Word: frenchmen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Most Frenchmen seem a little bored with the grandeur of De Gaulle. These days, they find glory enough in a little Gallic warrior who has a droopy yellow mustache and wears a winged beanie, whose force de frappe is not a nuclear bomb but a magic potion that contains-as a bow to the French palate-lobster. The whole nation has come to adore a comic-book hero whose name suggests a mere footnote to history. He is Astérix Le Gaulois, leader of a hilarious village of "unsubdued and irksome" Gauls still holding out against Caesar...
...American scene, St. John de Crevecoeur, in 1782. Emerson elaborated and sustained the vision, and by 1908, Israel Zangwill, an admiring English Jew, was completely carried away: "America is God's Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all races of Europe are merging and reforming . . . Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians-into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American...
Atomized Industry. One problem is that, after they've seen Paris, too many Frenchmen want to stay down on the farms. France has so many farmers that it is the ofily big Western European country that can feed itself-but its industries are underpopulated. Only 16% of its people hold industrial jobs, compared with 22% in Britain and 23% in Germany. Because farmers are low taxpayers, industry has to carry too heavy a share of the tax load, and this year the rates on profits, after dividends, were boosted from 34% to 50%. As a result, French industrial companies...
...family-owned firms, whose self-satisfied owners are often reluctant to risk expansion or spend for modernization. Of the 30 biggest industrial companies outside the U.S., twelve are German, ten British, but only two are French (Renault and Rhône-Poulenc). Expansion capital is hard to come by. Frenchmen are wary of investing, often prefer to sock their savings into real estate and gold. They have seen too many investments demolished by wars and inflations, and their fears have hardly been allayed by the 40% plunge in the French stock market since...
Yellow Men. Much of their comedy is sharply contemporary, and carries a sting. A reference to "the 13 Frenchmen who actually fought in the last war" is followed by a summation of Lyndon Johnson in his Viet Nam visit: "Shortly after he arrived, he left." An African head of state is asked by an English interviewer about his country's firm resistance to Red Chinese infiltration. "If God had meant there to be yellow men," the chief explains, "he would have made them like you and me." Hendra and Ullett, both 25, arrived at their joint lunacy three years...