Word: fran
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Just before last week's final ballot, Socialist François Mitterrand offered a wry description of how French voters approach an election. "On Monday you throw artichokes at the prefecture," he said. "On Tuesday it's potatoes. Wednesday you put up roadblocks, and on Thursday you break windows. You tie up downtown Paris on Friday and boo the Minister of Finance. I don't know what you do on Saturday, but on Sunday you vote for the government...
Despite the Gaullist opposition, Français, Si Vous Saviez (Frenchmen, If You Knew) was finished within 18 months. But even then, the government-appointed censorship board waited for seven weeks before granting it a commercial license. In fact, the license came through only ten days before the beginning of the French elections-too late for the film to have much influence on the voting, but in time to enable the government to refute charges of film censorship...
...When Français, Si Vous Saviez finally opened in eight small theaters in Paris last month, it proved to be a prodigious (eight hours), three-part history of modern France from the First World War to the death of Charles de Gaulle. Its characters range from French-Algerian "Secret Army" Colonel Antoine Argoud to Communist Leader Jacques Duclos, from a patriotic old Lorraine grocer to a Gandhi-quoting Algerian nationalist. The two film makers, who describe themselves as non-Communist leftists, use all these characters to document their thesis: that liberté, egalité, fraternité are more rhetoric...
Naturally, Français, Si Vous Saviez became a center of controversy overnight. The pro-government France-Soir praised it as "exciting" and "excellent," while Historian François Furet attacked it as a "monument of crafty demagogy" that sought to turn De Gaulle "from a savior into a scapegoat...
...making deep inroads into such traditional Communist strongholds as the working-class "Red belt" around Paris, François Mitterrand's once moribund Socialists surged to within 500,000 votes of the Communists - and raised a lot of old fears and jealousies. Threatened by the loss of his party's traditional position as the leader of the French left, Communist Marchais stubbornly rejected Mitterrand's proposal that both parties should back the leftist candidates most likely to win - which in any given district would most likely be the relatively respectable Socialist candidate rather than the Communist...