FRANCE: Trials & Improvisations

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Meanwhile at Clermont-Ferrand a military tribunal tried, stripped of rank and sentenced to death General Charles de Gaulle, for desertion, flight, conspiring with a foreign power, inciting French soldiers to enter service with a foreign power, and engaging in propaganda against France. Safe in his dingy suite of offices on London's Victoria Embankment, where he is trying to rally free Frenchmen to the cause of liberation, General de Gaulle took his death sentence lightly, declared: "I shall have a settlement of accounts with the men of Vichy after the British victory. I consider this act to be void."

Improvisations. In Wiesbaden, where the Armistice Commissions met daily, the French continued to plead for the evacuation of Paris.

Without waiting for the Nazis to depart, France's new Minister of Finance, Marcel Yves Bouthillier, moved his ministry back to Paris and as an optimistic gesture ordered the reopening of the Bourse. "The finances of France must now be handled by improvisation," declared the scholarly, 39-year-old Minister, who has one of the best money minds in France. Neither a Fascist nor a politician, Bouthillier has spent the entire 14 years of his public life in the Finance Ministry, leaves it to attend the opera, to go to bed, or to indulge in his favorite sport—sailing.

At his Ministry in the Louvre Palace last week he found a strange contrast to the days when France was a banking power. Instead of financial kings, industrialists, foreign statesmen and Oriental potentates, his anterooms and the entrance to the Palace were crowded with anxious officials demanding back salary, retired civil servants wanting overdue pensions, and worried captains of industry begging for credit to get their factories going. "People expect miracles," remarked

Minister Bouthillier's young assistant, "but we are not miracle men; we are more like acrobats performing in an empty circus."

. One way France intended to finance defeat became apparent when the Petain Government ordered the confiscation of the wealth and private property of Banker Baron Edouard de Rothschild and millionaire Importer Louis Louis-Dreyfus, who held two of the five great fortunes of France. A decree permitted the Government to revoke the citizenship and seize the property of persons who fled from France unless they return and provide "good reasons" for their flight. That Baron and Baroness de Rothschild, who arrived in the U. S. by Clipper with $1,000,000 worth of jewels in a little bag, would return to France and the eager hands of Chief Heinrich Himmler's ransoming Gestapo was not expected. Other estates were also confiscated in the effort to grovel for Nazi favor, including those of Louis Rosengart, manufacturer of France's "baby Fords," and famed Journalists Genevieve Tabouis, Andre Geraud ("Pertinax"), Pierre Lazareff and Henri de Kerillis.

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