FRANCE: Dodging the Tax Dodgers

Into Premier Edgar Faure's office last week went a messenger with a personal letter. "Your colleagues and friends," it warned, "may have told you how prepared I was to bring you the weight of the enormous force that is on the march . . . [but] you have definitely chosen a path that will lead you nowhere. You are taking the responsibility for the rupture. You will suffer the consequences." The letter was from a crackpot—but a crackpot with a following.

Pierre Poujade, 34. a small-town bookseller, leads an organization called the Union for the Defense of Shopkeepers and Artisans, whose 800,000 members (half of them dues-paying) are mostly shopkeepers and small businessmen. His fast-growing outfit, reflecting some of his own Fascist past and some up-to-date assistance from the Communists, has parlayed the confused and complex tax situation into the hottest political issue in France (TIME, Feb. 7).

Opposed in principle to paying any taxes, Poujade & Co. demand: 1) abolition of the Polyvalents, the Finance Ministry's 376-man squad of special investigators, who have the power to descend on any enterprise and check its books; 2) repeal of penalties for tax evasion. Egged on by Poujade, tens of thousands of taxpayers, mostly in southern France, where his strength is greatest, have refused to make their first installment in payment of taxes on last year's income. About half the members of the National Assembly are flirting nervously with provincial Poujadist organizations.

The Pressure Group. Last week Poujade took his fight to the National Assembly, told Assemblymen that the "hour had come for action," demanded that they pass a motion of no-confidence in the government of Premier Edgar Faure. Sitting in the visitors' gallery like a king, dispatching aides to and fro to collar Deputies, Poujade treated the Assembly to a Mussolini-like series of frowns and grins as he followed the debate. Rarely has the French Assembly seen so blatant a display from a pressure group. The Assembly, acutely sensitive to the opinion of France's shopkeepers, found it hard to refuse Poujade. Only the Catholic M.R.P., the Radical Socialists and some Independents put up stiff resistance. Faure himself compromised, agreed to call the Polyvalents off businesses grossing less than 60 million francs, if the Assembly would postpone the debate on repeal of the tax evasion penalties. "Otherwise," he said, "you can find yourselves another government." Poujade-backing Assemblymen Max Brusset and Edouard Frédéric-Dupont agreed to withdraw their motions.

The atmosphere was so tense by 3:20 a.m. that when Poujade, up in the visitors' gallery, rose and took off his coat, Speaker Pierre Schneiter read the gesture as a riot signal and touched off the emergency sirens throughout the Palais Bourbon. As the Republican guards started to evacuate the chamber, Poujade explained that he had merely taken off his coat to put on a sweater before leaving.