FRANCE: Capitalist Revolution

Business was booming at the Verrerie Marquot, a glass works at Fains-les-Sources, halfway between Paris and Strasbourg. The factory was turning out $50,000 worth of glassware a month. With his furnaces producing at full capacity, Gustave Marquot, the 29-year-old owner, last week was studying plans for expansion.

The Marquot boom was largely due to the way in which the boss was getting along with his 400 workers. Gustave Marquot is practicing and preaching a kind of capitalism which, in most of Europe (and quite a few places in the U.S.), would be considered as both revolutionary and paternalistic.

Partly Moral, Partly Selfish. The Marquot workers live in pleasant cottages for which they pay the company a nominal rent, work in spotlessly clean factory buildings. There are hot and cold showers (available to wives & children on Saturday), a hospital, a library. Gustave Marquot, who inherited the 90-year-old family business last year, is a fairly typical member of Le Centre des Jeunes Patrons (Center of Young Employers), which is trying to build a brighter future for free enterprise in France. The Young Employers are against the predatory capitalism of the past, but they also want to keep France from sliding into the collectivist pitfall. Their answer to the welfare state is to look after their workers’ welfare themselves. Their attitude, they say, is partly moral, partly selfish.

The Center (founded in 1938 but dormant through war and occupation) now has about 3,000 members. They represent a small and dissident fraction of the hidebound Conseil National du Patronat Français (France’s N.A.M.), which has 880,140 members and remains suspicious of the Young Employers’ radical views. But the Young Employers are tireless evangelists. Originally their group was limited to employers under 40; now there is no age qualification, but members are expected to be “young in spirit.”

Their official statement of policy says: “The Young Employers reject all notion of privilege, class or caste . . . They do not consider militant unionists as enemies . . . The right of the man who will and can work to obtain by his labor the means to support himself and his family is absolute . . . The idea cannot be to give all men the same start, because nature has given them unequal physical, moral and intellectual gifts . . . The real ideal is to give everyone a chance . . . The real goal to pursue is that . . . all workers should have the opportunity of becoming capitalists . . . An atmosphere must be created in the nation which fights against the exaggerated appetite for absolute and automatic security . . .”

Right Speed, Right Time. Gustave Marquot considers himself un capitaliste éclairé (an enlightened capitalist). He has set up a profit-sharing plan, health insurance, a pension fund. To combat absenteeism, Marquot has instituted an “assiduity bonus”—each worker gets 150 francs for each two-week period in which he has not been absent from work. There is no union at Marquot’s. About 100 of his 400 workers once belonged to the Communist-dominated C.G.T., but the union fell apart six months ago when the secretary found himself unable to collect dues. Workers’ gripes are now handled by an employee-management council. There are twelve Communists on the Marquot payroll, but Marquot says with a twinkle, “They are theoretical Communists who vote Red but who want no Communism in the factory.”

Plump, apple-cheeked Gustave Marquot, who lives with his family 100 yards from the plant, spends two hours of his nine-hour day at his desk, the other seven talking to workers or watching them make glass. He and his employees use the familiar tu when speaking to one another, but there is no doubt who is boss. A TIME correspondent recently watched Marquot among his workers. Against the eerie background of a dozen gaping furnaces belching fire, men & women moved swiftly as fireflies carrying red-hot glass at the end of prongs, molding, blowing, cooling. There was not much room, but the workers never got in each other’s way. Said the capitaliste éclairé, “It is all a matter of going to the right place at the right speed at the right time.”

Said one worker about his boss: “He knows his job and so do we—that’s what matters . . . Sure, I believe the world is moving irresistibly toward socialism.” Then he added: “But if all the factories were like this, maybe it wouldn’t.”