Word: napoleonism
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...Napoleon's Width. What rubs salt in the wound is that the French claim to have invented the automobile, either in 1873, when one Amedée Bollée built a steam car that was driven from Paris to Bordeaux, or in 1891, when Rene Panhard and Emile Levassor placed a German Daimler motor on a chassis and thus created the first true auto. France remained the center of the automotive world until World War I, when the U.S. forged ahead. But the ardor for cars has never dimmed, and with today's prosperity, French automakers sell...
This merely contributes to the outrage of French motorists. France has an exquisite network of roads, lined with noble colonnades of trees. They run straight as arrows from one picturesque village to another. But these blacktop paths are nearly as narrow as in Napoleon's time (when they were designed), and are totally inadequate to the 10 million vehicles now struggling to get from place to place...
...Ideal Informer. The concierge system dates back to Napoleon Bonaparte, who cannily required the installation of a person on the ground floor of every residence in Paris whose job was to watch over the inhabitants. With tiny salaries and vast stocks of information about every tenant, the concierge -in Napoleon's time and since-has been the ideal informer for police, income tax agents and suspicious husbands. As a result, the word concierge is synonymous with bad taste, ignorance and lack of scruples...
...Imagine yourself alive and at your present age in 1805; what would you be thinking about and hearing from everyone round you? Ten to one it would be the fear that England would be invaded by 'that devil in human form,' Napoleon...
Inside a Magnum. Guy was raised in a mansion that once was Talleyrand's and later became European headquarters for the Marshall Plan. Today, in an 18th century town house that once belonged to a niece of Napoleon, he lives with his auburn-haired second wife Marie Helene, 32. (When he left his first wife for Catholic Marie Hélène seven years ago, Guy became the first head of a Rothschild house ever to marry a Christian, had to resign the presidency of France's Jewish Community in the ensuing scandale.) The walls of their...