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In former days the little shopkeeper might not earn much money, but he was content because he had "independence," the chance to take life easy, leave his wife behind the counter while he went hunting in winter or fishing in summer. The wine was cheap, food was good, and the rest of the world could go hang. "Je me défends," was his motto.
Nobody was more coddled. The little shopkeepers got concessions, the little artisans (working with no more than one "companion") were exempted from production taxes, the peasant probably paid no tax at all because his family farm was obligingly assessed on ancient land values. Result: 150 years after the Industrial Revolution, nearly half of France's working population is still self-employed v. one in six in the U.S. And while Paris and the industrial north thrived, Poujade's France lagged, clinging desperately to a way of life a century out of date.
Last week France as a whole was booming. Industrial production last year was 60% above prewar, 20% over 1954. Wages have risen 19%, while prices (though very high) have remained stable. Even the birth rate has reversed the long decline of the 19303—population increased last year by 280,000.
It was a prosperity Poujade's France watched with rancor. The prosperity of the other France was not their prosperity; in fact, it threatened to destroy them. Provincial artisans could not compete with its mass-produced goods, provincial storekeepers with its chain stores and their big turnovers. Even the tax system, which so long had coddled them, now threatened to crush them. So they cheated on their taxes, and pleaded it was simple necessity.
Almost everybody in France cheats on his taxes as a civic right. The state expects it. Disputed taxes are based on the "visible signs of wealth," and tax forms, making a presumption of deceit and preparing for it, demand the horsepower of the family car, number of dogs, number of keyboard instruments. Shopkeepers, not trusted to report their true profits, pay on their turnover.
But disastrously for France's hard-pressed shopkeepers, the tax law forces them to pay whether they make money or not. For them, cheating had become a matter of simple survival for a business that had no economic right to survive at all. In 1953, when a zealous tax expert ordered a crackdown, shopkeepers all over France rebelled—a bewildered, angry explosion of despair and unreasoning protest against the forces which condemned the good life to economic death. "Je me défends," they cried, and their voice was Poujade's.