Word: cognac
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...miles south of Cognac's red-roofed mansions, the farmers of Segonzac explain why. MAASTRICHT: DANGER! proclaims a French Communist Party poster, but its hammer and sickle has been plastered over with the red-white-and-blue sticker of the far-right National Front, which appropriated the same slogan. The department of Charente, which includes the Cognac area, approved the treaty by a mere 13 votes out of 178,672 cast. Much of the opposition came from farmers. All rural France resented the agricultural-subsidy cutbacks initiated by Brussels, but even though they do not directly affect Charente grape growers...
...runs deep. "They signed this complicated treaty without telling anyone," said Michel Forgeron, a Segonzac grape grower whose calloused hands and weathered face attest to a life outdoors. "Now we don't know where we are going." Until recently, he sold the spirits he distilled from 40 acres to Cognac's family firms. Now multinationals such as Seagram and Guinness have moved in: even Monnet's old company was once sold to Germans and then to Britons. "Decision makers in Toronto or Paris do not care whether we live or die," said Forgeron's wife Francine. "We are pawns...
...last-minute panic before the referendum, the French government sent copies of Maastricht to all 38 million voters -- a maneuver that may have hurt as much as helped. "The text was incomprehensible," said Guy Bechon, 56, principal of Cognac's Jean Monnet High School. A stocky fellow with a doctorate in physics, he nonetheless voted for the treaty "because I did not want my children to face a future of isolationism. Perhaps we must lose a little of our originality in order to progress." But Bechon would not go so far as Monnet, who hoped that transcending nationalism would "liberate...
...argument goes, will prevent it from turning eastward to build a new economic empire around the former Soviet satellites. On the other hand, a growing number of Frenchmen find the intimacy prescribed by Maastricht too close for comfort. "France has been a sovereign nation for 1,000 years," said Cognac Mayor Francis Hardy. "We have suffered too much in three wars with Germany to melt into one federal agglomeration...
Half an hour south of Cognac, Pierre-Remy Houssin, a National Assembly Deputy, welcomed 49 Bavarians last week to "a Musical Encounter" in his village of Baignes. The Germans, from Baignes' sister city of Dietramszell, near Munich, brought three kegs of beer and played brassy tunes, while the French choir chimed in with Mozart and Bach. Houssin told the Germans that he opposes Maastricht. "The best way to fall down stairs is to run up four steps at a time," he joked. But the Bavarians hardly seemed to mind. "Maastricht is a bad program," said Hans Gams, 21, a farmworker...