Word: frenchman
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FROM radios and television sets throughout France last week came the hoarse, oracular voice that every Frenchman tries hopelessly to imitate. It belonged to Charles de Gaulle, who in a nationwide address announced his plans for a strengthened presidential system by which his successor would be elected directly by the people (TIME, Sept. 21). Though De Gaulle's proposal would short-circuit the constitution and has already enraged politicians of all parties, his grandiloquent dialogue between "you Frenchmen and Frenchwomen and my self" only heightened the curious blend of awe, irritation and amusement with which most Frenchmen today regard...
THOUGH he will be remembered as the senior architect of Franco-German amity, Charles de Gaulle has believed throughout most of his life that Frenchman and German could never bridge their temperamental differences-let alone lay foundations for Europe's closest economic, political and military entente. In 1934, while a captain attached to the Defense Ministry, De Gaulle wrote a slim volum, The Army of the Future, which mirrored the conviction of most Frenchmen that the traditional hostility between France and Germany was "in the nature of things." The border between the two countries, wrote De Gaulle...
...This Frenchman, who has so much order in his mind and so little in his acts, this logician who doubts everything, this lackadaisical hard worker, this enthusiast for tail coats and public gardens who goes about in sloppy clothes and strews the grass with litter, in short, this fickle, uncertain, contradictory nation-how could the Teuton sympathize with it, understand it, or trust...
...irony of De Gaulle's evolution is that it took yet another war with Germany to persuade him that German and Frenchman could and should be partners. In his memoirs. he describes the thoughts that filled his mind in 1945 while inspecting French occupation forces in Germany...
...sense of history (see box). And at 71, he is a man of amazing diligence. Said one admiring German official: "The key to De Gaulle is evident in his speeches in German. He doesn't speak it really well, but he has a perfectly aspirated //. For a Frenchman, that's the toughest letter of all. De Gaulle must have concentrated on it and systematically practiced it until he got it. It's that power of will that's so characteristic. And you can be sure that he will keep pressing his idea of Franco-German friendship...