Word: mend
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...year ago. Mendès told the National Assembly flatly: "France must limit her objectives, but attain them; establish a policy which is perhaps less ambitious than some would desire, but hold to it. Our aim must not be to give the illusion of grandeur, but to remake a nation whose word will be heard and respected...
...With typical meticulousness, Mendès, after the war, appealed this conviction. It was set aside only last month...
...that she was one of the world's Big Five, a fiction nurtured by De Gaulle and his successors, affirmed again and again by Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, made statutory in the permanent seats of the U.N. Security Council. As events have shown, and as Mendès-France affirms in effect, it was just an illusion, and the effort of maintaining it in Indo-China proved disaster in fact. What Mendès is now proposing is that France recognize itself as a second-class power, but an honest one. Free of the need...
...Mendès' view might be put in the French saying, Reculer pour mieux sauter-take a step backward so as to jump better. He argues that by trying to be strong everywhere, France is strong nowhere, that strength cannot be achieved anywhere with an overburdened or propped-up economy. Says a British friend: "He does not argue that France should stand alone, but that France should stand erect...
...Gambler. Almost unknown to the general public a year ago, Mendès-France has become a living symbol of change, in a country that longs for change. Previous Premiers had one goal that was more important than all others: to stay in office. A "successful" Premier was the one who managed to stay longest, and however patriotic he might be, he had to shape all his actions towards continuity in office. Generally, this meant that it was safer to do nothing. Thus, a Premier formed his majority first by telling the Catholic M.R.P. that he was for EDC, then...