Word: frenchmens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Most of all, of course, the general's departure mattered to France. Most Frenchmen woke up in the first days of what might be called A.D. (After De Gaulle) slightly dazed and a little disbelieving at what they had wrought. Some had doubted De Gaulle's resolve when he told them?arbitrarily, as always?that a non vote would really end his rule. Others, long accustomed to the Gaullist unexpected, wondered whether it was really for keeps, or whether De Gaulle might not still somehow come thundering back into the arena. Above all, the French, the inveterately rationalist sons...
...loss. Weary as they are of greatness, the French could not help mourning its passing. No one expressed it better than one of France's most distinguished political writers, Pierre Viansson-Ponté: "Even among his opponents, even among those who campaigned relentlessly for the 'No,' even among those Frenchmen who could no longer stand his self-assurance and his pride, many felt a sudden pang when they thought of him on Sunday night. Thirty years on the stage, sometimes in the glare of the footlights, sometimes in silhouette, eleven years of absolutism, long tempered by his own resolve, later...
...moreover, pleasing fewer and fewer Frenchmen with his foreign policies. Always the product of his personal piques as well as his grand designs, those policies had grown increasingly alien or irrelevant to the world as viewed by ordinary Frenchmen. They often left the impression that the old man was getting erratic. Perhaps the most damaging stance involved the Arabs and Israelis. Though France has only 520,000 Jews, many more French were incensed when De Gaulle extended an earlier arms embargo to include spare-parts shipments to Israel...
...outside the Gaullist party in an appeal for a broad consensus, he became the party's unanimous candidate almost immediately. Meanwhile, the opposition parties seemed determined to fulfill all of De Gaulle's most scornful descriptions of them and to prove the old maxim that four Frenchmen locked in a room together are likely to emerge with five political parties. In the course of their first-week search to mount a challenge to Gaullism, they only managed to stumble over one another in a parody of the Alphonse-Gaston...
Significantly, the early demonstrations were supported by their middle-class parents. By the time it had ended, some 10 million Frenchmen ? or 20% of the population ? had somehow struck at their government, either directly or by stopping work. The depth of discontent was clear to all, and it was only the fear of another convulsive round of riots that saved De Gaulle. In the process, he bargained away the wage curbs of the franc's stability, helping to precipitate the fiscal crisis that followed...