Word: frenchmen
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...youthful Frenchmen were careering jubilantly through the streets of Paris, trailing red flags from their cars and chanting, "We've won! We've won!" Standing in the chill spring rain at the Place de la Bastille, others laughingly shouted, "Mitterrand, give us some sun!" Even as a joke, that demand was a measure of the Impossible hopes raised by French President François Mitterrand's election victory two years ago, a historic occasion that brought to an end 23 years of conservative rule...
...understand what a difficult situation we are in." Other officials expressed the hope that the restrictions would take citizens' minds off the other austerity measures. Yet the foreign travel controversy aroused only anger. Said a bank employee in Paris: "The government is making us pay for its mistakes." Frenchmen were particularly goaded by the fact that they will have to carry a carnet de change, a kind of financial passport complete with a photograph of the bearer, as they pass across the national frontier. Said the usually pro-Socialist newspaper Le Monde: "France is copying the East bloc countries...
...government's rationale is that the 8 million French citizens who traveled abroad last year spent $4.9 billion, or more than a third of the trade deficit. The government hopes to slice that sum in half, although some analysts predict that, given the ability of most Frenchmen to circumvent rules, one-fifth would be more realistic. But the negative effects will be substantial. State-owned Air France, for example, could lose 1 million passengers this year...
...bureaucracy that still has to come to terms with what is clearly an administrative nightmare, one commentator proposed that travelers simply smuggle their money out. "Just walk with your head high and the bills stuffed in your pockets. The customs agents won't think to look there." Although Frenchmen can usually be counted upon to find ways around restrictions, the latest curbs were not a joke but a singular admission that the Socialist government's economic program was failing...
Mitterrand's decision to reappoint Mauroy came as a surprise to many Frenchmen. It was Mauroy, after all, who had announced only in February that he "would not be the man of the third devaluation of the franc," and who, during the municipal election campaign, had blandly assured voters that in the struggle for economic equilibrium, "the worst is behind us." A gifted and genial politician, Mauroy has had day-to-day control over the Socialist experiment since Mitterrand's election in 1981. Wrongly anticipating a worldwide economic upswing and applying economic theories that had by then been...