Word: reynaud
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...week began Pierre Pflimlin, member of the M.R.P. Catholic center party and a good European, had tried to form a Cabinet devoted to lacing France into a "financial corset" of austerity. Conservative Independent Paul Reynaud told him: "Your program is tragically insufficient. I would even say it is not serious." The Conservatives would just as soon delay until a new election was forced, scenting that they might pick up some of the 37 seats now held by the discredited Poujadists. The Socialists, whose votes Pflimlin next solicited, were not anxious to face their electoral supporters at this month...
...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...
...Reynaud's ardent support put new heart into the government. Summing up the case for the Common Market, Mollet cried eloquently: "How often between an America sometimes too impulsive, some-times too slow to understand the perils, and a Soviet Union, disquieting and often menacing, have we wished for the existence of a united Europe, a world force not neutral but independent. This dream, this hope is today within our grasp. Have we the right to let it escape...
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...