As Parliament reassembled last week the biggest armament man in the world, trim, grey-mustached Eugène Schneider, stood figuratively at bay. All through Depression the giant Schneider-Creusot works have been racing to fill orders, their furnaces blazing and their lathes screaming as they turned out guns and projectiles for Japan, and for such other good customers as China. With the French budget now cracking under a deficit of seven and one-half billion francs, the Chamber's ruling Left-Center politicians have resolved in recent weeks to crack down on French munitions makers for a larger share of their profits than can be extracted by ordinary taxes from such secretive, elusive and resourceful tycoons as Eugene Schneider.
On the opening day of Chamber session, square-shouldered, homespun Premier Edouard Daladier kept the details of his cracking-down budget plans in the background, demanded that the Chamber adopt the expedited procedure of budget debate known in France as ''extreme urgency." He then appealed for an initial vote of confidence in a speech which was in effect the answer of France to Germany's withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference (TIME, Oct. 23).
"We are deaf to no word, but we are blind to no act!" cried M. Daladier. "If Germany desires, as she says, an understanding with us I say to her:
"First, if you are sincere, why do you avoid an inspection of your armaments?
''Second, if you wish for disarmament why do you start the negotiations by walking out? . . .
"As for France, we will be at Geneva when the Disarmament Conference resumes its work. . . . France is not isolated today! On the contrary France has never had so many friends."
As he spoke the Premier, a man of the moderate Left (his party is misnamed Radical Socialist), warmed up the Chamber until finally even his enemies on the extreme Left and Right were cheering him. He won a smash vote of confidence 470 to 120 — in effect on the issue of Adolf Hitler. After that the Chamber buckled down to debate the budget with "extreme urgency" and the life of the Daladier Cabinet was in danger every minute.
Léon Blum, leader of the Socialists whose votes have been indispensable to the Daladier coalition, was all for trans forming the entire French armament industry into a state monopoly. The Premier's plan was to have the state buy into all munitions firms, install a state supervisor in each factory to check the real extent of the business and make sure that the Government gets its share of the profits. Before these Blum and Daladier projects reached the Chamber they led to a battle royal in its Finance Committee which first voted last week for Blum Armament Monopoly, then reversed itself and resolved to support Daladier Armament Control.
Getting out of committee the Blum-Daladier squabble was soon raging in the Chamber lobbies and finally Socialist Blum declared himself opposed to the Premier's entire theory of balancing the budget on a sound money basis by drastic economies and increased taxation.