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London Loan. Once more gathering over France like an angry storm cloud is the issue of whether the franc must soon be devaluated. Because thrifty French citizens are about to vote, Deputies dare not up taxes now. Yet the Sarraut Cabinet cannot spend the cheers of its Communist, Socialist and assorted Left supporters. Therefore it has turned unobtrusively around to borrow $200,000,000 in London from a private syndicate headed by Lazard Brothers & Co.—a significant name.
London's Banking Brothers Lazard are of the same international fiscal family as Lazard Frères of Paris. Normally French Communists and Socialists are accustomed to raise some of their loudest screams against the Regents of the Bank of France as the country's "real rulers and merciless exploiters"—and one of the Lazard partners is a Regent. Thus in France it was as if in Washington on the eve of an election President Roosevelt should turn to a potent private Wall Street firm for a $200,000,000 loan to which strings could be attached. In Paris the Communist Deputies and the Socialist cohorts of Léon Blum might have been expected to shriek "Lazard Money!" Instead they kept mouse-mum.
To many observers the French economic spiral seemed to be scraping such anxious lows this week that once the election is out of the way—or even sooner—the shot-in-the-arm of "devaluation" may have to be resorted to. Rather than debate this crucial issue last week the highly-sexed French Chamber found time to work up a lather of excitement over "Hitler's Secret Loves" (see p. 21).
Into the teeth of Frenchmen who call rising Léon Blum "abominable"' his friends never tire of flinging the words with which France's late, great Wartime President Raymond Poincaré once greeted him when Deputy Blum re-entered the Chamber after a long absence. "You are very welcome here, Monsieur," said Raymond Poincaré, himself deeply learned and broadly cultured. "We have need of your light and your council, M. Blum. It is well for France that men like you should sit in the Chamber."
*In a passionate editorial last year Royalist Editor Charles Maurras proclaimed: "I make myself personally responsible for the assassination of Blum!" (TIME, Dec. 16).