Word: taine
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...Nazis' No. 1 French war prisoner had escaped from Germany and reached Vichy and talked openly with Marshal Pétain. Presumably the Nazis could yank him back to Germany again. But towering, mustachioed General Henri Honoré Giraud, 63, escapist extraordinary, reputedly a German-hater, said to be an admirer of the military theories of General Charles de Gaulle, had become more than ever an old darling of France, and Quisling Pierre Laval was already having enough trouble with the French people...
Many Frenchmen, who had stomached the idea of Marshal Pétain as a possible savior of France, vomited all hope for Vichy when Pierre Laval took over...
Pierre Laval, the best hated man in France, came back into power this Tuesday when old Marshal Pétain knuckled under to Hitler again, announced that he would give Hitler's slippery French favorite a post in the Government. At the same time Pétain called off the Riom trials until they could be rigged nearer to Hitler's desire...
Laval is the father of Vichyfrench collaboration with Hitler and served as Vice Premier and Foreign Minister for the first six months after the fall of France. But in December 1940 Pétain found him at once so unpopular and so highhanded in his pro-Naziism that he cast him into outer darkness. His return to power is a tip-off of further collaboration to come, focussing all eyes again on the French fleet (see p. 23) which may hold the balance of sea power today...
Even before Pétain's decision the U.S. State Department had pretty well discounted the durability of Vichy's neutrality. Answering Pétain's protest over U.S. recognition of the Free French De Gaullist regime in French Equatorial Africa and the Cameroons, the U.S. had allowed itself the rare diplomatic luxury of speaking frankly. Said the U.S. note: "(A) handful of Frenchmen ... in contempt for the high tradition of liberty and individual freedom which has made France great, have sordidly and abjectly, under the guise of 'collaboration,' attempted to prostitute their country...