As the first anniversary of his Fifth Republic rolled around last week, France’s Charles de Gaulle was vacationing in the south at the 11th century abbey of La Celle in Provence. It was either a characteristic bit of lonely audacity on his part or a gathering of strength for the battle ahead, for before President De Gaulle lay the most serious crisis yet to face his regime.
The crisis bore the name of the man most closely identified with the one big success of the De Gaulle era—Finance Minister Antoine Pinay. Hopefully, peace may one day crown De Gaulle’s efforts in Algeria, history may yet regard De Gaulle’s generosity to the restless states of French West Africa as high statesmanship, but the one here-and-now triumph of the regime has been economic. And that is the province of short, commonsensical Antoine Pinay, 68, onetime leader of the powerful right-wing Independents in France’s National Assembly and one of the Fourth Republic’s many Premiers.
Plain-spoken Antoine Pinay, smalltown leather manufacturer who has made himself the living symbol of the Frenchman who carefully counts his change, has long been unhappy in his Cabinet job. He wanted to make quicker progress toward a settlement in Algeria; he deplored De Gaulle’s disregard of his allies and his disdain for NATO. And Pinay made no attempt to disguise his personal dislike for Premier Michel Debre. On at least one occasion he so irked De Gaulle himself that the general accused Pinay of having forgotten “which republic it was.”
For all that, Pinay is by common consent De Gaulle’s most effective minister. Executing plans drawn up by Economic Braintruster Jacques Rueff, he carried through—without the usual rapid and disastrous rise in prices—the devaluation that gave the franc a strength it had not enjoyed in international markets since 1936. Introducing economic liberalism into France’s closed economy, he made the franc convertible, hacked away at government subsidies, even persuaded French business to abandon its traditional protectionism and go wholeheartedly into the Common Market. Heartened by the knowledge that Pinay was at the helm, wealthy Frenchmen repatriated massive quantities of capital that they had secreted abroad—a phenomenon that helped restore France’s foreign reserves.
Fire Me. But Gaullist ideologists in Debre’s Cabinet—led by Minister of Industry Jean-Marcel Jeanneney and Justice Minister Edmond Michelet—had other ideas. To keep the French economy growing, they argued, the government must exercise more active control of business. They wanted to: ¶ Establish a government corporation, similar to Italy’s state petroleum monopoly, to refine and market Sahara oil; ¶Adopt West Germany’s”co-management” scheme—which would give France’s heavily Communist unions seats on the board of directors of every important French company; ¶ Set up a government bank to make loans to ailing industries.
Fortnight ago, Pinay took his objections to the public. Said he: “It is surprising enough that the present government should consider carrying out what are really socialist policies. But that I should be required to apply such a policy is altogether out of the question.” And last week, before a showdown session with Debre, he said that he had no intention of going quietly: “If the government does not want me any more, it will have to issue a decree removing me from office.”
Then, proceeding to the Premier’s study in the Hotel Matignon, Pinay stated his terms: unchallenged control in future over all of France’s economic and financial affairs. Replied Debre stiffly: “There is no Pinay policy. There is only the policy of the government and the head of state.”
The Muttered Word. In the Fifth Republic of Charles de Gaulle, other voices may object but cannot prevail. The National Assembly is growing resentful of its constitutional impotence. Leftists are impatient over wage freezes and mad about state aid to church schools (a touchy issue that led to the Education Minister’s resignation). Rightists charge that De Gaulle is liquidating France’s colonial empire with indecent haste, and disapprove of his Algerian concessions. Many Frenchmen, left to right, are nervous about De Gaulle’s attitude toward the Western alliance. Appeals to la gloire are no longer enough to drown out all these objections. At the mere suggestion that Pinay might leave the Cabinet, shares on the Paris Bourse fell last week.
The threat was not to De Gaulle himself: as President, he holds a seven-year contract. But it could very well undermine Premier Debre, a talented and remote lawyer faithful to De Gaulle but with little popularity of his own. Foreign confidence in the franc and the continued soundness of the French economy were at issue in the challenge posed by Antoine Pinay this week to Charles de Gaulle, returning to his first Cabinet meeting of the new year.
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