Word: reynaud
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Pierre Mendès-France, playing shrewdly on France's century-old fear of German domination, had belabored the proposal in language and innuendo all but identical to that used by the Communist orators. Worse yet. four other former Premiers-Edgar Faure. Joseph Laniel, Antoine Pinay and Paul Reynaud-lent their names to a motion that demanded as the price of French participation that the other five nations must agree to put up capital for France's overseas territo ries, while giving France complete control over the spending of the money...
...Blunder. The answers were electrifying. Faure, who bears Mollet a deep grudge, had drafted the motion and stood by it. But Laniel confessed that he had never seen the text-"They just read me something over the telephone"-and publicly disavowed it. So did Pinay. Bird-like old Paul Reynaud, 78, determined to make amends for his unwitting blunder, bounced up to the speaker's rostrum to express his wholehearted approval of the Common Market. He was, rasped Reynaud, tired of "anthologies" of reasons for staying out of the Common Market. "These reasons," he said, "resolve into a single...
Predictably, the most vocal opponents of French participation in the Common Market were the Communists (who dismissed the whole thing as a "Vatican conspiracy") and the right wing led by ex-Premiers Antoine Pinay, Paul Reynaud, Edgar Faure and Joseph Laniel. The bitterest-and most surprising-attack was delivered by ex-Premier Pierre Mendes-France, the man who once talked boldly of "opening the windows" of the French economy. Now Mendes, whose political influence has greatly diminished, argued that opening the windows so high would drive out French capital and bring in unemployed...
...Reynaud, of course, like all French politicians, has always been right. He is a brilliant self-advocate, but has never understood that politics is the art of the possible, not the plausible. On his own showing, he won every argument including the last one-with the SS colonel who locked the door on his cell at Oranienburg concentration camp. Colonel: "The Russians would have shot you long ago." Reynaud: "I did not know that you took them as mentors...
...reader may accept much of Reynaud's picture of France. But the picture that really stays in the mind is the one he has drawn by inadvertence-the picture of men who would rather lose a war than an argument...