La Tribune de Madagascar
- Give Us Our Daily Bread
- Miscellaneous News
On 30 September 1926 La Tribune de Madagascar carried an editorial titled after a line of the Lord's Prayer. Citing veterans' accounts of men whose ailments vanished within weeks on the front-line diet, it reckoned that 7 million tonnes of wheat would give France an average of one pound of bread per person per day, which it said was more than consumption required. It proposed that only stale bread be sold, and pointed out that people in regions that ate rye bread were none the worse for it. A brief news note reported that the Banque de France was buying not gold and silver coins as such but the weight of their fine metal, and that coins would be weighed and paid for according to their actual weight.
This is a partial reading. Small type, breaks between image tiles and OCR errors mean several whole articles on the page cannot be reliably reconstructed. The editorial excerpt begins mid-sentence and ends at an illegible point. The Banque de France note is a low-confidence transcription with gaps at both ends. The research did not independently confirm whether the editorial's 7-million-tonne wheat figure matches the 1926 French harvest, the specific bread-regulation debates the editorial was answering, or the law or decree behind the Bank's buying of coins by fine weight.
Translation
Give Us Our Daily Bread
had the honor of fighting in the war say that those who arrived at the front with special diets and mineral-water habits were radically cured of their ailments within a few weeks of the new diet, to which their bodies adapted without any difficulty and as if by miracle. The same would be true today. So, with 7 million tonnes of wheat, we in France would have on average one pound of bread per inhabitant per day. That is more than consumption requires. Children up to two or three years old, the elderly, convalescents and women in general do not eat a pound of bread a day; and if care is taken to allow only stale bread to be sold — far more digestible and healthier than fresh bread, but less appetizing, and not eaten out of greed — the body's needs will be met with a pound of bread, all the more so as there are still regions of France where people eat rye bread instead of wheat bread, and the people of those parts are none the worse for it. [?]
Miscellaneous News
[?] – It is specified that at the Banque de France, it is not the gold and silver coins that the Bank is buying, but the weight of fine metal. The coins will be weighed and paid for on the basis of their actual weight. [?]
Context
What state was the franc in when this page appeared?
Both items on this page appeared at a time of French anxiety about money. Raymond Poincaré had returned to power in 1926 for his third term as prime minister, which lasted until 1929. The franc had already collapsed in 1924, a collapse the historian Sally Marks attributes to French financial practices and to reparations drying up. An editorial calculating how far 7 million tonnes of wheat could stretch and a notice on how the central bank valued gold and silver coins both fit this climate of worry about the currency: a weaker franc made anything bought abroad, wheat included, more expensive. The 7-million-tonne figure, and the claim that it would more than cover consumption, are the editorial's own reckoning; it gives no source for them.
Why would the Banque de France care about the fine-metal weight of coins?
The short news item draws a precise distinction: the Bank was buying metal by weight, not coins at their face value. The note appeared under a new governor. Émile Moreau became governor of the Banque de France in 1926. That year he led the Bank's efforts to stabilize the Poincaré franc, and he was an avid supporter of de facto devaluation, accepting a lower gold value for the franc rather than restoring the pre-war one. He also advocated building up gold reserves in the years before the Great Depression. That background explains the rule in the note. If the franc was worth less in gold than before the war, a gold or silver coin struck under the old standard contained more metal than its face value now represented. Buying by fine-metal weight tied the price to the metal rather than to the coin's denomination. Weighing each coin also meant that worn pieces were paid only for the metal they actually contained. The legible part of the note gives neither the price paid nor the legal text behind the rule.
What wartime experience did the editorial draw on?
The editorial rests its case on the war years. It reports the accounts of men who had served that soldiers who arrived at the front with special diets and mineral-water habits were cured within weeks by army food, and from there it argues that a pound of bread per head per day would be enough. Official control over how much bread people could have was a recent memory in France. Bread rationing began as early as December 1914 in parts of the occupied zone and was later extended to the whole country and to many other foodstuffs. In Paris, sugar ration cards were introduced in 1917 and bread cards in 1918, and rationing continued after the war, for sugar until 1921. The editorial's per-head bread arithmetic echoed a kind of allocation France had lived with only a few years earlier. The claim that front-line food cured illness, however, is an anecdote the editorial attributes to former soldiers, not an established medical finding.
Was selling only stale bread a realistic policy idea?
The editorial's most concrete proposal was to allow only stale bread to be sold. Its reasoning was that stale bread is more digestible and healthier than fresh bread but less appetizing, so people do not eat it out of greed. The idea was not eccentric. A later government applied the same reasoning: in Britain during the Second World War, a regulation banned the sale of bread less than 24 hours after baking. The reasons given were that freshly baked bread is hard to slice thinly and that its taste leads people to eat it without restraint. That British rule came more than a decade after this editorial and does not show that France acted on the proposal in 1926. It does show that holding back fresh bread was later used to curb consumption of a food that was not itself rationed: in Britain, bread was not rationed until after the armistice.
Original
Donnez-nous notre pain quotidien
ont eu l'honneur de faire la guerre disent que ceux qui arrivaient au front avec des régimes et des habitudes d'eau minérale, étaient radicalement guéris de leurs maladies en quelques semaines du nouveau régime alimentaire auquel leur organisme s'adaptait sans aucune difficulté et comme par miracle. Il en serait de même aujourd'hui. Donc, nous disposerions en France, avec 7 millions de tonnes de blé, d'une livre de pain en moyenne par tête d'habitant et par jour. C'est plus que n'en comporte la consommation. Les enfants jusqu'à deux et trois ans, les vieillards, les convalescents, les femmes en général n'absorbent pas quotidiennement une livre de pain, et, si l'on prend la précaution de ne laisser vendre que du pain rassis, bien plus digestible et plus sain que le pain frais, mais moins appétissant et que l'on ne mange pas par gourmandise, les besoins de l'organisme seront satisfaits avec une livre de pain, d'autant plus qu'il est encore des régions en France où l'on mange du pain de seigle au lieu de pain de froment, et les gens de ces pays ne s'en portent pas plus mal. [?]
Nouvelles diverses
[?] - On précise qu'à la Banque de France, ce ne sont pas les pièces d'or et d'argent que la Banque achète, mais le poids de métal fin. Les pièces seront pesées et payées sur la base de poids réel. [?]