686
PARTISAN REVIEW
wrapped up in radical language and may require for their achievement
a political upheaval whose incidence will then be blamed on the alleged
weakness of the country's institutions.
That a system which penalizes industry in the interest of farmen
and shopkeepers is not even efficient economically has gradually been
recognized in France since the war, but the barriers to reform are
extremely powerful. The Monnet Plan failed in its total purpose-which
was to revolutionize the French economy, not just to modernize some
sectors of it-because it did not tackle agriculture. This is now de–
scribed as an oversight on the part of the planners, and there is talk
of making up for it; but in fact it involved a political decision. It is of
course perfectly true that farming ought to have got more attention
when the Plan was drawn up: although it still absorbs nearly one-third
of France's manpower, its share of the funds was limited to 8 percent.
(The Russians now admit having made a similar mistake-also for
political reasons.) Thus after six years of State-subsidized tractor pro–
duction, France still has only 150,000, against an estimated need of one
million (the Soviet Union has half a million, on a much bigger
terri–
tory). Technical training and advice to farmers is backward compared
not only with Denmark but with Greece. By contrast, subsidies were
until recently paid to marginal producers of wine and sugar beet, of
which there was an unsalable surplus. These grotesque practices had the
twofold effect of costing the Treasury large sums of money and making
some of the best land unavailable for urgently needed crops. Result:
France, potentially the greatest agricultural surplus producer in Western
Europe, has to import increasing quantities of food, with disastrous ef–
fects on the balance of payments. The proportion of produce consumed
on the farms has now risen to one-sixth of the total (the highest
in
Europe), and a French farm laborer feeds only six people (against 20
in the United States). Yet to tackle this antediluvian system would
be
equivalent to a social revolution, and so far no French government–
not even the Socialist-Communist coalition of 1946-47-has had the
courage to try. (The recent abolition of some of the most unproductive
subsidies, though a step in the right direction, merely removes a partic–
ularly grotesque anomaly.)
Turn to housing and one finds a similar picture. This field, too,
was neglected by the Plan, and doubly neglected by a private building
industry of which M. Claudius Petit, a former Minister for Recon–
struction, once said in despair that it operated "in accordance with the
best Merovingian standards." There is talk now, at long last, of stepping
up the rate of house construction to 200,000 a year, which will just
