Turkey to the Prefects

The black nostrils of France's earthy, peasant-born Premier snuffed trouble last week as Communists in French naval ports incited restive mobs with shouts of "Hang Laval!" (see col. 1).

Chief reason for hanging Pierre Laval: the Premier's drastic wage slashes, affecting huge numbers of already underpaid Frenchmen. Chief reason for not hanging Laval: his equally drastic efforts to force down food prices, rents, etc., along with wages in a great "Equality of Sacrifice" to keep the French franc at its present gold value. Last week Premier Laval, who locked up his Cabinet for 14 hours while the Ministers wrangled over and finally approved his first 28 emergency decrees (TIME, July 29), locked them up again and got action on some 40 more decrees. As before, these were rushed over to be signed by sad-eyed President Albert Lebrun in the blackness between midnight and morning.

"From now on the great financial-danger has been set aside," crowed Chanticleer Laval. "Later will come a great revival of business activity if the disciplined nation responds to the effort the Cabinet is pursuing."

These decree efforts were featured last week by earmarking two billion francs ($132,500,000) to be spent with all speed on employment-creating public works, half by the national Government and the other half by the 86 French prefectures. Obviously, the moment was opportune for Premier Laval to pull tighter the reins by which Paris controls France. For the first time in history all prefects were summoned to the Capital. Most made their trip in their official limousines and gleaming, long-snouted Renaults roared in over all the main roads of France.

To the prefects the Premier talked turkey as only a peasant can. "It has been said that the prefects think a good deal more about the next Cabinet than about the Cabinet now in power," he tartly observed, "but this has been said wrongly, I feel sure. I have confidence in you. But it is necessary that you merit this confidence! You are representatives of the State and representatives of the departments, but I want you to remember that you are first and foremost representatives of the State. You ought to transmit to the State all information that may be useful to it. You do not do this enough! There has been a certain laxness incompatible with present exigencies. It is the fate of the regime and the life of the country that are now at stake!"

This was to say that prefects must be more energetic in suppressing both radical and reactionary groups now hankering for a coup d'etat against the French Republic; must enforce Premier Laval's emergency decrees, especially those forcing down food prices, with greater vigor; and must not play politics with local disaffected groups. True Frenchmen and therefore argumentative, some 30 prefects next made the Premier listen to their views on how France should be run, each speaking out with vigor before the assembly about special conditions in his department.

In his limousine every prefect took home mimeographed copies of the 40 or more new decrees. These, in addition to launching the public works program, set up Government agencies for combatting unemployment (chiefly by limiting workers of alien nationality) and to enforce reduction of meat prices, lower bread prices already having been decreed. Fiscal measures, newly decreed, reduce the inheritance tax on farms, stiffen bankruptcy laws to protect creditors, reduce the profit permitted on contracts with the State, increase the profit tax paid by directors of large concerns, reduce the interest rates on commercial loans and generally contribute in involved fashion to the budget-balancing, despite the two added billions expenditure for public works, M. Laval has set as his goal.

All this was capped by a reversal of French economic foreign policy which has sought of recent years to protect home industry by rigid quotas limiting imports. Since other nations have retaliated in kind against French exports, Premier Laval decreed a general procedure of scrapping quotas and replacing them with reciprocal tariff agreements, hoping to induce other nations by friendly negotiation to admit more French wares as France admits more foreign goods.

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