Word: mende
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...structure of the new Europe was beaten out against the anvil of Mendès-France's realities. He who had helped destroy a dream had made his fellow bargainers settle for his version of the possible. The dreams may have been necessary in the beginning, but the new-style, unsentimental diplomacy of Mendès-France seemed to be just right...
...week long, a sour little man in a rumpled blue suit, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, darted among the Homburg-hatted diplomats of the West and flummoxed them. France's Pierre Mendès-France was something new to postwar diplomacy. He made no effort to appear obliging, did not seem to care whether anybody liked him personally or not. He had little to bargain with except the hopes he himself had aroused by pledging his troth to Western European Union in London. Now, with all the invitations issued, the guests on hand, the church bells pealing...
...French did not want us to have an army, we agreed to EDC. Now they don't want us to have EDC, so we will oblige them by agreeing to have an army," cracked one German. "I've come with great hope," said Konrad Adenauer. But Mendès soon let Adenauer know what his little matter was. It was the Saar...
Hope & Cold Flame. To broach the matter, Mendès invited Adenauer out to a small 17th century château near Versailles which French kings had maintained for favorite mistresses. In a small chamber warmed by a fire on the hearth, the two faced each other across a narrow table: Mendès, hooded, saturnine, a man like a cold, dark flame that cuts through difficulties or friendships with impartial efficiency; old Konrad Adenauer, German man of good will, behind whose craggy face still loomed the memory of his nation's blood-ridden record...
...take all the dossiers out of the drawer," said Mendès. He began that afternoon with hope. He spoke of a Moselle canal to link Lorraine's economy with the Ruhr, of a Rhone canal to open the Mediterranean to Germany, of joint arms plants, of joint German-French companies to develop France's North African territories. The Saar, Mendès indicated, could be just a small item in a new, sweeping Franco-German era of partnership...