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Sailors of the French Line were meanwhile staging the strike they patriotically abandoned to permit the Normandie to sail on her record-breaking maiden voyage (TIME, June 10). They walked off the Champlain at Havre last week and for two days most of her 670 passengers were fed and bedded in Havre hotels at French Line expense. Meanwhile the men's leaders wrangled in Paris with Minister of Merchant Marine William Bertrand, saddest man on the Normandie's maiden voyage.* Since employees of the French Line are paid largely by State subsidy, M. Bertrand insisted last week that they must take the 10% wage cut State servants must take. But this sternness M. Bertrand followed by a question. Would the French Line crews go back to work at 10% lower pay if given overtime work regularly enough to bring their total earnings up to the present level?
Since money-hugging French Proletarians scarcely think of how much they work in their concentration on how much they earn, the seamen answered with a roar of "Oui!"', rushed back to their ships which sailed with all speed from Havre, while the French Cabinet announced Depression-busting decrees (see col. 3). General grumbling and unrest in French ports last week, with some rioting and shouts of "Hang Laval!" at Cherbourg, showed that the Premier was acting none too soon.
* Because the Flandin Cabinet fell while he was at sea and a rival politician on the spot in Paris copped his job of Minister of Merchant Marine in the new Laval Cabinet. Friends on the Normandie warned M. Bertrand that this would happen, urged him to call up M. Laval by radio telephone. ''That is not done!" exploded French M. Bertrand. "I cannot remind the President of the Council that I exist, by telephone!"
On his return trip, in token of his shelving, M. Bertrand ceased to dine on the Normandie with the wife of the President of France. After this self-effacement, which Frenchmen considered in exceedingly good taste, he put on a short, sharp political fight in Paris to get back his job as Minister of Marine, got it.