Word: bidault
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Bowler & Pince Nez. Bidault comes from central France, the son of an insurance man. He taught himself to read at six, and was educated by the Jesuits. Bidault was deeply influenced by a scholarship prize he won at the age of 15: a book on Montalembert, the 19th century political philosopher who strove to fuse Roman Catholicism with Liberalism. Bidault went on to the Sorbonne, then to teaching (history and geography) in a lycee. In his 30s Bidault looked so young that a proctor at the school once reprimanded him for smoking; he took to wearing a bowler...
...whose words and deeds are most crucial to the negotiations at Geneva is a small, enigmatic Frenchman who set out to teach history, not to help make it. Foreign Minister Georges Bidault, 54, speaks for the divided mind and flagging spirit of France. But his own mind is undivided: more than most Frenchmen, he has a passionate dislike of the Communists...
...schoolteacher lived an austere bachelor's life in a Left Bank jumble of books, unmarked exercise papers and unmade bedclothes. But Bidault was a stickler for neatness and order in personal appearance and in matters of the mind...
...side, Bidault wrote editorials daily for the Roman Catholic L'Aube. Still remembered by some are those he wrote about Spain's civil war-an event that produced a spiritual crisis for Bidault. As a Catholic he was drawn to the Franco side, but as a republican democrat he was drawn to the Loyalist side. In what has since become a well-known-and often infuriating-Bidault habit, he held a kind of parliamentary debate within his mind, eventually summoning up a majority for a decision. The debate in the case of Spain resulted in a series...
Official Greeter. When World War II came, he volunteered for the fighting front, but was captured by the Germans before he could do much soldiering. Luck was with him. Because he had been drafted briefly in World War I, Bidault was released by the Nazis in a general parole of World War I veterans. He made his way to Lyon, ostensibly to resume teaching. But instead, the meek-seeming little professor undertook the hazardous life of an underground patriot. He joined a Roman Catholic resistance group named Combat, soon was publicly identified as a resister and had to plunge into...