Word: napoleons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...rescued his nation not once but twicethe first time from the shame of its capitulation to the Nazis in World War II, the second from its own quarreling factions. With the Fifth Republic, he gave France its first strong governmental framework since the days of Louis Napoleon. He was indeed "I'homme du destin," as Winston Churchill once called him, and even his name, suggestive of both Charlemagne and ancient Gaul, was perfectly suited to the role he took upon himself. When De Gaulle died last week, just 13 days before his 80th birthday, President Georges Pompidou...
...yearns for more than ever today. These qualities, as much as any specific accomplishments, will make his figure endure, just as the memory of another great-and even more controversial- Frenchman has survived through the years. As a young man, Charles de Gaulle composed a tribute to Napoleon Bonaparte that could serve as his own epitaph: "In spite of the time that has gone by, of opposing sentiments and new subjects for mourning, crowds from every part of the world render homage to his memory and near his grave abandon themselves to a shiver of grandeur...
...Napoleon said that he left France smaller than he took her," Hoffmann added. "De Gaulle certainly left it larger than...
...building now to institutionalize the point. Back in the halcyon haze of the '20s and '30s maisons de tolérance such as the Sphinx, the Chabanais and above all the One-Two-Two (for 122 Rue de Provence) were Parisian tourist attractions outranking the Louvre and Napoleon's tomb. During World War II, however, the bordellos disintegrated in quality-the Gestapo used them as intelligence sources-and in 1946, Marthe Richard, a municipal council member, led a successful campaign to outlaw all houses of prostitution in France. Exercising the eternal prerogative, she has since changed...
...Napoleon was not the only one who failed to grasp this essential rule. Eve Merriam, a poet who should know better, has broken it in her latest book, The Nixon Poems. Eve Merriam is no mean poet, and some of her work has been quite first-rate. She is one of the few winners of the Yale Younger Poets Prize who have ever been heard from again. This latest collection fails miserably, however, because of its subject, not its author. No great poetry can be written about Richard Nixon, for he is not important to men or to mankind...