Word: bourges
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...narrows into the foaming torrents of the Rhone River. Wandering tribesmen settled at the lake's edge as early as the Bronze Age. The Romans conquered the place in 120 B.C., and Julius Caesar came to fortify it for his Gallic Wars. In what is now the Place du Bourg-de-Four, where a stone fountain gently splashes through the seasons, the Roman road from Italy once crossed the road to southern France...
...French the incident is mere history. When Napoleon passed through the Swiss village of Bourg St. Pierre on his way to Italy in 1800, his troops borrowed 80 pots and pans, uprooted 2,037 trees and took 3,150 logs to help transport their cannons across the snow-covered Great St. Bernard Pass. Napoleon sent an IOU promising, "I will reimburse everything." Since then the citizens of Bourg St. Pierre have been trying in vain to collect the 30,254 gold francs they say they are owed. When President François Mitterrand visited Switzerland last year, they politely reminded...
...response, a personal representative of Mitterrand's has arrived in Bourg St. Pierre (pop. 214) bearing a commemorative plaque and a handwritten letter from the President, thanking the village for the hospitality shown Napoleon. French officials said the matter had been resolved "in a warm and friendly way." Mayor Fernand Dorsaz accepted the plaque and letter as symbols of the debt's amicable settlement, and declared the matter "closed and settled-with a tinge of nostalgia...
These signs of hope on the economic front were of small help for the delegates at Bourg-en-Bresse. Said a Socialist Deputy from the southwest: "If I go into my rural district and tell my constituents that the foreign trade deficit has improved, they just look at me." Pocketbook concerns also overshadowed Mitterrand's assertive foreign policies, including the dispatch of troops to Chad and Lebanon, and the maintenance of firm support for the Atlantic Alliance. Such moves are quietly disapproved of by his Communist allies and by small factions of his own party, but endorsed...