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Too Many Shops. Heartland of the taxpayers' revolt and Poujade's power is the region south of the River Loire. Typical as any is the small town of Saint-Céré in Quercy, where Poujade was born. Once, Saint-Céré was a thriving medieval town of spires, turrets and picturesque houses. Now empty houses sag into ruin. Since 1800 population has dropped from 5,000 to 3,000. Its 13 mills, ten brick and clay factories, four tanneries shrank to two leather works and three small distilleries. Today the main industry is tourists (mostly French) who come to see the nearby caves with their prehistoric drawings, to dance at the casino, or to linger on candlelit terraces late into the velvet evenings over Saint-Céré's specialties—truffles, goose, freshwater crayfish.
But when the tourists leave and the winter comes, Saint-Cere, swaddled in sweaters and overcoats, shivers in its ancient houses, in a monotony relieved only by a weekly movie.
Saint-Céré has 218 shops—roughly one for every three families. There are 32 cafes, 30 groceries, eight butchers, seven bakers. Many are run only as sidelines, tended by wives while men work as masons, farmers or salesmen. The richest man in town is a Communist who owns the movie house and casino. The young leave, the old dream of happier days.
The youngest of eight children of a penniless contractor, Pierre Poujade was born here on Dec. 1, 1920. His father's ancestors were serfs, his mother's, impoverished landowners. Widowed when Pierre was only seven, his mother took in washing, kept chickens in the backyard. In school Poujade doted on history and the glory that was France. His favorite character was Napoleon. At 13 he got so youthfully enthusiastic about the fascist movement of Jacques Doriot that he flunked his school finals. He spent the next three years wandering Southern France, working in vineyards, on docks ("I wanted lots of muscles"), in a road gang.
After France fell, Poujade leaped enthusiastically into Pétain's Companions of France, an organization that was loaded with team spirit, stern slogans and close-order calisthenics, all of which Poujade loved: "That was real French fraternity." But when the Allies landed in North Africa and the Germans moved into unoccupied France, Poujade hit out for the Spanish border.
Interned, he spent five miserable months in a Spanish jail before making his way to Portugal and thence to Morocco. His body was covered with boils and sores. At Rabat airbase, Chief Nurse Yvette Seva grimly nursed him back to health. Two years later she married him. Daughter of a French tax functionary ("Imagine, my own father-in-law a tax collector!") whose family had lived in Algeria for 120 years, Yvette is a strong-minded woman, vigorously antiSemitic, and firmly dedicated to the proposition that what's good for the colon is good for Algeria.
Once his health mended, Pierre was shipped to England, where he ended the war as a chairborne sergeant with the R.A.F. He went back to his mother's .drafty old house (no bathtub or flush toilet) in Saint-Céré and sent for Yvette. Their problem: how to make a living.