My rage only grows at the murder of cartoonists, artists armed only with wit, by masked gunmen shouting Islamic slogans in Paris today. The bursting slogan, Je suis Charlie, says "I am Charlie." If you speak, if you question, if…
Posts tagged as “France”
French President François Hollande hit a constitutional bump this week. The Socialist leader (who presides over a country that my students are not finding terribly oppressive) wants to raise the top tax rate to 75%. That rate would apply to…
I'm about to discombobulate my blog-posting schedule. In four hours, I take off with 28 of Spearfish High School's best and brightest to visit France for seven days. Our itinerary does not include an audience with socialist President François Hollande,…
American expatriate writer James Baldwin was in Paris when the French lost at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954. He wrote the following observation in his 1972 book/essay No Name in the Street: The French were still hopelessly slugging…
I'm reading The Collapse of the Third Republic, journalist William Shirer's 1969 study of the political, economic, and cultural factors that led to France's swift and crushing defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany in 1940. About a tenth of…
The Tour de France concludes here in Paris tomorrow morning... after my plane leaves. I rode a bus yesterday down the Champs Élysées, I returned later and walked by the finish line where the well-to-do will sit in white tents…
We've all seen the Eiffel Tower in photos and film. The grand industrial-engineering-art project is so familiar that we might be tempted to think seeing the Tower in person could be a let down. We would be wrong. I spent…
Did I mention I'm in Paris? Here I am at the Louvre, with our guy Pei's great glass pyramid out front. The drastic contrast the the architecture of the old fortress still doesn't well with some observers. But it creates…