Word: frenchmen
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When the European settlers of Algiers began their uprising fortnight ago, it seemed unthinkable that 1,000,000 Algerian "Frenchmen"-60% of whom are Spanish, Italian or Maltese by ancestry-could topple a government satisfactory to the majority of their 45 million fellow citizens in Metropolitan France. But as last week wore on, metropolitan Frenchmen came to realize that it was not the insurgent settlers they had to fear; it was the French army, which stood revealed as neither a neutral witness nor an unwilling accomplice, but as the active and continuing patron of the settlers' revolt. "The army...
...public support in Metropolitan France. Public opinion in the Metropole was behind De Gaulle partly because the likeliest alternative to his government was civil war, partly because his contemptuous refusal to bow to the insurgents' pressure gave good republicans the kind of leadership they had lacked in 1958. Frenchmen also saw Algiers' unseemly display as a blow to France's claim to be a great power. Public opinion was also behind De Gaulle, because France in 1960 is preoccupied with normality...
...have spent half of the past 15 years out of France-nothing seems so important to France's future as the fate of Algeria. Yet the passionate argument over Algeria raging last week between De Gaulle and the insurgents passed clean over the heads of many, perhaps most Frenchmen. The Paris of the emergency Cabinet meetings was also the Paris of the big fashion shows, memorable chiefly for such dramatic developments as the ingenious way Couturier Guy Laroche managed to combine "the popular princess line" with silhouettes resembling a Coke bottle or a bowling pin. In the Paris area...
...Fifth Republic survived the Algiers insurrection, it would be chiefly because of the historic speech-a magnificent retrieve-in which De Gaulle had rallied his countrymen to its defense and the army to its duty. But it would also be because an increasing number of Frenchmen were weary of seeing the life of their country perennially disturbed by storms out of Algeria...
...being the worst. Debré arrived at Challe's headquarters with the brusque announcement: "General de Gaulle expects every general to do his duty." With icy defiance, a cabal of five generals and eleven field officers told him flatly that 1) the army would not fire on Frenchmen, 2) De Gaulle had no choice but to renounce his offer of self-determination and proclaim unequivocally that he would keep Algeria French. Grey-faced, Debré returned to Paris unnerved; worse yet, the furtiveness of his trip-his arrival in Algiers was not made public until after he had left...