Word: frenchmen
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Ever since the French Revolution, the specter of a militantly left-wing government has periodically caused wealthy Frenchmen to dispatch their gold and cash to safe harbors abroad. This year an unknown number of businesses and petits bourgeois have been illegally transferring their liquid assets to Switzerland, Liechtenstein and other countries with strong currencies and discreet bankers. The reason for this unseemly flight of capital was explained by a recent public opinion poll. It showed that President Georges Pompidou's Gaullists and their allies were fast losing ground to the Communist-Socialist coalition in next month's parliamentary...
...mediateur, as the ombudsman is called, will be assisted by a dozen high-ranking civil servants, who are, of course, bureaucrats. Unlike the Swedes or Norwegians, who can complain directly to their ombudsmen, Frenchmen who feel mistreated by their government will find a wall of nearly 1,000 Deputies and Senators between them and their mediateur. These politicians will pass complaints to the ombudsman only if they consider them worthy of his attention. Not surprisingly, the arrangement does not please the politicians, one of whom grumped that the new post was "turning us into letter boxes...
...Frenchmen sincerely believe that their language, logical and precise, is the foundation of their civilization. They are especially worried, now that Britain has joined the Common Market, that English, rather than French, will become the primary language of European commerce and technology...
Even so, the prosperity responsible for the rosy forecasts, the 13 million cars on the roads and the second homes in the countryside has not reached the millions of Frenchmen who earn $180 or $200 a month, or who try to live on old-age pensions frozen at $2.20 a day in a time of rampant inflation. Overlaying the unevenness of le boom is an ill-defined but widely felt boredom with the Gaullists. Last spring, 40% of the French electorate did not even bother to turn out for a Common Market referendum that Pompidou too cleverly planned...
...Mitterrand, 56. As a result, the union program is rather more socialist than Communist; it calls for nationalization of banks, insurance companies and major firms in "strategic industries." Even so, the prospect of even more government control in an economy that is already 12% nationalized worries many Frenchmen. At the voting booth, they may well heed the Gaullist charge that "the Socialists and Communists promise you El Dorado, but they'll give you Chile...