Word: gaullists
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...favor of the referendum?almost the mirror opposite of France's 53% rejection. The city of Paris turned down the referendum 56% to 44%, and it could not win a majority even in the chic 7th, 8th and 16th arrondissements, the silk-stocking districts of Paris, and normally solid Gaullist. Women voters, who have made up another Gaullist bastion, gave 10% less than the 70% they mustered in 1962. Finally, and perhaps decisively, the young vote, which has recently eluded De Gaulle, was out in force: some 850,000 French in their early 20s were voting for the first time...
...paper when the moment finally arrived, but no one any longer doubted that France would. On the night of the referendum, there were some sharp, ugly scenes in the Latin Quarter between police and students, but they were largely provoked by the flics, as though attempting to incite the Gaullist prophecy into reality. If that was the aim, it failed. France accepted the vacuum calmly, fascinated by the details of the transition, watching and waiting to see what would happen next. Interim President Alain Poher, a quiet, reassuring man, contributed to the calm as he moved swiftly and decisively...
Georges Pompidou was the first to announce his candidacy, and though he did so 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...
...tensions of modernization even divided the Gaullist government. Service-level specialists in such ministries as Public Works and Health pressed for change and refurbishing, but the "other" government, typified by the Finance Ministry, opposed radical reform, and it was De Gaulle's personally run Finance Ministry?where tax forms are still laboriously filled out and stamped by hand?that kept control of France. "It has become a system governed by rules rather than objectives," says University of Nanterre Sociologist Alain Touraine...
Some of its rules, moreover, seemed out of joint with France in any age. The cradle of modern revolution and free speech had, through the Gaullists' abuse of their power over the state-owned radio and television networks, one of the free world's most tightly controlled public information centers. Politicians who opposed De Gaulle were rarely accorded air time, and pro-Gaullist propaganda assaults filled prime time during election campaigns. Another arbiter of public taste turned out to be De Gaulle's prudish wife Yvonne. For her influence in banning sex from TV, banishing dirty books from Left Bank...