Snobbisme

"Messieurs, what is it but snobbery--le snobbism epouvantable--which causes Frenchmen to buy foreign cars?" demanded Louis Renault, Dean of French motor makers, last week. "If foreign cars should come to dominate the French market, what a calamity! . . . To have lost a million and a half men in the war to escape German tutelage, only to fall under the tutelage of America! Mon Dieu that would be more than Frenchmen could bear! Tell these things to your readers--urge them to support the wise, the necessary law of M. Flandin." French reporters bowed and withdrew.

Six weeks ago M. Pierre Etienne Flandin, Minister of Commerce, sent an ultimatum in the direction of the U. S. Senate: "If others build tariff walls, France will build tariff walls!" (TIME, Dec. 2). M. Flandin's wall, scheduled to go before the Chamber of Deputies this month, provides: 1) Increased duties on assembly parts ranging from 30% to 200%; 2) The present ad valorem duty of 45% on complete cars raised to 90%, practically a prohibitive duty.

Correspondents were told by U. S. motor men in Paris that such duties would mean doubling the retail price of Fords assembled in France, thus making it impossible for this car, shrewdly advertised as Le Ford Franc,ais, to compete with what French Ford salesmen call "other French cars" such as Citroens, Baby Peugeots, Baby Renaults.

Immediate result of publication of the Flandin Tariff Bill: Prime Minister Andre Tardieu of France was pressingly invited to a strictly private dinner by the new U. S. Ambassador, onetime Senator Walter Evans Edge, who, though he believes in a high U. S. Tariff, must convince M. Tardieu that a high French tariff would be injudicious.

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