Although we enjoyed our rounds of the government offices in Vientiane, with officials offering tea and pleasing conversation in French, we were getting nowhere.

This is important because, despite all the efforts of the French government, an appreciable segment of France's export trade in wines is still tainted with a misrepresentation approaching downright dishonesty, and there are many too many negociants who would rather turn a sou than amass a creditable reputation overseas.

But by week's end the Laotian cry of invasion was read as an exaggeration ( see foreign news ), and the U.S. was agreeing with its cautious British and French allies that a neutralist -- rather than a pro-Western -- government might be best for Laos.

The " Days of April " ( journées d ' avril ) is a name appropriated in French history to a series of insurrections at Lyons, Paris and elsewhere, against the government of Louis Philippe in 1834, which led to violent repressive measures, and to a famous trial known as the procès d ' avril.

An attempt to require an Annales-written textbook for French schools was rejected by the government.

The French Revolution ( 1787 – 99 ) that began during his youth was also influential: Ampère ’ s father was called into public service by the new revolutionary government, becoming a justice of the peace in a small town near Lyon.

* 1839 – The French government announces that Louis Daguerre's photographic process is a gift " free to the world ".

The French withdrew in 1867, and the government they supported quickly collapsed.

* 2006 – A massacre is carried out by Sri Lankan government forces, killing 17 employees of the French INGO Action Against Hunger ( known internationally as Action Contre la Faim, or ACF ).

In 2000, a French court ruled that a government minister's description of anthroposophy as a cult was defamatory.

Some even seemed to want an event similar to the French Revolution to come to the United States to overthrow the government.

In 1880, the French government awarded Bell the Volta Prize of 50, 000 francs ( approximately US $ 10, 000 at that time, about $ in current dollars ) for the invention of the telephone, which he used to found the Volta Laboratory, along with Sumner Tainter and Bell's cousin Chichester Bell.

In 1796, during the French Revolution and three years after the declaration of war between France and Great Britain, Étienne-Gaspard Robert met with the French government and proposed the use of mirrors to burn the invading ships of the British Royal Navy.

The parade passes down the Champs-Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde, where the President of the French Republic, his government and foreign ambassadors to France stand.

In France he was considered as the restorer of the art, which had declined after the time of Louis XIV, and during the last twenty years of his life the French government commissiond him to undertake several works.

The French government relocated from Paris to Bordeaux very briefly during World War II, when it became apparent that Paris would soon fall into German hands ( as in 1870 during war against Prussia and at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian war ).

" However French government applies a principle of precaution against GMO.

The French Monarchy did not concern itself with the minority languages of France spoken by the lower classes, although it did require the use of French for government business.

An attempt by the French government to incorporate the independent Breton-language immersion schools ( called Diwan ) into the state education system was blocked by the French Constitutional Council on the grounds that, as the 1992 amendment to the Constitution of the 5th Republic states that French is the language of the Republic, no other language may be used as a language of instruction in state schools.

The Toubon Law states that French is the language of public education, which means that Breton-language schools do not receive funding from the national government, though the Brittany Region may fund them.

Ms. Turocy has been decorated as Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.

On a military mission for his native Virginia the youthful George Washington touched off the French and Indian War, then guarded his colony's frontier as head of its militia.

`` Ah, then please tell me where the frontier is because this gentleman here '' -- I indicated the French occupation officer -- `` informs me that Germany is just on the other side of him ''.

For a while his work was influenced deeply by the French impressionists, and by the patterned, mosaic-like paintings of Gustav Klimt, then the dean of Austrian art.

he rose at half-past six every morning, made himself some French coffee, had his corn flakes and more coffee, smoked four cigarettes while reading last Sunday's Herald Tribune and yesterday's Pittsburgh Gazette, then put on his high-topped farmer's shoes and walked under a vine bower to his workshop.

At Geneva in 1954, to get the war in Indo-China settled, the British and French gave in to Russian and Communist Chinese demands and agreed to the setting up of a Communist state, North Viet Nam -- which then, predictably, became a base for Communist operations against neighboring South Viet Nam and Laos.

I had part of a bottle of French beer called Panther Pils ( so help me ), then switched to Tuborg.

Albert Schweitzer, OM ( 14 January 1875 – 4 September 1965 ) was a German and then French theologian, organist, philosopher, physician, and medical missionary.

He received the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his philosophy of " Reverence for Life ", expressed in many ways, but most famously in founding and sustaining the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, now in Gabon, west central Africa ( then French Equatorial Africa ).

Mary Peabody Mann served as a French instructor for a time. The school was briefly famous, and then infamous, because of his original methods.

* 1513 – Battle of Guinegate ( Battle of the Spurs ) – King Henry VIII of England and his Imperial allies defeat French Forces who are then forced to retreat.

The Bishop of Coutances then did the same, but in Norman French.

During the Greco-Turkish War ( 1919-1922 ) campaign ( part of the Turkish War of Independence ) Afyon and the surrounding hills were occupied by French, Italian and then Greek forces.

The work was then translated into French, with valuable notes, by Silvestre de Sacy in 1810.

The French creation, made of iron and wood, developed into the " penny-farthing " ( historically known as an " ordinary bicycle ", a retronym, since there was then no other kind ).

It is located in the Quartier Craplet, fprmerly the garrison of the 11th Batallion of Chasseurs Alpins and then the French Army's Centre d ' instruction et d ' entraînement au combat en montagne ( CIECM ).

Orion then rejoined the action further south than intended, firing on the fifth French ship Peuple Souverain and Admiral Blanquet's flagship Franklin.

The Tonnant, its decks crowded with 1, 600 survivors from other French vessels, surrendered as the British ships approached while Timoléon was set on fire by her remaining crew who then escaped to the shore in small boats.

Since then it has only been visited by sport fishermen, regularly scheduled patrols of the French Navy, and by Mexican tuna and shark fishermen.

From then on the French succession not only excluded females, but also rejected claims based on the female line of descent.

Cretin became a medical term in the 18th century, from an Alpine French dialect prevalent in a region where persons with such a condition were especially common ( see below ); it saw wide medical use in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and then spread more widely in popular English as a markedly derogatory term for a person who behaves stupidly.

Later on, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this French revolutionary principle – though not of course its specific way to identify the “ general will ” – percolated into first Socialist and then Fascist political thinking.

The French then took control of Casablanca.

Camille Pissarro () ( 10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903 ) was a French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas ( now in the US Virgin Islands, but then in the Danish West Indies ).

It is not until the 13th-century French prose romances, including the Lancelot-Grail and the Post-Vulgate Cycle, that Camelot began to supersede Caerleon, and even then, many descriptive details applied to Camelot derive from Geoffrey's earlier grand depiction of the Welsh town.

Corsican was long the vernacular language alongside Italian, official language in Corsica until 1859, then it was replaced by French owing to the conquest of the island by France in 1768.