a U.S. dole. The Indo-China war was going from bad to worse. In the precious North African colonies, the corks were beginning to blow. Finances were in a nightmare tangle...
...whole mess was an affront to the small-town businessman who stepped into the middle of it. Back home in St. Chamond, a small town (pop. 14,500) which prides itself on being the shoelace capital of France, Antoine Pinay had made his small tannery (50 employees) bigger and more profitable than when he inherited it from his father-in-law. There was no reason, he confided to an intimate, why a man could not run France the way he runs a business...
...business of governing France has vast and subtle domestic and global complications which never intruded into Pinay's leather business or crossed the mayor's desk at St. Chamond. But he tucked those toward the rear of his mind, to concentrate on the one problem which his Frenchness told him was closest to the center of France's illness. André Siegfried once remarked of the petit bourgeois that "his heart is on the left, but his pocketbook is on the right." Pinay built his policy as Premier around one object-the Frenchman's pocketbook...