Word: frenchmen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Dirty Hands. Partly because of the army censorship in Algiers, partly out of a surfeit of crises, plain Frenchmen did not at first recognize the deadliness of the situation. Only gradually did it become clear that not just a few barricades had to be taken, but half of Algiers, half of Constantine. Not until the fourth day of the uprising did French newspaper readers learn that the insurgents had freed fellow insurgents from jail, permitted shops to be opened or ordered them to close, shut down Algiers municipal services and were in control of the city with the army...
Ambitious Jacques Soustelle, wartime chief of Free French intelligence, objected that this would mean massacre in Algiers and a deadly split in France. With clear reference to the World War II African and Middle Eastern battles in which Free Frenchmen fought and killed Vichy Frenchmen. De Gaulle coldly retorted: "Soustelle. when we made Free France, we had to dirty our hands...