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Pinay got "there" because none of the old hands was willing to shoulder the responsibility last February, when the Treasury was empty and the budget unsolved. France, where Crisis is a word rarely out of the headlines, was drifting into the Worst one yet. The country might collapse completely without a U.S. dole. The Indo-China war was going from bad to worse. In the precious North African colonies, the corks were beginning to blow. Finances were in a nightmare tangle.
The whole mess was an affront to the small-town businessman who stepped into the middle of it. Back home in St. Chamond, a small town (pop. 14,500) which prides itself on being the shoelace capital of France, Antoine Pinay had made his small tannery (50 employees) bigger and more profitable than when he inherited it from his father-in-law. There was no reason, he confided to an intimate, why a man could not run France the way he runs a business.
The business of governing France has vast and subtle domestic and global complications which never intruded into Pinay's leather business or crossed the mayor's desk at St. Chamond. But he tucked those toward the rear of his mind, to concentrate on the one problem which his Frenchness told him was closest to the center of France's illness. André Siegfried once remarked of the petit bourgeois that "his heart is on the left, but his pocketbook is on the right." Pinay built his policy as Premier around one object—the Frenchman's pocketbook.
"Currency reflects the image of the country," said Pinay. "When the franc has regained its position, France will soon recover its rank."
Breaking the Locks. Starkly simple as it was, the crisp, one-track sound of Pinay's program had a decisive effect in the Assembly. Opposed by the two biggest blocs in Parliament—the Socialists and the Communists—Pinay nevertheless assembled a majority willing to join him in the battle of the pocketbook.
More surprising was the reaction in the country. From the ornate rostrum of the Chamber, beneath the stone-eyed gaze of Attic beauties, the prosaic tannery-man from St. Chamond ticked off the things he proposed to do: fight inflation, which had shrunk the franc to one twenty-fifth of its prewar value. Bring down prices, not by dirigisme (the Frenchman's word for government controls) but by persuading the big industrialists and the countless Antoine Pinays of France to be content with more reasonable profit margins. Balance the budget, not by his predecessors' resort to higher taxes, but by slicing expenditures and borrowing on a businesslike basis. Seduce out of hiding the estimated $4 billion in gold concealed in the socks of French peasants and petits bourgeois.
In almost every proposal was a barb that brought squeals of dissent from some faction of the Assembly. But Antoine Pinay, who understands the common Frenchman, was reaching beyond the Assembly to the public. "The remedies are neither of the right nor of the left," he said. ". . . They are technical measures to be taken in a climate of political truce."