Word: premiered
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...white-faced ministers of the Fourth Republic nervously deployed a small army of steel-helmeted cops, not sure of their loyalty, and Interior Minister Jules Moch ordered coils of barbed wire laid out on 15 of the 18 airfields surrounding Paris. Escorting a visitor out of his office, ex-Premier Guy Mollet, onetime Socialist Resistance leader, soberly remarked: "We may never see each other again. I am going to die on the barricades...
...Soldier. At the somber, grey-walled Hotel Matignon, official residence of France's Premiers, the Republican Guards now wear dress uniform (white gloves, red epaulets) every day, and treat visitors with a new formality. Senior government officials no longer wander in whenever they feel like an informal chat, nor do they ring up the Premier on a direct line. De Gaulle, who regards the telephone as an intolerable impediment to concentration, has had the only one in his office disconnected...
Faced with the two-pistol technique, the panicky leaders of the Fourth Republic rapidly wilted. "Each day," complained ex-Premier Georges Bidault, "our position toward De Gaulle changes. Yesterday we were standing; today we are on our knees; tomorrow we will be on our bellies...
Silence & Her Sister. Once invested as Premier, De Gaulle had three immediate objectives: to bring the army back under control of the central government, to win approval of a constitution that would give France a strong executive, to come to terms with the French colonies' desire for independence without sacrificing a French relationship with them. To achieve these goals, he proceeded to employ his resources (which now included unchallenged legitimacy) according to the rules he had laid down in The Sword's Edge?"economy of force, the necessity of advancing in strength (and, hence, by stages or bounds), surprise...
...along, too, De Gaulle made highly effective use of surprise, silence, and silence's sister, the oracular utterance. "I have understood you," he told a wildly cheering crowd during his first trip to Algiers after becoming Premier. Only four months later, when he abruptly ordered all French army officers to resign from the insurrectionary Committees of Public Safety, did the right-wing Europeans of Algiers realize that what he had meant was that he understood them and disapproved. Last week, with almost equal lack of forewarning, De Gaulle suddenly began churning out a series of decrees that he had been...