Word: frenchness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Then there were pocketbook issues at stake. The French bourgeoisie, which has never altogether given up the notion that the only safe place for silver is in a sock, was angry and upset over France's rapid inflation and high taxes and the lingering uncertainty about the value of the franc. In the two weeks immediately preceding the election, small businessmen staged two strikes over the tax issue?the first in their history. Big businessmen, on the other hand, were concerned about shrinking profits and the "participation" that De Gaulle had promised their workers following the chaos of last spring...
...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...
Beyond his actual deeds, his whole domineering style and omnipresent personality had become an embarrassment, or at least a source of frequent irritation. It was impossible to discuss French politics for more than a few minutes without reducing the issue to De Gaulle personally. Even the countless jokes about him had grown somewhat tiresome because they always involved the same cast: De Gaulle with God, Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc or Napoleon. An industry grew up making De Gaulle souvenirs, from adulatory De Gaulle effigies and mildly satirical De Gaulle party masks to obscene artifacts. The monarch was not amused...
...French have nothing against grandeur, but it demands an austerity that has nothing to do with their current mood. Contemporary France is moving rapidly, almost visibly, into the age of mass-consumer, pop-culture society, and the last thing it wants is austerity. The evidence of that attitude is almost everywhere. The France of sunny sidewalk cafés and smoky boîtes is now, also, the France of 536 Wimpy hamburger mills, dizzy discothéques and monumental traffic jams. Vacationers on the Côte d'Azur looking for bargain accommodations now stop at modern motels as well...
...open an exhibition of works by five American painters (Lester Johnson, Harry Nadler, Robert Natkin, Frank Roth, William Wiley). Looking over the abstract canvases, Shriver cracked: "Every year brings artistic upheavals?and sometimes other kinds of upheavals too." If farms are becoming large, business is becoming still larger. French corporations are swiftly reorganizing their methods and management along American lines. Their executives are studying computer management, and computers are becoming a way of life and profit. There is even one model on Paris' Champs-Elysées that reads horoscopes ?and that predicted, after reading De Gaulle's, the defeat...