Word: servane
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Late one night in his Paris apartment, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, editor of the weekly L'Express, got a polite phone call from a French policeman. Asked the cop: What time would Servan-Schreiber go to his office next day? Editor Servan-Schreiber, at 30 the wonder boy of French journalism, replied that he would be there at 8 a.m. as usual. Next day when he arrived at the office he found the doors closed tight and sealed with official wax. The government had seized the current issue of his weekly and temporarily closed the office. The charge: "ministers...
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, 29-year-old editor of the conservative weekly L'Express: "The French mystery is impotence-that lucidity should be followed by nothing. If you listen to an ex-minister, he will explain with serenity what might have been done; if you meet a man in office today he will brilliantly explain what should be done. The ideas are seductive, the directions are clearly indicated, the plans are detailed. France conceived the universe and then nothing, or almost nothing, happens . . . The men who govern today or have governed in recent years (they are practically the same...
...encouraging notes about France's discouraging situation is the fact that some Frenchmen themselves are getting worried about things. Thundered the new conservative weekly, L'Express, edited by able young Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber...
Lucidity & Nothingness. Le Monde's influential political writer, Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, took up where Schuman left off. "What is so mysterious about France," he wrote, "is its impotence. It is that lucidity is followed by nothing. If you listen to an old minister, he will explain to you with serenity what could have been done. If you have occasion to meet a man today in power, he will brilliantly depict what must be done. The ideas are seductive, the directions are clearly fixed, the plans are meticulous; France comprehends the universe. And then nothing, or nearly nothing...
...asked Servan-Schreiber. "The most distressing thing is not to understand why. Historic decadence is not a satisfying explanation, and in any case it is inadmissible ..." France's day-to-day existence, he suggested, is determined "by lower echelons, public and private ... the assistant chiefs of bureau and the secretaries of corporations . . . These men are probably honest and competent, but not for directing the destinies of the country ... It is neither their role nor their mandate. The sum of all these specialized interests does not constitute a community of interests . . . One after the other, the problems that we have...