Word: frenchmen
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...Frenchmen, though, missed the implications of the first national referendum conducted since Georges Pompidou succeeded Charles de Gaulle as President of the Fifth Republic. In view of France's seven-year presidential term, occasional popular votes are desirable to infuse a measure of excitement into the body politic-and, perhaps, to demonstrate the viability of the President's mandate. De Gaulle himself called for five referendums during his term of office, resigning after the fifth when the voters surprisingly rejected a program for government reform on which De Gaulle had demanded a vote of confidence...
...Frenchmen created and built the Statue of Liberty. Other Frenchmen designed the city of Washington and part of New Orleans. And what have American architects and builders given to France? Answer: Levittown...
Breguet benefits because France badly needs modern housing; for example, more than a third of Paris housing has no indoor toilets. Now Frenchmen can afford to buy new homes. The country has the fastest growing economy in the Common Market (TIME, Dec. 6), a fact that has become obvious to Breguet. Recently he has had to attach two-car garages to many of his homes...
...again to a cast of Clermont-Ferrand residents, presenting their painful, fragmented, cumulative remembrance of things past. Mendès-France was imprisoned in the city before escaping to join De Gaulle. He discusses the convulsions of Anglophobic, anti-Semitic and antidemocratic feeling that after the debacle helped Frenchmen blame everyone but themselves for defeat. He also tells of his charade of a trial by Petainist judges, before which he announced: "I am a Jew. I am a Freemason, but I am not a deserter; now let the trial begin...
...success and a scandal in France. The national television network refused to show it, but the film became a hit in moviehouses. It can be argued that Ophuls is somewhat unfair to the Resistance (there probably were more fighters than the film suggests), and to the majority of Frenchmen, who gave the underground more informal help elsewhere in France than they did in the vicinity of Vichy. But Sorrow's subliminal message seems unexceptionable: in crisis, men tend to be self-protective, self-delusive, brave, cowardly, cruel, confused and dangerous; organized hatred and apocalyptic ideology are to be avoided...