Word: frenchmen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...duel went on in a strange silence -a silence imposed on the mass of the French people not by Jules Moch's troopers but by a fundamental indecision. Economically prosperous, politically cynical and weary, Frenchmen could not summon up enough enthusiasm for De Gaulle to rush to the barricades on his behalf. But for the most part they seemed not to feel enough hostility to offer him active opposition, were apparently prepared to accept him as ruler of France, if it came to that. When, early last week, France's two biggest unions called for a general work...
...Gaulle was well aware, this line of attack had its risks. In the minds of some Frenchmen, De Gaulle's soft sell and his insistence that he must be invited to power reawakened a longstanding suspicion that "le grand Charlie" lacked the capacity to be either an effective democrat or effective dictator. "After all," mused a dentist in Chateau-Thierry, "De Gaulle had the country in his hands in 1945 and couldn't run it. We need somebody who is better at politics." But on the minds of many Frenchman, De Gaulle's tactic of moderation seemed...
Above all. the insurgents had a policy for ending the Algerian war-a policy so radical that no French government had ever dared to put it into effect. While Moslems and Frenchmen alike cheered him on, burly Jacques Soustelle, who escaped a police guard in Paris to fly to Algiers, called for complete political integration of 1,000,000 French and 8,700,000 Moslem Algerians. Cried Soustelle: "Let each one of us be French like all the rest, with the same rights and duties...
Payday. When the integration movement started, it was mainly inspired and organized by the army, whose leaders recognized that associating Moslems and Frenchmen would give the insurrection a strength it could never achieve if it were based solely on exasperation with the politicians in Paris. Military trucks and buses were commandeered to bring fellahin in from their farms, and the army saw to it that Moslem demonstrators did not lose a day's pay. The Moslem stevedores from the Algiers docks had good reason to join in, too. Since maritime traffic with France had been cut off. they were...
...rounded up eyewitness accounts of valets and those Napoleon treated as valets: mistresses, bodyguards and generals, tailors, aides-de-camp, and such luminaries of the age as Goethe and Metternich. Out of the intimate, often lurid documentation emerges no hero but a devastating closeup of the man who convinced Frenchmen they were a race of heroes, and split nations apart like ripe fruit to show that "given 500,000 men, one can do anything...