Word: reynaud
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Deprived of French citizenship was Alexis Léger ("greatest living diplomat"), onetime Permanent Secretary General in the Foreign Ministry, reputedly the "brains" behind French foreign policy from 1933 until ousted by Reynaud in May 1940. His fame as a surrealist poet was also in eclipse because surrealism is frowned upon in the stern New Order...
...teau Chazeron there awaited him the same medieval accommodations as had greeted onetime Premier Daladier, ex-Generalissimo Gamelin, ex-Premier Paul Reynaud, Georges Mandel, former Minister of Interior, and hulking, scholarly onetime Premier Léon Blum of the Popular Front...
...Reynaud and Mandel were quartered in the left wing. Reynaud, who has cycled for fun and sport for many years, was reported to have asked for a stationary bicycle to keep his trim little legs in shape, a pulley weight to flatten his waistline. Mandel, feared in politics for his thoroughgoing dossiers of the careers of France's great and near-great, asked for pen, ink, paper. Daladier, whom the war strain turned from a fairly pleasant individual into a red-faced, moody old bull, was more taciturn than ever. In the daylight he scrawled a lengthy history...
...week's end Blum and Reynaud were yet to be indicted. Of the others Mandel alone faces a possible sentence of death. He was charged with "treasonable acts" in attempting to cooperate with Great Britain's Duff Cooper and Lord Gort in Morocco in the hope of carrying on a pro-Ally Government after France had officially signed her armistice. The others face possible life imprisonment, with the present Premier, aging Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, holding power of pardon...
There were certain to be questions on whether Gamelin sacrificed his ill-equipped troops to cover his own blunder, why Reynaud and Daladier ever conceived that France could defeat Germany, why planes were abandoned intact for the enemy to take over, and who were the men responsible for such errors as ordering an armaments factory immediately abandoned when the assembly line was filled with virtually completed tanks. Everything could come under review with a court charged to determine and judge the men responsible for "the passage from the state of peace to a state of war" and whose acts subsequently...