Word: mende
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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France wanted a tight little Europe embracing Britain and including a strong fence around Germany. On the eve of the conference, Premier Pierre Mendès-France outlined his ideas: 1) a British "association" with the Continent; 2) the admission of Germany and Italy to the 1948 Brussels Pact; 3) a system of "strict and severe controls" on the armies and arms of all Brussels Powers, but especially on the Germans. On German admission to NATO, Mendès hedged. Brussels first, said he, and then perhaps consideration of a NATO seat for the Germans...
Everybody expected Mendès-France to come out with a system of state planning. He did the opposite. He decided to plunge French economy into international competition as quickly as possible by reducing customs tariffs and opening the frontiers. Thus he will gradually lift a great part of the protective decrees. Mendès-France will issue no ukases; it is the old order of free competition which must clean house...
...Regime. Formidable resistance rises against Mendès-France. He has the support of the majority of the workers and of big business. Against him stands the greater majority of small and medium-sized industrial, commercial and agricultural enterprises, all those who were able to survive only in the incubator of protection. They don't realize that without radical treatment, most of them are condemned to death...
...Mendès-France refuses to make promises to the allies that are incapable of being kept. He is a less easy man to handle than his predecessors. Foreign diplomats who were loth to see their postwar arrangements crumble were only too eager to listen to Mendès-France's internal enemies. Washington's attitude suggests that American diplomacy may have joined the ranks of those who seek Mendès-France's downfall...
...young Wildes; it was "the smiling giant, always exquisitely dressed, who crawled about the nursery floor with us and lived in an aura of cigar smoke and Eau de Cologne." Unlike many another stiffly Victorian parent living on Tite Street, Wilde was always ready to romp with his boys, mend their toys and enter into their games...