FRANCE: Lesson from a Piece of Cheese

Premier Antoine Pinay, a resolutely ordinary Frenchman, likes to think of France as a large-scale model of Saint-Chamond (pop. 15,000), his industrious little home town (its chief product: shoelaces) near Lyons. As often as he can, Pinay locks his desk in the Hotel Matignon, his official Paris residence, and slips away to look over the prosperous tannery he still owns in Saint-Chamond, and to chat with local shopkeepers and housewives about the problem on whose solution he has staked his political future: how to cut prices, hold back inflation. Recently, le petit Premier made a startling discovery: high prices are caused not simply by “greedy capitalists,” as the Socialists and Communists would have it, but by “thrifty” French housewives who have forgotten how to be thrifty.

Last week, in the magazine Realties, Pinay reported on some experiments, conducted by a staff of economists, which confirmed his own findings at Saint-Chamond.

¶Faced with two halves of the same Camembert cheese, one carrying a bigger price tag than the other, French housewives “always” (“You hear me—always”) ask for the more expensive piece. ¶Presented with both halves of the same bolt of cloth, customers not only buy the higher-priced half but actually invent reasons justifying the price difference.

As long as they stick to such spendthrift habits, concluded Pinay, France should not expect the government to perform price-cutting miracles. “Ever since Henry IV,* all governments have broken their teeth on this problem [of prices]. The only solution would be an abundance of goods and the restoration of free competition. But things are not that simple, because the customer does not know how to defend himself. On the contrary, he favors high prices . . .”

Line of Mercury. Pinay had a good talking point, but he would need results, not arguments, to convince the National Assembly, which reconvenes next month, that his government can keep its promise to balance the French budget without raising taxes. At first, Pinay did remarkably well (TIME, April 21 et seq.), but by last week his “save-the-franc” campaign had fallen afoul of man and nature. Foot-and-mouth disease, raging in central France, had ravaged cattle herds, sent beef and veal prices soaring. A hot, rainless summer reduced butter and cheese production, ripened a grape harvest so abundant that the bottom fell out of the wine market. Rearmament cutbacks produced spotty unemployment in the engineering trades; French labor unions threatened new demands for wage increases. With

France’s 1952 budget already 200 billion francs in the red Pinay was in a tough spot.

Without additional U.S. aid (which Washington has already refused), France might soon be in for more trouble. But “Lucky” Pinay refused to be downhearted. Last month, vacationing at Aix-les-Bains in the French Alps, he ran into a gypsy in front of his hotel. The gypsy grasped the Premier’s hand, studied his palm and said: “I see no change in your present political situation for at least a year or possibly two . . .” Then the gypsy traced Pinay’s line of Mercury (which shows ability in the pursuit of wealth), and added: “You are going to make a long voyage to North America within the next two or three months …”

Washington didn’t need to read its heart line (which shows generosity to others) to figure out why.

* Warrior King of France, born 1553, assassinated 1610, and still remembered affectionately for his comment: “I should like to see a chicken in the pot of every Frenchman on Sundays.”