Marshal Petain's Vichy regime looked like that new start. A couple of years later, it wasn't so evident that he was going to be able to protect them from German extortions, and it didn't look so much as though they had won the war, either. And so by '43, a lot of people are shifting sides.

Marshal Petain's Vichy regime looked like that new start. A couple of years later, it wasn't so evident that he was going to be able to protect them from German extortions, and it didn't look so much as though they had won the war, either. And so by '43, a lot of people are shifting sides.

Well, I think they're going to learn that an awful lot of French people changed their minds. In 1940, the Third Republic had made a miserable mess of it.

A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

I think the French have come to grips with their past, and that was true up until about - until the '70s. And then there were things like the film "The Sorrow And The Pity."

Birdscapes moves rather like those swallows, dipping and swerving to pick up all sorts of items of interest. Mynott tells plenty of good birding tales, but these serve mainly to set off trains of reflection. . . . Reading Birdscapes is like going birding with a learned, witty, and somewhat irreverent companion who isn't satisfied just to check things off. . . . [D]elightful to read on a journey or a housebound day, and [opens] fascinating new horizons for anyone who wants to enlarge his or her interest in birds.

I think the career of President Mitterrand, which was rather sensational when it was revealed, is probably very typical.