Word: reynaud
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Fiddlers. At 61, Paul Reynaud was one of that rapidly diminishing body of Frenchmen who had never been Premier. In March 1940, he assumed the premiership of France at war, and with it, disaster. Before two months had gone, the Panzers were smashing through Belgium and the Stukas were at work over the choked roads. By then the reader has progressed 340 pages into modern Europe's worst tragedy, but has heard nothing of the rumble of a falling civilization. Instead, he hears the sharp noises of those professional fiddlers-French politicians-who are always tuning up, but whose...
...Reynaud is an honest, able man. His financial policies were more sensible than most. He could envision something of what a war of movement and armor would do to France's static infantry. Above all, he knew that Hitler was not Kaiser Wilhelm I, "the old gentleman who took Alsace Lorraine from us," but a modern Genghis Khan. He knew that Laval, "the Robert Walpole* of the rabble," was squalid and detestable; that Pétain was a defeatist who had to be "kicked into" his victories in World War I, and in World War II, in the absence...
...Real Failure. Reynaud himself gives no answer to this question, but perhaps a clue might be found in the reminiscences of Pertinax. Reynaud had a mistress, Countess de Portes, whom nobody except Reynaud seems to have liked very much. He also had a wife. Anglo-Saxons believe that the French have a way of managing these things. Not so Paul Reynaud, who had the unhappy faculty of finding himself in the same salon with both ladies. It is possible to suspect that Paul Reynaud, for all his intelligence, lacked organizing ability. This is confirmed on the political level...
...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...