Word: auriolism
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This week Jules Vincent Auriol, 66, first President of the Fourth Republic, would arrive in the U.S. for a ceremonial visit. He hoped to persuade doubtful Americans that France would be a strong and steadfast ally against Communism. "France," says Auriol, "will fight for the victory of common sense." Auriol's career and his present position exemplified some of the main arguments for both an optimistic and a pessimistic view of France's future. On the plus side: his integrity, his Resistance record. On the minus side: his identification with the feeble "third force" that has failed...
French diplomats thought that President Auriol would be just the man for Americans to listen to. A cheerful, bubbling extrovert with a good, plain-spoken word for everybody, Auriol looks and acts like the mayor of a thriving French town (which he was for 15 years) or like a man who would enjoy a musical evening with Harry Truman. (Auriol plays the violin.) On his only previous visit to Washington, as a member of the 1925 Franco-American War Debts Commission, Auriol shocked his superiors by running up and embracing the doorman at the French embassy, who turned...
Easygoing Vincent Auriol is the sort of incumbent the French public wants (but has seldom had) in the presidential Elysee Palace, a genial, approachable man who possesses enough native dignity to give his job as chief of state just a wisp of kingly bearing...
Only once was Auriol's local reputation attacked. On the eve of an important election, his glass eye (the original was lost in a childhood accident) was found in the bed of a well-known lady. His political friends hastened to explain that they had used the room for a Socialist Party caucus and that Auriol's eye had popped out in a moment of oratorical exuberance. This happened to be the truth, but Muret's citizens preferred to believe a more entertaining account of how the eye got in the bed; delighted with their gallant representative...
...unspoken purpose of M. Auriol's visit is to symbolize and exploit the recent upsurge of understanding between France and the U.S. The French President will have some good news to report, including: 1) the Assembly seems close to a single-ballot, majority-vote, solution for France's vexing electoral-reform problem, which will probably leave the Communists out in the cold; 2) the Schuman plan for Western Europe's coal & steel has been initialed by all parties concerned (see below...