France: Liberte, Egalite--Mais Verite?

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As a result, wealthy Parisians let the paint peel from their houses, put, their Picassos in the attic, and claimed that their pedigreed poodles were used exclusively as watchdogs, which are taxexempt. (Le Fisc finally abandoned its hit-and-mistress methods this year.) When the inspectors started demanding taxpayers' financial records, artful Frenchmen from plumbers to landlords retaliated by insisting on cash for their services; the most fashionable doctor in Paris today would sooner vote for socialized medicine than accept a patient's check.

The government's biggest problem is that honesty, as French taxpayers see it, is not merely irrelevant but almost certainly disastrous as well. A high-minded young Parisian artist once filed a scrupulously accurate tax return and was horrified to find that the skeptical local inspector, applying the standard correction factor, credited him with three times the income he reported.

This week the government presented an ambitious program of social and economic reform to the National Assembly, and the perennial question of how to pay for it once again came to the fore. Of course, De Gaulle could always imitate the Anglo-Saxons and send tax evaders to jail. But then how would he raise the revenue to build all those new prisons?