Word: mitterrand
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...outside French-speaking Quebec, were understandably irate back in 1967 when French President Charles de Gaulle stood on a balcony at Montreal's city hall and encouraged the province's then violent separatist movement with his cry of "Vive le Quebec libre ((Long live free Quebec))." Until President Francois Mitterrand arrived last week, no French chief of state had set foot on Canadian soil since then...
...victory too over the governments that helped Barbie. It was the Klarsfelds who picked up his trail -- he had disappeared for almost 40 years into the identity of a prosperous and peaceful businessman named Klaus Altmann living in Bolivia. They were the ones who managed to persuade Francois Mitterrand's Socialist government to act, to induce the Bolivian government to expel "Altmann" so that he could be returned to the country of his crimes...
...impresario? None other than Interior Minister Charles Pasqua, who staged the display as part of a campaign against pornography. Dubbed "Pasqua's Sex Shop" by the press, the antiporn program quickly backfired. An uncooperative President Franois Mitterrand declared that he opposed "all forms of censorship," and former Culture Minister Jack Lang pointedly sent along an erotic engraving by Picasso to be included in the show...
...officials responsible for protocol can be thankful that state visits like Chirac's can be undertaken by either the Premier or the President -- alone. Under the unwritten rules of cohabitation, more elaborate occasions, like last year's Western economic summit in Tokyo, require the presence of both Chirac and Mitterrand. Though each scrupulously observes the courtesies due the other's office, both expect to be received in equally grand style. They usually travel aboard separate aircraft, hold separate meetings with foreign leaders and are prickly about details, right down to the seating arrangements at banquets. The two leaders have learned...
Such rivalries were inevitable under cohabitation. The unusual arrangement came about because France's constitution sets a seven-year presidential term but schedules parliamentary elections, which determine the choice of a Premier, at five-year intervals. Mitterrand, the only leftist to hold the presidency in the Fifth Republic, served the first five years of his term with a parliamentary majority and then lost it to Chirac's center-right coalition in 1986. It was the first time that sequence of events had occurred. Mitterrand and Chirac cooperated well for a while, but lately political thrusts and parries between...