The General Practitioner

When Pierre-Paul Schweitzer was first mentioned as a successor to the late Per Jacobsson as the $40,000-a-year (taxfree) head of the International Monetary Fund, everyone seemed in favor of the idea--except Schweitzer himself. An unassuming and dedicated French senior civil servant, Schweitzer was reluctant to leave his post as No. 3 man (with a chance for the top job eventually) in the Bank of France, did not like the idea of moving his wife and son from Paris to Washington. Word went out that he had been Jacobsson's own personal choice, and as the pressures mounted, Schweitzer finally gave in. Last week he was officially named the new watchdog of the world's currencies.

Elegant and lanky, Schweitzer, 51, is not expected to make sudden or radical changes at the IMF. He is a pragmatist, and is wary of grandiose global formulas for solving the world's fiscal troubles. "I'm not an economist in my own right," says Schweitzer. "I'm a general practitioner." He believes that the IMF should concentrate its attention on the underdeveloped nations, feels that there should be a gradual increase in the world's money supply to finance increasing world trade. But he insists that any increase in funds should be initiated by national treasuries and not through any sort of IMF-sponsored arrangement.

A nephew of Philosopher Albert Schweitzer, Schweitzer was born in Alsace-Lorraine, is a member of the small French Protestant elite that has played a role in French banking out of proportion to its numbers. He joined the French treasury in 1936 after graduation from Paris' Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, went underground as a Resistance fighter after France's fall in 1940, and spent the war's final months in Buchenwald. His education in international monetary affairs began in 1947, when he became an alternate member of the IMF board. In a succession of important French administrative posts, he helped conceive and carry out the devaluation and stabilization of the franc, laying the basis for France's remarkable economic renaissance.

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