"Pennies, Charlie"

Throughout France last week many Frenchmen got their mail late or not at all. Trains, buses and planes ran behind schedule or were canceled. In some places, it was impossible to register a birth, take out a marriage license or even obtain a permit to bury the dead. Because of falling water pressures, many tenants on upper floors of apartment buildings had to forgo washing. Millions of unscrubbed schoolchildren obtained an extra bonanza in the form of a holiday from school; teachers were on strike.

Behind the nationwide one-day strike of government employees, from postmen to customs inspectors, lay the dissatisfaction of lower-income Frenchmen at the steady upward creep of consumer prices. Though France has 30% more cars on the road this year than last, and the long-abused French franc continues to gain strength in relation to gold and the dollar, the new prosperity fostered by Charles de Gaulle has not trickled down to the lowest-paid classes. Even conservative newspapers concede that the pay of government employees, traditionally a pace setter for clerical workers generally, is disgracefully low. Only 14% earn $200 a month, while more than a fourth receive under $100.

De Gaulle had hoped to combat the rising cost of living by an all-out overhaul of France's antiquated food distribution system, under which nearly every vegetable or farm animal produced in France must be shipped to Paris' Les Halles market for sale or reshipment to the provinces. But the reform has been put off because of the cost of prosecuting the Algerian war. Last week embattled artichoke growers at St.-Pol-de-Leon dumped 800 tons of artichokes into a quarry and doused them with diesel oil in protest at the fall of the farm price of artichokes from 23-c- to 1/2-c- a lb-while French retailers were charging as much as 19-c-.

At week's end 10,000 marching strikers tied Parisian auto traffic in angry knots. As annoyed autoists irritably leaned on their horns, the strikers chanted, "Des sous, Chariot; des sous, Chariot [Some pennies, Charlie]." The demand seemed modest enough.

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