Foreign News: Back to Casanova

With the French Government facing a staggering budgetary deficit of some six billion francs ($235,000,000 gold, $360,000,000 Roosevelt), knife-faced Finance Minister Georges Bonnet was as glum last week as Louis XV when that profligate and nearly bankrupt King was visited by the sly Venetian Adventurer Giovanni Casanova de Seingalt.

To His Majesty the suave scamp explained the Venetian lottery system. This Louis XV promptly introduced into France, with Casanova as manager, later conferred on him a pension which enabled him to visit and seduce elegant ladies in all parts of Europe. Until recently the Third Republic has scorned to stoop to lotteries, but two months ago Finance Minister Bonnet decided he must take the plunge. Last week he put on sale a batch of 2,000,000 lottery tickets, soon to be followed by four similar batches.

Each ticket is priced at 100 francs ($3.92 gold, $6 Roosevelt), thus making the total lottery stake one billion francs. If all this were velvet M. Bonnet could wipe out one-sixth of the deficit at one stroke. Instead 60% of the lottery proceeds must flow back to the public in prizes, 10% will pay expenses, only 30% going to M. Bonnet’s Treasury to help pay French War veterans’ pensions.

From the first, last week, there was no doubt of the Bonnet Lottery’s smashing success. Long before dawn impatient queues formed all over France in front of banks, post offices, tax-collection bureaus, tobacco shops. Doors opened at 9 a. m., Frenchmen shoved and fought to buy. By 9:30 every ticket in the first batch of 2,000,000 was sold and speculators were reselling them to disappointed latecomers at a 20% premium. Drawings to determine winners in the first batch will be held on Armistice Day in Paris’ lofty, crescent-shaped Palais du Trocadero facing the Eiffel Tower. Every holder of a block of ten tickets will receive a 20% rebate if none wins a prize—this feature especially appealing to thrifty Frenchmen. Waiters, taxi-drivers and petty shopkeepers to whom even 500 francs looks big, were asking each other excitedly last week, “What would you do with 5,000,000 francs?” That being the amount of the Grand Prize.

Since everyone knows that lottery methods cannot fill the bucket of France’s deficit, crucial interest began to focus on the reassembling of the Chamber of Deputies next month. Writing in Le Capital last week former Finance Minister Louis Germain-Martin, no friend of his successor M. Bonnet, submitted a brutal analysis of the budget situation, proved that the Chamber can restore stability, but only by wholesale cuts in veterans’ pensions and civil servants’ salaries, by a drastic drive against chronic French income tax frauds, and by imposing new taxes so crushing that the Chamber seemed likely to balk. Warning that if France wants to avoid inflation, the Frenchman’s nightmare, she must make heroic sacrifices, M. Germain-Martin said:

“Mr. Roosevelt had the temerity to tell us he believed neither in our desire to achieve financial soundness nor in the possibility of defending our gold standard. He hopes we will resort to inflation. He is unable to understand the repugnance felt by all social classes in France to the attitude of financial drifting which would lead to inflation. But action is necessary. “Let us not forget that since April, 1932, successive governments have solicited 32,000,000,000 francs in new bond issues. We cannot continue to live like privledgedsons on borrowed money.”