Word: frenchness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...David. Though last spring's disorders revealed the depth of France's discontent, De Gaulle and his ministers have failed since then to find fundamental solutions. The government, in fact, has not produced a single new law that effectively gets at the roots of the inequities in French society. As the National Assembly's fall term came to an end, Pierre Lelong, a Gaullist Deputy from Brittany, complained, "I have to tell my voters what we have accomplished, but I don't know what to say. We haven't done anything...
...universities and a complete overhaul of the archaic curriculum. Education Minister Edgar Faure has produced a reform law so vague that many educators doubt that it ever will be put into practice. The students remain angry and distrustful. Disturbances of varying intensity have erupted this fall at dozens of French universities and high schools. Last month, after riot police were stationed on the campus at Nanterre, where the spring disorders began, militant students pinned to their clothes the Star of David, just as the Jews of Nazi Germany had been forced to do, and taunted the helmeted police with cries...
Perhaps the Socialists, who only six years ago commanded 15% of all French votes, will rise again. The practical effect of the opposition's collapse, however, is the demise of any remaining parliamentary democracy in France, at least for the moment. That development alarms France's Centrist Party, whose leaders feel that the opposition's impotency reflects a deeper ill. As they see it, French society is losing its cohesion and direction. The Centrist publication Facts and Causes, for example, writes that "in reality, the malaise is twofold." Its reasoning: "The failure of the government has caused...
Actually, the French economy is not as sick as many Frenchmen seem to suspect. Owing to tight currency controls, the huge speculative outflow of francs has been stopped. Some $500 million in francs has returned to France in the past month. Furthermore, despite the franc's recent weakness, France still possesses some $3.5 billion in gold and foreign currency reserves plus nearly $4 billion in standby credits from the International Monetary Fund and her Western trading partners. Even so, the nagging worry remains either that the austerity program will bring on a recession or that runaway prices will force...
However the economy goes, the sources of France's malaise are mainly psychological. As Charles de Gaulle this week makes his annual New Year's Day television address to the French people, he will very likely attempt to conjure France out of her melancholy. It will be a difficult task, since many disgruntled Frenchmen at present feel that the avuncular oracle finally has lost his touch, his matchless rhetoric its meaning. But as he has often displayed in the past, De Gaulle, the politician of catastrophe, can be at his best when France is at her worst...