Word: frenchmen
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Four times since he came to power in 1958, Charles de Gaulle has faced Frenchmen with the threat to step down unless his proposals received their endorsement. Each time the French have submitted to his will. Yet his statement on French television last week that he was turning the April 27 referendum into a vote of confidence caught most French citizens by surprise. For one thing, the issues hardly seemed important enough for De Gaulle to stake his career on them. For another, interest in the referendum has been so slight that the outcome is by no means certain...
Three Issues. It is little wonder that most Frenchmen are unenthusiastic about the referendum. The text itself, which runs for 14 turgid pages, is enough to drive most voters away. Furthermore, the referendum demands a single answer on three totally different issues. One of them is De Gaulle's plan to decentralize French bureaucracy by taking much administrative power away from officials in Paris and giving it to the provinces. In pursuit of this goal, De Gaulle wants to consolidate France's 95 departments into 21 "economic regions" that will have their own legislatures...
...answer comes out: community. We need to consider the American community in all its devious and marvelous turns through history. We need, more still, to feel, to experience that history, as if it were truly our own. Of course, few Americans are really Americans, in the sense that Frenchmen are French, or Englishmen English: we just haven't been here that long, most of us. Still, we are now Americans, troubled mostly by the problems of America; and to relate fully to those problems we need to relate fully to their history as problems, even if we cannot relate ourselves...
...devaluation is to improve the efficiency of their economy, which is fragmented into countless small businesses. Even more urgent, as the conservative newspaper L'Aurore noted last week, is the task of "restoring the confidence" of the French people in their government. Said L'Aurore: "Rarely have Frenchmen in all social categories demonstrated such dissatisfaction with the way in which the government is managing the nation's affairs." Until confidence is restored, the franc-and France-will continue to be unstable...
...competitive imbalance by making French goods cheaper on world markets. But devaluation would also be a bitter political setback for Charles de Gaulle, who has staked his prestige on maintaining parity of the franc at 20 U.S. cents. Even so, a currency that foreigners hesitate to handle and that Frenchmen hold only because they have to is hardly the basis for a policy of grandeur...