FRENCH
POLITICS'
685
turn philosophically accepts a high rate of taxation and social secw'ity
rates, in the knowledge that the consumer can in the end be compelled
to pay the price--literally. The result is that exports are choked off by
high costs, while real wages have remained low, the share of the work–
ing class in the national product being now slightly below pre-war–
despite greatly increased nominal wages, family allowances, paid holi–
days, etc.
The rapid resurgence of Western Germany and the comparative
stagnation of France, which has struck so many observers in recent
months, is certainly not due to any inferiority on the part of French
scientists, technicians or workers, although the more lavish equipment
of Garmany industry with research facilities is making itself felt. It is
almost entirely due to social and institutional arrangements which in the
last analysis go back to one all-important factor: the predominance
within the German community of industry over commerce, and of in–
dustry and commerce over agriculture. Germany's economic and social
life is geared to the needs, the work rhythm, and the attitudes of an
expanding industry, with all other classes forced to adapt themselves to
its requirements. In exchange, German prices are lower, and commerce
accounts for only 8 percent of the national income, against 16 percent
in
France. In the case of France, a highly efficient industrial and tech–
nological nucleus is prevented from equally rapid expansion by an
antiquated social model which reflects, finally, the excessive weight of
pre-industrial society. The result is not merely a slower rate of in–
dustrialization, but an actual stifling of progress, and this in a highly
competitive world in which France, moreover, has to shoulder the
heaviest military burden-relative to the country's capacity-of any
nation west of the Iron Curtain.
No wonder the social cleavage is sharper in France than in Ger–
many, despite the influx into the Federal Republic of millions of dis–
possessed refugees from the East. An expanding economy generates a
climate of hope; a stagnating one produces a feeling of despair. It is
this sense of having to struggle against the stagnation imposed upon
the country by the selfishness, incapacity and conservatism of the busi–
ness community and the fanners which causes the "New Dealers" to
talk in almost revolutionary terms and to look for allies on the farthest
Left
(if
they are not, like the hard core of the Gaullists, aiming at a
dictatorial solution). Yet the goal is essentially modest: it is to turn
France into a modern country and to allot the primacy to industry, at
the expense of finance, commerce, farming and middle-class conser–
vatism. As so often in French history, relatively moderate aims are
