Word: french
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...burned these machines here a couple of days ago as proof we're ready to go all the way," New Fabris employee Daniel Thébault told French news channel i-Télé as he motioned to several heaps of charred metal outside the main building. "We're not going to simply be discarded like worthless objects." (See the worst cars of all time...
...July 20 a delegation of New Fabris staffers will go to Paris and meet with French Industry Minister Christian Estrosi, who Eyermann says will be asked "to put pressure on [Peugeot maker] PSA and Renault." With both companies having received most of the $8 billion in state aid the government distributed to French automotive groups to weather the recession, Eyermann argues they should now help out industry workers who are losing jobs to the slowdown...
...Though French government officials have shown a willingness to placate - and pay off - rambunctious protesters in the past, they may think twice about bending to the threats of blowing New Fabris sky-high. That violent ultimatum is only the most recent in a series of escalating acts of intimidation by French workers facing layoffs. Last April, French fishermen furious over the effect European Union fish quotas were having on their bottom line blocked traffic in and out of North Atlantic ports for two days until they were promised state aid. Recently, France has witnessed a series of so-called bossnappings...
...Over the past two decades, farmers and fishermen have repeatedly staged violent action to denounce falling revenues - including several incidents in which French livestock farmers burned truckloads of live sheep coming in from Britain. Peeved farmers in the provinces have also repeatedly dumped improbable volumes of animal merde in front of state buildings, and in 2000, environmental catastrophe was narrowly averted when industrial workers angry about a plant closure in northern France dumped sulphuric acid into a drainage system that feeds a major river. Not to be outdone, grape growers in southern France have even resorted to "wine terrorism...
...Groux, a specialist in French social and labor conflict for the National Center of Scientific Research, notes that while that kind of activity would bring about legal punishment and public denunciation elsewhere in the world, it's viewed with singular tolerance in France. That's due in part to lingering French admiration and respect for insurrectional and revolutionary movements, and a national inclination toward stroppiness. "French history is filled with examples of rebellion and insurrection sparked by injustice that, like the Revolution itself, involved excesses people tend to minimize as they approve the wider cause involved," notes Groux. "There...