Word: frenchmen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Sadly enough, not only youth has abandoned Simone de Beauvoir. So has judgment. That brilliant, recalcitrant mind, trained at the Sorbonne and annealed during the French Resistance, cannot accept the shape of the postwar world. When Dienbienphu falls, she exults, although the fallen are Frenchmen. The U.S. is decadent and bent on war. Russia is interested only in world peace, and fills the sky with Sputniks in proof of its military superiority, which will keep the peace. Pope Pius XII dies, and Mile, de Beauvoir, who renounced God at 15, accepts the news "with a certain amount of pleasure...
...officials report full cooperation from the police and the courts, but France's Napoleonic Code is filled with dusty laws that may trip the unwary. A tourist's U.S. drugs may be confiscated, for example, because the law bans the import of prescription drugs available in France. Frenchmen who have become U.S. citizens are in trouble if they revisit France:* they can be jailed for draft dodging, forced to serve 18 months in the army. In Gaullist France, all tourists are well advised to repress political opinions. Under an 1881 law, insulting heads of state, even in whispered...
...encourage concierges, waiters, taxi drivers and the like, each tourist will receive a "carnet de cheques-sourire" (checkbook of smiles), with tickets that he can tear out and distribute (along with his tip) as a reward for especially cheerful service. At the end of the season, 50 beaming Frenchmen with the largest number of smiles will win a brand-new car, a free vacation to Tahiti or the West Indies, or another prize. Will it work? One skeptical tourist official sighs, "Parisians are born complainers-they don't even like each other, not to mention tourists." And he shrugs...
...Million Frenchmen Wronged. The most recent danger signal was a sharp January dip in automobile production, down 26% from a year ago. Textile production has fallen 10%, forcing many small firms into merger or bankruptcy. There have been other serious declines, ranging from 5% in metal products to 16% in construction materials. Exports are 8% below their 1964 levels, railway freight tonnage has decreased more than 5%, and the newspaper Le Monde estimates that a million Frenchmen have had their purchasing power reduced by dismissals or short work weeks...
...French economy. Influential former Premier Michel Debré is pressing for more controls; Pompidou and Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d'Estaing argue for more free enterprise. Though the Gaullists see no compelling political reasons at the moment for relaxing the present unpopular controls, most Frenchmen are confident that relief will come later this year. Reason: the next French presidential election must be held by December, and De Gaulle will want his voters to be contented and prospering...