Word: mende
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Martin Euler told newsmen that there were going to be new Saar talks with the French. "Reopening of Saar talks," said the headlines. No such thing, answered the French Foreign Office. Hastily the German Foreign Office sent off assurances to Paris that Adenauer had no intention of asking Premier Mendès-France for any "interpretations" or "protocols." Adenauer had only promised the FDP to put their points to the French. He was still in full command of the situation...
Confidence. In Paris, as he had promised he would, Mendès-France got the Assembly to schedule debate on the Paris agreements the week of Dec. 13. Then he plunged into what the French call the terrain de l'embuscade (ambush country) of French politics-the budget. Most of France's 19 postwar governments have been trapped and brought down not on the high ground of national or foreign policy, but in the tricky thickets of the budget...
Characteristically, Mendès tried to flush out lurking marauders at the start. French Deputies hate to raise taxes but love to raise the salaries of government workers. Since the Assembly cannot increase the government's allocations, its favorite device for forcing the government to increase salaries is to send any budget item back to committee. Mendes sternly warned that he would tolerate no "untoward maneuvers." Unbelieving, the members of the Assembly went right ahead, prepared to send back to committee the estimate for the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs...
...Figaro, shook up his staid readers and set off a fusillade of protest in the French press. Just back from his first trip to the U.S. in four years, Brisson reported: "In Washington, in New York, distrust is everywhere." Brisson, whose paper takes a dim view of Premier Mendés-France reported that Americans felt that France, by reneging on EDC, had gone back on her word. When Brisson argued that France is rightfully worried about Germany after three invasions, he reported that a top Washington "policymaker" replied: "One understands that a woman has nerves, that she makes hysterical...
...most slashing attack came from the small, pro-Mendés-France intellectual weekly, L'Express, edited by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber (TIME, June 14). Gasping at "the audacity of telling us that distrust is everywhere in America and that Mr. Foster Dulles . . . cherishes a lot of mental reservations about the chief of the French government," L'Express lumped Brisson and Le Figaro with "those wretched persons who dug a ditch for France . . . who twice a year sold Americans on the great Indo-China illusions . . . who sold the prestige of France in Asia and the young graduates...