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Politics : Foreign Policy Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epsteinbd who wrote (1736)	1/5/2003 2:48:46 PM
From: Hands Off	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15987

Hi epsteinbd, So, in your opinion, what did de Gaulle mean by the statement? At my micro level I just don't see the French working together in a team environment. That is why I read the Jean Moulin book. To see if, under foreign occupation, they might be able to cooperate. I did not get that sense from the book. Lots of mistresses, lots of self-serving politics, infighting and very little resistance. Heck, the first thing Moulin did when he was parachuted back into France after meeting de Gaulle and getting his radio in London was to go on a 10 day skiing trip in the Alps. And the money he was given to finance the resistance was mostly used to finance his own grip on power. But admittedly all this comes from just one book. And don't forget Vichy who sent 75000 French jews to concentration camps. But one needs to look more at the Dreyfus story to get a better feel for the history behind this. Finally, I would not take that 10000 derailments thing too seriously. The commies claimed many things. Regards Marshall PS: just by chance TF1 has the Moulin story on TV tomorrow.

To: epsteinbd who wrote (1736)	1/6/2003 2:26:05 PM
From: Neocon	Respond to of 15987

I am a Francophile. "Grand Illusion" and "Rules of the Game" are two of my favorite movies; "The Red and the Black" and "Madame Bovary" are two of my favorite novels; I enjoy Montaigne and Racine, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and I have actually read Sartre's "Being and Nothingness", as well as works by Gabriel Marcel, Raymond Aron, and other significant intellectuals. I know many French painters well, and have seen major exhibits of Impressionists (for example, the Origins of Impressionism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York), or of individual painters like Cezanne (major retrospectives in Washington and Philadelphia). Baltimore has one of the best collections of Matisse in the country, and I have seen a lot of Matisse elsewhere. I love French food, especially provincial dishes, like cassoulet and coq au vin. My idea of a great sandwich is a piece of a baguette with pate de compagne and St. Andre. I read French pretty well, and can get by speaking it, although I have been trying to improve. Nevertheless, I am not from a wealthy background, and I did not get to Paris until in my 40s. I was very ambivalent. Some things I loved, oddly, more often watching daily life than the museums and monuments. Some irritated me quite a bit, like the difficulty in getting a decent glass of iced tea, or even decent ventilation, on a hot afternoon. But the main thing is that I was looking for the Paris in which Monet sat and painted Notre Dame, or women washing along the banks of the Seine; where Camus and Sartre argued; where Baudelaire wandered the streets. Instead, I kept finding myself thinking of Vichy, and Paris under the occupation; of my distant cousins, who had to hide out during the war to avoid being sent to the death camps; of the guillotine and the canaille cheering it on, whether deserved or not; of the Commune and the Second Empire; of Dreyfus; of the Jewish prime minister, Bloom (demonstrators against the government carried placards saying "Better Hitler than Bloom", in '36). I admired De Gaulle even more for taking Monarchical France, the Republic, and the two Empires and making it one continuous history reflecting the "gloire" of France, but I also wondered whether France had every really become one country, or laid to rest its demons.......