Word: gallic
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...Whatever happens during the talks , Germany's first couple is unlikely to generate the kind of media voltage produced by their Gallic counterparts, Nicolas and Cecilia Sarkozy, in New England over the summer. Madame Sarkozy, then on the verge of leaving her husband, turned down an invitation to a barbecue with the Bushes in Kennebunkport, Maine, claiming she was ill. Frau Merkel and Herr Sauer, by contrast, enjoy a more settled partnership, which is unlikely to offer the sort of fodder for speculation that the Sarkozys did. In marriage, as in transatlantic politics, the less news the better...
...Many French people have adopted the traditional Gallic shrug toward striking public service workers who have left them stranded. "You can't blame them for protecting their perks. No want wants entitlements taken away," said university student Anne Gautier, 22, as she walked away from a crowded Metro station to walk to classes. But not all Parisians were pounding the pavement with the same sympathetic mood. "As usual, the ordinary worker being taken hostage by a minority of people who've decided they come first," complains an accountant who would only give her first name, Chantal. "I didn't strike...
...endowed with the power to quash any form of religious expression? In conventional American wisdom, the road to theocracy is paved with good intentions, and the universalism that defines the French republican ethos seems more than a little totalitarian. In fact, it’s more or less just Gallic stubbornness; the French believe that the moment they stop maintaining laïcité, which translates very roughly as the secularism of the public sphere, the Republic will cease to exist. If that means insisting on a certain idea of how the citoyen looks, then...
...mina-winner Camille Laurens and Pulitzer laureate Robert Olen Butler, who collaborate on a tale of a woman who spends her life waiting for something and hires a detective to help her figure out what it is. The narrative is inert enough to be a parody of Gallic opacity - until the last line, when everything is illuminated...
...that moment, I really loved the U.S., regardless of Enlightenment platitudes. We may be fat, loutish, and drunk, but more than anyone we know how to have fun. There is no stern Gallic conscience telling us, “One must not make fools of ourselves in public.” If anything, Americans feel a solemn duty to make fools of themselves in public. And that, in short, is what I learned this Fourth of July...