FRANCE: Symbol at Stake

As the first anniversary of his Fifth Republic rolled around last week, France's Charles de Gaulle was vacationing in the south at the 11th century abbey of La Celle in Provence. It was either a characteristic bit of lonely audacity on his part or a gathering of strength for the battle ahead, for before President De Gaulle lay the most serious crisis yet to face his regime.

The crisis bore the name of the man most closely identified with the one big success of the De Gaulle era—Finance Minister Antoine Pinay. Hopefully, peace may one day crown De Gaulle's efforts in Algeria, history may yet regard De Gaulle's generosity to the restless states of French West Africa as high statesmanship, but the one here-and-now triumph of the regime has been economic. And that is the province of short, commonsensical Antoine Pinay, 68, onetime leader of the powerful right-wing Independents in France's National Assembly and one of the Fourth Republic's many Premiers.

Plain-spoken Antoine Pinay, smalltown leather manufacturer who has made himself the living symbol of the Frenchman who carefully counts his change, has long been unhappy in his Cabinet job. He wanted to make quicker progress toward a settlement in Algeria; he deplored De Gaulle's disregard of his allies and his disdain for NATO. And Pinay made no attempt to disguise his personal dislike for Premier Michel Debre. On at least one occasion he so irked De Gaulle himself that the general accused Pinay of having forgotten "which republic it was."

For all that, Pinay is by common consent De Gaulle's most effective minister. Executing plans drawn up by Economic Braintruster Jacques Rueff, he carried through—without the usual rapid and disastrous rise in prices—the devaluation that gave the franc a strength it had not enjoyed in international markets since 1936. Introducing economic liberalism into France's closed economy, he made the franc convertible, hacked away at government subsidies, even persuaded French business to abandon its traditional protectionism and go wholeheartedly into the Common Market. Heartened by the knowledge that Pinay was at the helm, wealthy Frenchmen repatriated massive quantities of capital that they had secreted abroad—a phenomenon that helped restore France's foreign reserves.

Fire Me. But Gaullist ideologists in Debre's Cabinet—led by Minister of Industry Jean-Marcel Jeanneney and Justice Minister Edmond Michelet—had other ideas. To keep the French economy growing, they argued, the government must exercise more active control of business. They wanted to: ¶ Establish a government corporation, similar to Italy's state petroleum monopoly, to refine and market Sahara oil; ¶Adopt West Germany's"co-management" scheme—which would give France's heavily Communist unions seats on the board of directors of every important French company; ¶ Set up a government bank to make loans to ailing industries.