Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...France, thousands of them came to Geneva, bringing their skills as watchmakers, jewelers, merchants, bankers. Within a century they had helped make dour Geneva one of the richest cities in the world. It still forbade theatrical performances as sinful, so Voltaire acquired a new house just across the French border in order to stage his plays. Today Geneva boasts a refurbished Grand Theater (it had been gutted in 1951 when something went wrong during one of the more fiery scenes in Wagner's Die Walkure), but there is still very little night life. Since most forms of gambling are illegal...
Geneva lost its independence to the French Revolution. France, which almost completely surrounds the city, annexed it in 1798, but after the fall of Napoleon it finally became the 22nd canton of Switzerland. By then it was just a peaceful backwater. Franz Liszt came here after eloping with the Countess d'Agoult, and he composed a piano piece inspired by the city's church bells. "Happy is he who can stay long by these shores," wrote another aristocratic visitor, Lord Byron...
...city's role in modern diplomacy began with the Battle of Solferino in Italy in 1859. A Genevan traveler, Henri Dunant, was so appalled by the spectacle of the wounded French and Austrian soldiers left to die on the battlefield that he wrote an indignant book titled Un Souvenir de Solferino. From that book came the Geneva Convention of 1864, in which 16 nations agreed for the first time on humane treatment for the wounded. From Dunant's protest also came the creation of the International Red Cross...
...right to proceed with research on Star Wars technology. Britain and West Germany, while still harboring strong doubts about eventual deployment, have independently grown more interested in the research program's industrial potential; one key West German defense official predicts that it will lead to "a third technological revolution." French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas proclaimed that the S.D.I. contains "an element of seduction...
...editorial vigorously rejected a 1984 German book, Unity of the Churches --Real Possibility, co-authored by the late Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner and Father Heinrich Fries of the University of Munich. The attack was signed by French Dominican Daniel Ols, who teaches at the Pontifical Angelicum University in Rome. Such an editorial does not carry the weight of a Vatican pronouncement, but Ols says that he was asked to write his piece "by the hierarchy," which would mean by key aides of the Pope or even by John Paul himself...