Word: frenchmen
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Since they disagree on almost everything else, many Frenchmen disagreed with M. Mauriac's dour outlook. What was more striking in France last week, however, was that more & more Frenchmen were beginning to agree on one of the major causes of their chronic parliamentary crises. The cause: the constitution of the Fourth Republic, which came into force in 1946 and since has spawned 15 consecutive governments ranging in health from sickly to stillborn. So long as the constitution remains unchanged, Frenchmen are beginning to realize, premiers and cabinets are bound to come & go with distressing frequency...
What Pinay proposed to do was neither world-shaking nor highly original, but in the way he proposed it Frenchmen found adrenalin for their flagging spirits. He brought France its first right-of-center government since the war, forming it out of a hostile and mistrustful Parliament, without the help of the vacillating Socialists. So quick was Pinay's popularity with the French public that hostile deputies, suddenly reminded that they had constituencies as well as parties to serve, voted against their inclinations time & again because they feared to tumble him from office. "A most disconcerting fellow," explained...
Better Than Orson. Suddenly Pinay was a hero. Frenchmen began to compare him with Raymond Poincaré, who won fame in the 1920s not because he had been both President and Premier of France, but because he had saved the franc. In newsreel theaters, flashes of the dignified little man in plain double-breasted suit and the homburg provoked wild applause-"the first politician since De Gaulle who has received spontaneous applause," reported an impressed minister after an afternoon at the movies. At the autograph exchange in the gardens of the Palais Royal, the signature of Antoine Pinay went...
...Resistance because he was one of 225 Senators who voted state powers to Petain in 1940. Pinay had not joined the Resistance; it offended his conservative sense of law & order. But villagers have since related that as mayor during the occupation, he hid Jews and issued false papers to Frenchmen hunted by the Gestapo. Shortly he was back in the Assembly, and within two years was mayor again...
...little parties, huddles of special interests. It shows itself in the big industrialists and businessmen who resist alike the productive imagination of U.S. capitalism and the legitimate aspirations of labor, and prudently send their capital out of the country. And the resultant despair shows in the 5,000,000 Frenchmen, 25% of the electorate, who voted Communist (a survey by France's FORTUNE-like Réaltiés showed that most were "seeking an energetic and dependable champion who would improve their material lot . . . The U.S.S.R., despite a vague sympathy, gets on their nerves a little . . ."). The Frenchman...