Word: taine
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...Vichy, seat of the Government, Vice Premier Pierre Laval told the hastily summoned Chamber of Deputies: "I bring you, not the conviction, but the certainty, that if you want an honorable peace you must give Marshal Pétain what he wants...
What old Marshal Pétain wanted (on the advice of Pierre Laval) was for the Chamber and the Senate to vote themselves out of existence and empower him to write a new Constitution. This they meekly proceeded to do, with only three dissenters in the Chamber, one in the Senate. The one Senate dissenter was the Marquis Pierre de Chambrun, who holds honorary U. S. citizenship (under a Maryland law) by virtue of his direct descent from the Marquis de La Fayette, and whose nephew is Pierre Laval...
President Albert Lebrun quietly slipped into the background and 84-year-old Marshal Pétain in a decree beginning "We, Philippe Pétain, Marshal of France," designated himself as Chief of State, 57-year-old Pierre Laval as his successor. In his new twelve-man Cabinet, key posts went to the men who had surrounded him since France sued for peace: Ministry of Defense to General Maxime Weygand, Ministry of Interior to Neo-Socialist Adrien Marquet, Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Businessman Paul Baudouin...
...Government soon began to show its character. In a series of decrees Chief of State Pétain barred all non-Frenchmen (i.e., Jews) from holding Government positions, "invited" industry to send employed farmers back to their fields and to create collective organizations for housing and feeding workers, spoke of pegging the franc to the dollar instead of the pound (43 to the dollar).* Said...
...Alexandria, Egypt, the procedure was less dramatic but equally effective. There lay the French battleship Lorraine, the heavy cruisers Tourville and Duquesne, two other cruisers and several smaller ships. Their commanders were simply told that they would not be allowed to obey the Pétain Government's order to come home, on pain of being sunk by gunfire and torpedoes launched from concealed tubes on shore. While the French digested this ultimatum, over came some Italian bombers on a raid and the French ships joined the British in putting up a hot anti-aircraft barrage. A vote...