In the first light of a cloudless dawn last week France's first Socialist-dominated Chamber of Deputies adjourned with an all-time record of 65 "economically revolutionary" bills passed in ten weeks. Cried weary, wispy Premier Leon Blum to the Deputies: "The greatest social movement since the foundation of the Third Republic has been accomplished without any shedding of blood but by persuasion only."
Without shedding blood the Chamber had passed into law most of the Popular Front platform: 1) nationalization of munitions factories, 2) the 40-hour week, 3). collective bargaining between employers and trade unions, 4) vacations with pay, 5) co-operatives to handle French peasants' wheat and fix its price, 6) forced retirement at an earlier age of France's whiskered, fusty reactionary bureaucrats and 7) partial nationalization of the Bank of France, founded by the great Napoleon I, in 1800.
Not the Chamber's most important act, the new Bank of France set-up was its sharpest stab of lèse majeste against the entrenched French ruling class. Abolished henceforth are the Regents elected by the 200 biggest stockholders representing the so-called "200 Families." Instead, various branches of the Government appoint 16 Regents, the savings banks another, the Bank's employes "secretly elect" still another and two Regents are chosen by all the Bank's 40,000 stockholders, each having one vote, regardless of his holdings.
Whereas the 200 members of the Families' assembly used to vote in clannish secrecy, it seemed probable last week that a great number of ihe 40,000 newly eligible stockholders would accept their invitations to next month's assembly to ballot in the Bank's most publicized Assembly. All the great rooms in the Bank of France could not hold them and Bank officials last week seriously considered hiring an open-air stadium for the Bank meeting. Last week the Bank announced that stockholders must give three weeks' notice of their intention to vote, must vote in person and must present complete credentials at the stadium entrance.
On the ousted board of Regents are some of France's best financial brains, including François de Wendel (coal, steel, munitions), the Marquis de Vogüe (Suez Canal Co.. chemicals). President René Duchemin of the French Manufacturers' Association, Robert Darblay (paper), Louis Blanc (casinos) and Ernest Mallet, current representative of a banking family which has had a member on the board since the Bank's foundation, 136 years ago. To gether the old Regents are worth probably 7,000,000,000 francs ($462,000,000).