Word: reynaud
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...subject of the disintegration of government, there is probably no better-informed man alive than Paul Reynaud. Premier of France in the last three months of the Third Republic. Reynaud saw (in the words of General de Gaulle) "the regime collapsing around him, the people fleeing, allies retreating, the most illustrious commanders defecting . . . The very exercise of power was no more than a sort of agony, strung out along roads, in the dislocation of services, discipline and conscience." Last week 76-year-old Paul Reynaud was in the van of a movement to stop threatening disintegration in France...
...with the Nazi legions rolling into a divided, defeatist country, Reynaud cried: "If a miracle is needed to save France, I believe in miracles because I believe in France." He called for "clouds of airplanes from across the Atlantic," but because he was driven back to Bordeaux, boxed in by collaborationist politicians and forced to yield the government to Marshal Petain, his overly optimistic rallying cries in 1940 are cynically remembered today...
...spent four rigorous years in French and German prisons. His wartime imprisonment and his excellent record as a member of the French Assembly since 1946 have brought about a reappraisal of his fatal premiership. Says De Gaulle in his recent memoirs: "In such conditions, the intelligence of Paul Reynaud, his courage, the authority of his office, were deployed, so to speak, in a vacuum...
Twenty Crises. Last week Reynaud's intelligence and courage and authority were in action at the office he occupies as chairman of the powerful Assembly Finance Committee. Sitting stiffly upright at his desk, with scarcely a crease in his double-breasted waistcoat, he wrote out in longhand a set of proposals for reforming the French constitution to enable ministers to stay in office long enough to conduct responsible government. Although he himself had voted against the Mendès-France government, and thus helped bring on its collapse, he told a press conference that this 20th ministerial crisis...
Churchill's opposite number in France, Paul Reynaud, was a man of "innate loyalty and pluck." But the men who stood closest to Reynaud were, in Spears's eyes, a diversity of wet blankets with a single aim-to extinguish the fire in their Premier's heart. The chief among them...