Word: frenchmen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Once again the grainy color photographs showed the harrowed faces of hostages. This time the pictures of four Americans and two Frenchmen, delivered last Thursday to several daily newspapers in Beirut and printed by some of them the next day, came accompanied by an ominous warning: unless the government of Kuwait agreed to release 17 Muslim fundamentalist terrorists jailed there for bombing the U.S. and French embassies in December 1983, the American captives would suffer "catastrophic consequences" and their captors would "terrorize America and France forever...
...unfortunately, we learn nothing about the natives and little about who the Frenchmen are aside from their careers or significant personal events. This is excusable in real history when evidence lacks, but a good pop historian should always ascribe possible motivations to his characters, drawn form the genre's sister-science, pop psychology...
Jean-Louis Chavel is one of 30 Frenchmen being held in a small prison block by the occupying German army. Chavel, a lawyer before the war, and his fellow detainees know exactly why their captors provide them food and shelter: the involuntary guests are hostages, meant to discourage local Resistance violence against the Nazis. This deterrent, of course, does not work. Two Germans are killed, and the order comes down from the prison commander: one out of every ten prisoners is to be executed at sunrise. The men themselves must choose the victims. Lots are drawn, and Chavel finds himself...
...Polynesian art made virtually no impact on his painting; all its primitive elements-the flatness, the sinuous friezelike poses, the outlining-were either there already or deduced from photographs of Javanese, Cambodian and other Oriental material that he took with him. (One should not forget that in the 1880s, Frenchmen were still talking about Japanese art as art pri-mitif.) When he did quote Tahitian art, Gauguin played fast and loose with it, basing (in There Is the Marae, 1892) a Tahitian fence on the design of a tiny Marquesan earplug. In his Tahiti, primitivism was cousin to Baudelaire...
...When Frenchmen are drinking they like to sing Chevaliers de la Table Ronde. Americans sing Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue. The crowd shouts along, gathering strength for Dixie. "This is a fabulous group," says Melvar, a definite regular at 72. "We celebrate birthdays, weddings, funerals. In all these years we've only lost two men who could sing. Ralph's memorial service is tomorrow, and we're all going." "The party's over," sings Kenn. Margaret closes: "I'm so glad you all came...