Word: mitterrand
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...sometimes tense personal rapport is a long way from the public shows of affection their predecessors staged, particularly Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand, who movingly held hands in 1984 in a Verdun cemetery. There's been tension over policy, too. Charles Grant, director of the London-based think tank Centre for European Reform, points out that France and Germany have been at odds on issues from how best to reflate their economies during the economic crisis to the smartest strategies for dealing with Russia. (See pictures of Paris' expansion...
...However, Gaccio suggests French machismo may also be at work. "People always speak of [fellow former French President François] Mitterrand and Chirac as great ladies' men, and [current French President Nicolas] Sarkozy went out and married a top model, but who refers to Giscard as a seducer?" Gaccio asks. "No one - so he's decided to do so himself, with a story whose leading lady is no longer around to debunk...
...This is a puzzle; after all, we are talking about a left that not so long ago produced Prime Ministers such as Romano Prodi in Italy, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in Britain, Gerhard Schröder in Germany, and Presidents, like François Mitterrand, who ruled France for 14 years. The puzzle is sharpened by the current crop of center-right leaders, who are either not very exciting (Merkel) or much too exciting (Sarkozy and Berlusconi, with their flashy or buffo theatrics...
...Areva's rise was built on that national commitment, but the company has also benefited from the ambitions of Lauvergeon, who, as a member of France's civil-service élite, first gained public attention as Socialist President François Mitterrand's sherpa during the 1980s. After taking control of the key state-owned nuclear companies, she merged them to create Areva eight years ago. Her early success in convincing foreign clients that nuclear was the power source of the future earned her a remarkable degree of independence from political meddling. "If you look at what she's done...
...past and learned hard lessons from it," says Robert Paxton, professor emeritus at Columbia University and an acclaimed expert on fascism and Vichy France. "It has done deep research, held trials, updated text books, and even uncovered troubling wartime information on public figures - late President François Mitterrand for one. I'd like school teachers around the U.S. to be able to teach American responsibility for slavery and the mistreatment of Native Americans the way French educators do their own war-time history. Alas, if they did that here, most would get fired...