Word: mende
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...Must Choose." Mendès-France believed in himself. And last week, in hundreds of letters to newspapers and the government, Frenchmen declared their belief in him. "Your presence gives us comfort," wrote a pensioned widow. "A man who speaks to us with frankness and simplicity, you have restored confidence long lost to us," wrote a retired miller...
...Mendès was frank to the point of bluntness. The nation, he said, had been living beyond its means. "For years, we have undertaken tasks beyond our strength," he said. If the crepes suzettes sizzled as lavishly as ever in Paris' chic restaurants, it had been because the economy was propped by U.S. aid, and kept in an artificial fever of inflation by governments which lacked the courage to face realities. France's military commitments were far beyond what its economy could support. Mendès insists: "We must choose"-a favorite phrase...
...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...