Word: matignon
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They may both belong to France's conservative party, but President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Prime Minister Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin could not be more different. Tall, elegant, and ostentatiously erudite, Villepin was a career diplomat who gained the Matignon without ever having run for office. Short, petulant and sparking with excessive energy, Sarkozy marched to the Elysée Palace by winning an election, using old-fashioned political grunt work and his Cabinet posts to establish a reputation for delivering results. Along the way, the two men's conflicting styles and rival aspirations turned them into bitter enemies...
...often proved itself impervious to reform, fierce opposition like that means Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin must be doing something right. He certainly thinks so. "What we've done is enormous! Enormous!" Raffarin exclaimed in an interview with Time at his office in the Hôtel Matignon in Paris' seventh arrondissement. But, he added, "We have to be attentive to the nervous nature of French society." How nervous is France? Right now Raffarin's approval rating is 38%, the lowest point of his 16-month tenure, down from a high of 63% last December. So you might expect...
...problem for teachers and administrators has been to combat entrenched stereotypes of all the houses. "House A tends to view itself as a mini-BB and N [Buckingham, Browne and Nichols, a private high school in Cambridge] and Fundamental wants to be Matignon [a Catholic high school in Cambridge]," notes bilingual program teacher Arnold Clayton. "The Academy's reputation is that it is a house for foreigners and immigrants. But we've had the salutatorian the past two years...
Shirley, a ninth grader at Cambridge's Matignon High School, pointed to the cracked wall by her living room sofa, as she complained of the cold temperature in the room. Her mother, Marie, appeared in the doorway buttoning her coat, and slipped out of the door after delivering some last remarks in Haitian Creole...
Forty-eight hours later, Chirac appeared on television to announce that the decree would be submitted instead as a separate parliamentary bill to the National Assembly, where his coalition holds a three-vote majority. Sitting beneath a Gobelin tapestry in his office in the Hotel de Matignon, Chirac politely but pointedly called Mitterrand's concerns "without any foundation" and termed the President's refusal to sign "without precedent...