Word: mitterrand
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When Jacques Chirac led his center-right coalition to victory in France's parliamentary elections a year ago, he and Socialist President Francois Mitterrand found themselves in unexplored political territory. Never before in the 28-year history of France's Fifth Republic had a Premier, or head of government, on one side of the political spectrum had to coexist with a President, or head of state, on the other. Now, halfway into the two-year experiment the French call cohabitation, Chirac, 54, has helped make the power-sharing arrangement work better than most political observers had thought possible...
Temperatures in Paris dropped to 10 degrees. At midweek a 5 1/2-inch snowfall turned the French capital into a winter fantasy land where students waged impromptu snowball fights and cross-country skiers trekked across the Champs de Mars near the Eiffel Tower. Following the lead of President Francois Mitterrand, who deployed army troops to stricken areas across the country, French Premier Jacques Chirac mobilized some 1,800 soldiers to help remove the snow from Paris streets. The government ordered two Paris Metro stations to stay open all night to help shelter an estimated 15,000 homeless men and women...
This comes from centuries of Kings, Popes and Presidents acting out the gap between principles and applied statecraft. Says Guy Sorman of Paris University's Political Studies Institute: "Most Frenchmen believe that political power and foreign policy should be Machiavellian. Today when President Mitterrand is called a Florentine -- meaning a Machiavellian -- it is meant largely as a compliment. What Frenchmen dislike is naivete...
...shadowy secret government agents with false beards or other disguises. The gem of these was surely the Greenpeace affair of 1985, in which two teams of French secret service frogmen blew up a trawler belonging to the environmental organization Greenpeace in Auckland harbor. The resulting international uproar shook Francois Mitterrand's Socialist government and forced the sacking of its intelligence chief and the resignation of its Defense Minister. Unlike Iranscam, however, that was the extent of it. Parliament never pursued it further. Indeed, the two French agents jailed by New Zealand until last July are now regarded as heroes...
...formal rupture of the avant-garde from the academy. Giscard demurred. He wanted Orsay to begin in 1830, with Delacroix's Liberty Guiding the People -- which the Louvre flatly refused to release. Back to the drawing board. But then, in 1981 a new Socialist government headed by Francois Mitterrand came in, and Mitterrand let it be known that the 19th century must begin in 1848, the year of populist revolutions and the collapse of monarchies, in which Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto and the grandeur of French bourgeois culture began to move toward its apogee. Courbet, not Delacroix, would thus...