Word: frenchmen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Communists and gave the Communists increased representation in Parliament. But the bluntest verdict came from a bookseller whose only program was a refusal to pay taxes, and whose only remedy was to get rid of the old gang. "Throw the rascals out!" cried Pierre Poujade-and 2,400,000 Frenchmen gave him their vote in what Poujade himself called "an explosion of despair...
Dissipating the Power. It was the most dramatically dismaying result of the whole dismaying election. For the third time since the war, Frenchmen had gone to the polls-a healthy 82% of the eligible turned out-and, in an Assembly of 626 seats (30 of them to be decided later in Algeria), had dissipated the power to govern among four main blocs, roughly as follows: ¶ Communists: 150. ¶ Left-of-center coalition (Pierre Mendès-France and Socialists): 160. ¶ Right-of-center coalition (Premier Edgar Faure, Roman Catholic M.R.P., Independents): 200. ¶ Poujadists...
...Frenchmen examined their handiwork with a national headshake of disbelief. The support accorded the Communists and Poujadists put a third of Parliament (36% of the popular vote) into the hands of men publicly opposed to parliamentary democracy. The remainder, a workable majority if combined, was decisively split between forces of relatively similar philosophies but bitterly conflicting ambitions and allegiances...
...that he was politically indifferent: he was if anything too insistent on disagreeing with his neighbors. And in this he was helped by that old political nostrum, proportional representation, which encourages as many parties as there are disagreements. Proportional representation, and the resulting multiplicity of parties, registered accurately Frenchmen's differences and their deep distrust of one another. But it failed in the primary object of the democratic process-discovering areas of agreement...
...hopelessly divided, vote their immediate dissolution, and go back to the country for new elections. "But this," as the London Economist pointed out, "would require an improbable degree of self-abnegation"-and unless this divided Assembly could first agree on some useful set of electoral reforms, 22 million Frenchmen would in all likelihood only say again what they said last week...