Word: tain
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...tried a super-duper advertising campaign to sell 85-year-old Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain to every Frenchman. Two hundred experts set up shop in the government hotel in Vichy. Men of art and literature went to work. The Marshal's profile, slogans and symbols appeared on stamps, china, ash trays, badges, hatbands, blotters, coins, bijoux and shaving mugs. A francisc, the Marshal's Frankish emblem, adorned all official documents. The Marshal's colors and cheerful slogans about healthy children appeared on milk bottles. Frenchmen wryly remembered World War I, when the Kaiser...
France seethed with indignation. The Laval-Pétain duet was conking out. Its collaborationists' burbling was drowned by the rattle of machine guns outside hostage camps. Laval fired arch-collaborationist Jacques Benoist-Mechin from his job as Secretary of State, on the ground that Naziphile Benoist-Méchin had conspired against him. In the next breath Laval told newspapermen that his "Government was based on "solid foundations," remarked that rumors of its fall were "laughable...
...Pierre Laval did not laugh. He knew that ballyhooing Pétain would not win over the French people as long as their country was ground under the Nazi boot. He knew that all France's workers could not sate Hitler's rapacious appetite. If Hitler won, Laval would probably disappear, like Austria's Schuschnigg, in favor of a German Gauleiter. If the Allies won, Laval could expect to be hanged at least, possibly drawn & quartered by Frenchmen...
...lessons in humanitarianism from any country," snorted Laval. But by week's end he had learned one lesson: even the once reactionary, fascist Croix de Feu (Cross of Fire) was disgusted with him. Charles Vallin, the order's vice president, withdrew his support of the Pétain-Laval "national revolution" and fled to England. With Vallin went Pierre Brossolette, Socialist editor, long active in the French underground. Once bitter political enemies, both men were mentioned in dispatches during the battle of France; now they were pledged to work side by side with General Charles de Gaulle. Their...
...Pierre Boisson, Vichy's territorial Governor at Dakar, flew to Vichy to see Marshal Pétain. Reported reason: the Nazis had demanded the right to base bombers at Dakar...