Word: frenchmen
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...franc Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe. Men in morning coats and grey cravats walked amid the drift of chestnut leaves with elegant women in Balenciaga and Dior gowns and outsize souffle hats. A few miles across town in the cavernous glass-roofed Grand Palais, thousands of other Frenchmen thronged the annual Salon de l'Auto to stare with passionate absorption at the chromium flash and gadgets of the 1959 model cars. These people, the acquisitive bourgeois society described so memorably by Balzac, were the true victors of the referendum. France had voted conservative-matching the trend...
...Gaulle. Yet it also seemed clear that the voters of France and of the overseas territories-now known as the Community, like Britain's Commonwealth-had gone to the polls not so much to vote in a new constitution as to vote out an old. What united Frenchmen as dissimilar as Hubert Beuve-Méry, neutralist publisher of Le Monde, and the royalist pretender, the Comte de Paris, Prince Napoleon and Brigitte Bardot, cloistered Carmelite nuns and a nameless million voters who had previously backed the Communists, was an intense desire to be rid of the ungoverned...
...attentively to De Gaulle's oracular and stylishly ambiguous speeches, they got little hint of what the future would be like. Not even his aides, dedicated as they are to his general philosophy, are allowed to know at any moment the pattern of his intentions. All that most Frenchmen have for certain this week is a memory of De Gaulle moving among masses of people with the awkward lope of a giraffe, patting a head here, shaking a hand there, peering about him with nearsighted benevolence. But they knew also that he was a man of integrity and vision...
...Gaulle outlined, too, an ambitious five-year plan to raise Algeria's Moslems to something like economic equality with Frenchmen. But this would require peace. "Therefore, turning to those who are prolonging a fratricidal conflict, I say: Stop this absurd fighting, and you will see at once a new blossoming of hope all over the land of Algeria. You will see the prisons emptying; you will see the opening up of a future great enough to embrace everybody...
Unlike the British in India, the Frenchmen of Algeria are far more than just a governing caste. Though they are often all loosely called colons, only 22,000 of them are landowners, and of these only a few score are genuinely wealthy. The rest of Algeria's Europeans are policemen, office workers, garage proprietors, locomotive drivers, skilled laborers and tradesmen who call themselves French but call Algeria home. To their talent and initiative, the land owes such economic strength as it possesses...