Word: frenched
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Battler v. the Kid. Having no power outside the authority to allot certain star subsidies, Malraux set out to rehabilitate the French theater. At the Comédie Française, he complained, standards had fallen so low that there were only six performances of Racine to 113 of a couple of frothy farces by a 19th century playwright, Eugene Labiche. "Let us have Labiche," said Malraux tolerantly, "but not at the expense of Racine." From then on, as Paris-Presse put it, the lines were drawn between " 'Kid' Labiche v. 'Battling' Racine." Malraux snatched...
Malraux also decreed: let there be circuses-and staged the most dazzling Bastille Day celebration France had ever seen. In fact, never since Napoleon had government and culture so complemented each other. When Giraudoux's Electre opened, Paris critics were officially reminded that a French head of state has the privilege of seeing all new performances first; so, in "deference to General de Gaulle," the critics should hold up their first-night reviews until he could get to the theater on the second night. The grand opening of the opera fortnight ago, where Maria Callas had once complained...
...Spokesman Ahmed Boumendjel announced that his "government" was agreeable to negotiations with France "to discuss the conditions and applications" of the self-determination vote that De Gaulle has promised Algeria. The rebels even named their proposed representatives : five rebel officials headed by Mohammed ben Bella, 40, the bemedaled former French army sergeant who was the chief organizer of the Algerian revolt and the man most regarded as the villain by right-wing French settlers in Algeria...
...terms-which specified that the negotiations be confined to arrangements for a ceasefire, and should not include discussion of Algeria's political future. But what gave the rebel announcement an unmistakably smart-aleck flavor was that all five of the proposed rebel representatives have been in French prisons for more than three years; four of them, including Ben Bella himself, landed there in a celebrated coup in October 1956, when a Moroccan plane carrying them from Rabat to Tunis was diverted by the French and flown on by its French crewmen to Algiers...
Since the days of the French Revolution, when fanatics proclaimed that they had dethroned God and placed Reason on the ramparts of heaven, Frenchmen have struggled over the deathbeds of famous men. Stories, some apocryphal and some authenticated, tell of the last moments of such famed skeptics as Aristide Briand, Paul Valéry, Voltaire and André Gide. Last week the battle was once more joined over the final hours on earth of Edouard Herriot, who had done as much as anyone to insist on the separation of church and state, and had fought tirelessly against church control...