A CRISIS OF CONSCIENCE
The Victim is the Consumer

It would undoubtedly be wrong to apply Talleyrand's observation to pre-war France: "He who did not live through the last years of the ancien régime did not know the good life." It can nevertheless be said that the war of 1914 drew a watershed, a trough of social values ​​to which everything must be related.
If you present any work, not just to old artisans seasoned in a trade, but to workers in their forties, you will see them nod their heads and hear them reply: "Oh! That... that's pre-war work... We don't work like that anymore... Why?"
First, out of ignorance... and then, even among those who know, professional conscience is lacking. We are no longer capable of the slightest effort... The workforce is falling below mediocre. As for quality, today's consumers must settle for little. They pay more and more for what isn't worth much in itself. Finished work, what used to be called polished work, has had its day. Make way for mass production!
This is true in all branches of commercial, industrial, and artistic activity. Booksellers and second-hand booksellers rightly make a significant distinction between books published before the war and those printed today. Set aside the copies on fine paper, large paper, and luxury paper, printed in small numbers for amateurs, and consider the volumes sold in large quantities. The paper, the folding, the binding, the typography, the corrections—everything leaves something to be desired. And yet, the volume costs twice as much as it did before the war.
And it's the same for bookbinding, cabinetmaking, construction, furniture, and real estate... Have any job done; From the smallest to the largest, you will find only one concern: charging as much as possible for the hastily made object. If the thing you own needs a simple repair, ah! You're not out of the woods yet! Everything conspires to persuade you that it's better to buy new, at the price charged for a refurbishment, with no guarantee from anyone.
The old guard, the craftsmen worthy of the name, still form the square, the last square, around work well done... but they are only an elite working for an elite. The mass of consumers is left to the shills and apprentices. Their work is always good enough for them. Poor consumers!
Moreover, the crisis of professional conscience, to which Mr. Géo Minvielle has just dedicated an interesting pamphlet, is rampant everywhere, in the liberal professions as well as in the manual trades.

Mr. Minvielle is not the first to notice this and write about it. Already four years ago, in a volume he published, Mr. Gilles Normand showed our Feast of Balthazar troubled by the fateful inscription: Mane, Thecel, Pharès... and it was the atrophy of professional conscience that justified the prophetic threat. He extended the trial to industrial and commercial conscience; he found the culprits in the countryside as well as in the city; he denounced the slackening at all levels of the scale of production and commerce. But what should we understand by "professional conscience"? To this question, Mr. Minvielle replies, "The loyal, scrupulous, conscientious execution of professional duties." The opposite, finally, of what today represents shoddy workmanship, fraud, dissimulation, negligence, the do-it-yourself system.
The causes? Above all, the weakening of morality, the triumph of selfishness, the cult of incompetence and irresponsibility, the urge to quickly earn a lot of money, by any means necessary, to squander it on immediate pleasures.
The remedies? Gilles Normand and Minvielle propose several, moral, professional, and economic. But the morals that years of war have instilled in us cannot be corrected overnight; and 1,500,000 men, when they disappear from a country, leave behind nothing but their dust and the trace of their virtues: an immense void.

Lucien Descaves