Face of Disaster

The man who next gets the job of doctoring France's wounds will need more than a list of names and a gift for political guile, for the largest, most fertile land in Western Europe faces economic catastrophe. Causes:

P: Creeping inflation, which is crippling French finances, pricing French goods out of the export market, impoverishing French workers. During the past year, bread prices have jumped 39%, coffee 17%, heat and light 15%. To millions of French families, meat, milk and tobacco have become rare luxuries.

P: A staggering $600 million trade deficit with the dollar area; $400 million indebtedness to the European Payments Union. France's last gold reserve is down to a precarious $550 million.

P: The Indo-China war, which costs a billion francs a day, drains off almost all France's U.S. dollar aid. With peace in Indo-China, the budget would balance.

P: A sprawling, wastefully administered social security system, which loses $100 million a year, encourages featherbedding among French workmen.

Too Much Luxury. Even more dismaying than her economic woes and her political divisions are the rigid inequities which strain French morality. Cried President Auriol in a recent speech: "I know what makes people most impatient today: too much luxury, too much comfort, too much ease, side by side with too much poverty and penury." Sample injustices:

P: The French tax structure discriminates unfairly against the wage earner by levying 80% of all taxes indirectly--i.e., on food and consumer goods. Landowners and businessmen benefit from light and easily evaded personal income taxes.

P: Old-fashioned French industry fails to share increased productivity with its workers in higher wages and shorter hours. Unlike U.S. workers, who can buy the goods they produce, French workers often make it but can't afford to buy it.

Ancient Paradox. The Marshall: Plan pumped $2.5 billions of American taxpayers' money into France in three years. The results were impressive: production is now 150% greater than 1938. Yet France, basically healthy, bleeds from half a dozen hemorrhages, and no one will agree on which doctor to call, or whether to act on his advice should it hurt. Complained one U.S. official: "The trouble with the French people is that they're too damned intelligent. They're so intelligent you can't steam them up for the old college try like you can in Britain or Germany. Yet that's just what France needs."

The French sickness, of course, is deeper than that. Yet the old paradoxes remain: of a land fat and bankrupt; of a nation full of courageous individuals but collectively hesitant and despairing; of a nation famed for political logic and skill yet paralyzed by political anarchy.

"We distress our friends," said 73-year-old Paul Reynaud last week, "and are the laughing stock of our enemies."

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