Word: frenchmen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Hours" of Le Mans is the world's most famous auto race-and nobody is quite sure why. Perhaps it is Le Mans's history of death (more than 100 fatalities in 43 years), perhaps because it is so brutally long. Frenchmen call it La Ronde Infernale ("The Hell Circuit"). Pro drivers hate it: the 8.3-mile course is monotonous, and amateurs are allowed to compete, a fact that makes the coolest pro perspire with fright. The only man who really enjoys Le Mans is Italy's crusty old Enzo Ferrari, whose cars have won the race...
...foreign tourists, the Paris cop seems a model of quiet courtesy. He directs them to American Express and Thomas Cook with a debonair salute; he guides gladiatorial traffic with a calm nonchalance. Frenchmen look on le flic quite differently. Apart from their dislike of taking orders from anyone, they know that frequently in the hem of his natty blue cape is sewn enough buckshot to break a man's-and sometimes a woman's-nose. They have seen him wading into a crowd flailing a 6-ft. riot cane like a scythe...
...dared to protest that a cop was neglecting an accident victim while quizzing witnesses; Belmondo was knocked flat. During May, four prisoners detained for trifling offenses hanged themselves in their cells. There was no evidence to prove that the police were at fault, but no one could convince suspicious Frenchmen that the deaths were not caused by third-degree tactics. Paris has also gotten a little tired of the overzealous use of submachine guns issued during the past Algerian terrorist outbreaks. When a panther escaped from a circus, a flic mistook a shadow for the beast and in error plugged...
...lights in the hall fade. The slide projector goes on, and there on the screen is a picture of John and Jacqueline Kennedy with a towering, dour man about whom 40 million Frenchmen may be right. Says the lecturer's voice of Charles de Gaulle: "What a wonderful leader for the French he has been. How he has sacrificed himself! The women don't make speeches in France, and Madame de Gaulle was quite surprised when I told her what the ladies do over here...
...Algeria's farm land, most of it French-owned, and handed it to "management committees" of turbaned peasants. His regime has seized scores of cinemas, hotels and restaurants from Algerians who, in Ben Bella's words, "fattened themselves like pashas" by buying up property from fleeing Frenchmen. Unspoken Alliance. But Ben Bella's brand of socialism has distinct limits. Algeria's chief alliance is a strange, unspoken one, not with the Communists or with any Arab land. It is with France, Algeria's onetime overlord. As if to make clear its continued endorsement...