Word: frenchmen
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...SUNDAY MORNING, December 5, what seemed like a watershed event in recent French political history took place. From all over France people came to participate, and from all levels of society: small shopkeepers, bitter farmers and disillusioned, out-of-work youth. Sixty thousand Frenchmen, according to the organizers, converged on a fairground at Paris's Porte de Versailles. In the post-dawn cold, they disbanded the last of Charles deGaulle's parties, the Democratic and Republican Union (DRU), and thus marked the nominal end to the gaullist era in French politics...
...supporters, grim at the outset but suddenly fired-up as they interrupted Chirac 96 times during his speech, by all accounts called to mind the Frenchmen who have found anti-reform, authoritarian appeals attractive in the past, particularly during the pre-World War II depression. France is again suffering a severe economic crisis; after a decade of industrial boom, the average Frenchman is faced with bewildering jumps in both inflation and unemployment. The "little guy" has become fed up, and Chirac is capitalizing on this despair...
Charles de Gaulle liked to believe that all Frenchmen at heart were Gaullists, ready to respond instantly to his mystic brand of nationalism in times of travail-provided, of course, that the call to glory came from an inspired and iron-willed leader. Last week a generally disgruntled French populace awoke to the clarion of a familiar bugle, and lo, it was playing their song...
Cooking by Ear. Southern cuisine arrived by ship or afoot from many climes. Slaves came from Africa bearing benne (sesame seed), okra, yams and remembered formulas that were to become the masterworks of Southern cuisine. Frenchmen marched ashore to reincarnate such classic dishes as bouillabaisse, which is a culinary cousin of gumbo, a permissive potpourri that can include chicken, turkey, ham, crab, oyster, shrimp or anything else on hand. While New Englanders learned-belatedly-to raise beef and sheep, Southerners derived sustenance from the wild game and pigs and chickens that were raised almost as members of the family...
Sabatini's talents as a stylist lie well to the south of, say, Sir Walter Scott's. He is a Monte Pythonesque coiner of clichés: rubies have a fearless tendency to "glow like live coals," and Frenchmen sputter expletives like "Name of a name!" and "By example!" Yet in the next sentence Sabatini can turn a flashing phrase (a eunuch's hands are two "bunches of fat fingers...