Word: frenchmen
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...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...
...Parisians let the paint peel from their houses, put, their Picassos in the attic, and claimed that their pedigreed poodles were used exclusively as watchdogs, which are taxexempt. (Le Fisc finally abandoned its hit-and-mistress methods this year.) When the inspectors started demanding taxpayers' financial records, artful Frenchmen from plumbers to landlords retaliated by insisting on cash for their services; the most fashionable doctor in Paris today would sooner vote for socialized medicine than accept a patient's check...
...with choral music and songs than with instrumental music. His lyrical sensitivity to poetry led his songs into fragile moods that passed subtly from laughter into grief. "J'aime la voix humaine," he would say. and no composer of the century knew better how to write for it; Frenchmen now call him their Schubert, their Puccini. From the Mouvements Perpétuels he wrote at 19, through his days with the anti-impressionist Groupe des Six, on through all the rest of his career, he never abandoned his own highly idiomatic voice: Ravel envied him for knowing...
...supply and communication with Europe were virtually cut off. His army was steadily reduced by sieges of sickness (most notably, ophthalmia and bubonic plague), by Bedouin raids, and by the almost incessant warfare the French were forced to wage to keep their sprawling colony subdued. Some 27,000 Frenchmen died in Egypt, and after a time even victories became too costly. Napoleon pushed into Syria with 13,000 men, was stalemated by the Turks at Acre, and limped back to Cairo with only half his army. In the second battle of Abukir, the French slaughtered 9,000 Turks, but suffered...