Word: frenchmen
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There was good reason for concern. The small rural landowner was being squeezed dry. More and more parvenu nobles, exempt from taxes, were buying country property; the mounting costs of a burgeoning bureaucracy thus fell on fewer and fewer Frenchmen. Petitions for nobles and clergy to share in the tax load went unheard...
...According to Jacques Attali, a leading Socialist economist, the reason is that Giscard and Barre can no longer promise light at the end of the austerity tunnel. Says Attali: "The French are losing hope." According to a survey in the business magazine L'Expansion, three out of four Frenchmen now believe that the economic crisis will be "enduring" rather than "transitory...
...deteriorating mood has forced Giscard to modify his Olympian stance. "The feeling of Frenchmen can be characterized by three attitudes: discontent, doubt and worry," he admitted on national television. Even as he spoke, that discontent was being aggravated by new government austerity bites: a punishing jump of a full percentage point in employees' social security contributions and increases in the government-controlled prices of items ranging from rail and air tickets to cigarettes and gasoline (to $2.75 per gal.). Charged Georges Séguy, head of the Communist-dominated C.G.T. union: "This is not austerity, it's plunder...
...economist for a U.S. think tank. She also gets $9,000 annually from an inheritance, but they show few signs of opulence. They live in a two-bedroom walkup, drive a small car and holiday with parents. Lacking the kind of expense account that allows many Frenchmen the Gallic equivalent of a three-martini lunch, they do not make a habit of eating out. Says Xavier: "I would guess that 60% of the customers in Paris restaurants are not paying from their own pockets...
...their shoulders square but show greater flexibility with the lower arms, hands and wrists. Americans are stiff-wristed, tend to wiggle and bounce more than Mediterranean peoples. There is also a difference between Old and New Worlds in arm swinging: Americans do it as if they owned the world; Frenchmen walk with their upper arms close to the body, as if moving through very limited space...