Business was booming at the Verrerie Marquot, a glass works at Fains-les-Sources, halfway between Paris and Strasbourg. The factory was turning out $50,000 worth of glassware a month. With his furnaces producing at full capacity, Gustave Marquot, the 29-year-old owner, last week was studying plans for expansion.
The Marquot boom was largely due to the way in which the boss was getting along with his 400 workers. Gustave Marquot is practicing and preaching a kind of capitalism which, in most of Europe (and quite a few places in the U.S.), would be considered as both revolutionary and paternalistic.
Partly Moral, Partly Selfish. The Marquot workers live in pleasant cottages for which they pay the company a nominal rent, work in spotlessly clean factory buildings. There are hot and cold showers (available to wives & children on Saturday), a hospital, a library. Gustave Marquot, who inherited the 90-year-old family business last year, is a fairly typical member of Le Centre des Jeunes Patrons (Center of Young Employers), which is trying to build a brighter future for free enterprise in France. The Young Employers are against the predatory capitalism of the past, but they also want to keep France from sliding into the collectivist pitfall. Their answer to the welfare state is to look after their workers' welfare themselves. Their attitude, they say, is partly moral, partly selfish.
The Center (founded in 1938 but dormant through war and occupation) now has about 3,000 members. They represent a small and dissident fraction of the hidebound Conseil National du Patronat Français (France's N.A.M.), which has 880,140 members and remains suspicious of the Young Employers' radical views. But the Young Employers are tireless evangelists. Originally their group was limited to employers under 40; now there is no age qualification, but members are expected to be "young in spirit."
Their official statement of policy says: "The Young Employers reject all notion of privilege, class or caste . . . They do not consider militant unionists as enemies . . . The right of the man who will and can work to obtain by his labor the means to support himself and his family is absolute . . . The idea cannot be to give all men the same start, because nature has given them unequal physical, moral and intellectual gifts . . . The real ideal is to give everyone a chance . . . The real goal to pursue is that . . . all workers should have the opportunity of becoming capitalists . . . An atmosphere must be created in the nation which fights against the exaggerated appetite for absolute and automatic security . . ."