Word: frenchmen
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...Sorrow speaks with a very personal voice. It deals primarily with ordinary Frenchmen and Germans who have reduced the Holocaust to forms of individual and family history. Helmuth Tausend, a German officer stationed in Clermont-Ferrand, first speaks of the war as a six-year separation from his new bride. Marcel Verdier, a pharmacist, refers to the obsession with food he and his countrymen developed. Pierre Mendes-France, who was Secretary of State before the collapse, recalls both matters of government and of the desire for small needs like kitchen matches. Those who struggled against the Nazis give personal, seemingly...
...recent sale of French Mirage fighters to Libya. If the Pompidou government did not stop "the delivery of these offensive weapons at once," Aranda threatened to publish many more documents. "No one has the right to sell out the people of Israel," he added. "Shalom!" The speech led many Frenchmen to believe that he was Jewish. As it turned out, Aranda is Catholic, conservative and, to the consternation of the government, a staunch Gaullist. The Mirage statement, he explained grandly, was just "a poetic touch, a flower on the dung heap...
...heralding the first Kissinger book, the Administration defused it by announcing Landau's major disclosure four months before publication. Through his interviews Landau last years managing editor of the Crimson) found that in 1967." Kissinger acted as the American conduit for peace feelers from the North Vietnamese Two Frenchmen who visited Hanoi returned to Kissinger with the message that negotiations could begin if the bombing of North Vietnam ceased. The Harvard professor brought that offer back to Washington but President Johnson rejected it only after the bloody Tet offensive of 1965 did the United states out back the bombing...
...proliferation of names was such that a law was enacted strictly limiting the selection of first names to those of the saints or of Greek, Roman or biblical origin. Charles de Gaulle loosened the names policy somewhat in 1966, but French law still explicitly allows and even encourages Frenchmen to change surnames that are considered to reflect poorly on France and the French...
Sage Reminder. What sort of names? In 1967 the French Council of State set out some guidelines intended to help Frenchmen decide if they had a nom ridicule-a ridiculous, insulting or otherwise unappealing surname-that they could legally change. In the field of animals, from which a number of French surnames are taken, a Monsieur Duck, Cow, Camel, Ass or Snipe would be allowed to change his name, but a Monsieur Ox, Bull, Goat, Nightingale or Leopard would not. Nouns such as tripe, cheese, cemetery and cuckold, and adjectives like hideous and ugly were frowned on as surnames...