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Friends of the new Finance Minister said that his mind seemed fastened last week on the notion that, since some 45 billion paper and gold francs are supposed to have been tucked away by French "hoarders," somehow or other the Blum Cabinet can get these billions back into circulation "partly by threats" and thus avoid the necessity for devaluation—all this sounding last week to most of the world's fiscal experts like gibberish clear to no one except M. Vincent Auriol.
Especially nervous was The City, London's fiscal nerve center. There British businessmen arriving from Paris last week told their colleagues that France was in a state of bloodless revolution; that a violent and possibly Fascist reaction might be just around the corner; that French Fascism might soon turn upon the Jews, beginning with Premier Blum. Although such reports as these duly perturbed The City, Gentile British financiers remarked that the chief alarmists seemed to be British Jews.
"Peace in Principle," Very slowly meanwhile in France last week Le Peuple Souverain in numberless factories and shops were making what they called peace "in principle" with their employers. In the big Paris hotels guests found that, although the hotel workers' strike had been settled in principle, the hotel workers were in most cases still playing cards or dominoes while exact details of the terms on which they fully intended to resume work were being drawn up, much as the families of a French bride and groom haggle over the marriage settlement while the engaged couple are only too anxious to wed.
Proprietors tore their hair, hissed at their staffs that "formidable damage" had been done to the French tourist trade, that the higher wages the staffs had won in principle would bring bankruptcies galore.
This precisely was the rub, not only in French hotels but throughout all French industry. Jean Frenchman, something like 1,000,000 strong, had won from his employer by the week's end wage increases of 7% to 15%, but how real was that victory?
Coming back from Geneva to Paris, as soon as he heard that "in principle" the great majority of strikes seemed to have been settled locally, Trade Union Boss Léon Jouhaux estimated that the wage increases, the shortening of the worker's week to 40 hours and the enforced improvement of working conditions must increase French production costs by at least 35%—and they are already among the highest in the world, most other countries having cheapened their prices by cheapening their money. Unquestionably this week Le Peuple Souverain thought they had won higher wages in gold standard francs, but every fiscal authority agreed that such wages simply cannot be paid in France, unless the franc is cheapened, devalued and Le Peuple Souverain thus duped. Alternatives would be drastic reorganization of French economy by a Bolshevist or Fascist dictatorship set up in the Third Republic.