Word: mende
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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First there was the inconsequential Post and Telegraph Ministry budget, on which Mendès impatiently demanded a vote of confidence. He won-but by the narrowest margin of his meteoric, five-month tenure: 321 to 207. Later in the week, on the eve of his take-off for a ten-day visit to Canada and the U.S., Mendès asked the Assembly to postpone debate on the ugly North African situation until his return. Again he won-but by a still narrower margin...
...Mendès hoped to win over the Socialists, who have disdained to join any French government for the past three years, by giving them six Cabinet posts. The Socialists decided to join Mendès only if he agreed beforehand to push three Socialist measures. Unwilling to have his hands tied, Mendès said he would study the conditions until his return. He arrived in Quebec looking his usual assured self. After all, the Socialists, with almost no debate, had agreed to support the Paris accord for the new German army, which should assure its passage...
...kinetic little Premier remains widely liked and admired by the French people, and the only man since Charles de Gaulle who has given France a sense of cohesion, direction and escape from stagnation. Even Guy Mollet, the Socialist Party secretary, recognized this last week when he labeled Mendès "the second-best possible Premier"-meaning that if France could not have a Socialist Premier, then Pierre Mendès-France was the next best...
Monnet's vision was of a Europe in which nations would progressively sacrifice chunks of their sovereignty for the common good. Pierre Mendès-France, France's new man of the hour, has substituted a tougher, harder-bargaining diplomacy in which nations make accommodations and pacts with one another, but jealously cling to their sovereign authority. In this he has the powerful support of the British Foreign Office, which instinctively prefers the more pragmatic, national approach. At the London Conference, the new pragmatism paid off triumphantly in the seven-nation Western European Union...
...many a "good European" mourns a lost ideal. Germany's Konrad Adenauer, fearing what he calls "the reviving game of European national states," has felt compelled to go along. But to the Benelux foreign ministers he said privately: "I am 100% convinced that the German national army that Mendès-France forces upon us will become a big danger for Germany and for Europe . . . My God, I don't know what my successors will do if they are left to themselves, if they are not bound to Europe...