Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...publishing three best-selling books since 1976. When she died last week at 64, of cancer, in the Normandy village of Autheuil-Authouillet, Simone Signoret had attained far more than movie stardom. "For more than 40 years," declared President Francois Mitterrand, "she spoke to the hearts of the French people...
Born Simone Kaminker in Wiesbaden, Germany, where her father was an officer in the post-World War I French occupation force, she grew up in the affluent Paris suburb of Neuilly. When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, her father, a Jew, fled to Britain to join Charles de Gaulle's Free French army. Simone remained in France with her family, adopting her mother's maiden name --Signoret--to escape detection by the Nazis, and worked as a secretary for the Paris daily Les Nouveaux Temps...
...French daily Le Monde called it Operation Seduction. Officials in the government of French President Francois Mitterrand referred to it as a "charm offensive." In Washington, a Reagan Administration official huffily described the four-day visit to France last week as "more Gucci diplomacy...
...perils of the open, Western-style image making that he and his Kremlin advisers are striving to cultivate. Even so, he projected himself as an impressive, energetic figure whose pursuit of traditional Soviet goals is at least as dogged as that of any of his predecessors. Said a French foreign policy specialist: "What it confirms about Gorbachev is his ability and his political sense, but also his traditionalism in ultimately defending Soviet interests...
...Mitterrand adviser put it, a "liturgical institution" of detente. On a visit to Moscow last year, Mitterrand took the ailing Kremlin leadership of the day to task for its treatment of Nobel Laureate Andrei Sakharov. Moreover, the public mood in France these days is viscerally anti-Soviet. Said a French official: "Nowadays, everybody is repelled by the Soviets, who have discredited themselves in so many ways...