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Favorite son

Favorite son (or favorite daughter) is a political term.
 * At the quadrennial American national political party conventions, a state delegation sometimes nominates a presidential candidate from the state, or less often from the state's region, who is not a viable candidate in the view of other delegations, and votes for this candidate in the initial ballot. The technique allows state leaders to negotiate with leading candidates in exchange for the delegation's support in subsequent ballots.

 * Serious candidates usually, but not always, avoided campaigning in favorite sons' states. If a party's leader in a state, usually the governor, was unsure of whom to support, as the favorite son the state party could avoid disputes. Conversely, a party leader who has chosen a candidate might become a favorite son to keep other candidates' campaigns out of the state, or prevent a rival local politician from becoming a favorite son. The favorite son may explicitly state that the candidacy is not viable, or that the favorite son is not a candidate at all. The favorite son may hope to receive the vice-presidential nomination, Cabinet post or other job, increase support for the favorite son's region or policies, or just the publicity from being nominated at the convention.

 * The technique was widely used in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Since nationwide campaigns by candidates and binding primary elections have replaced brokered conventions, the technique has fallen out of use, as party rule changes in the early 1970s required candidates to have nominations from more than one state.

 * A politician whose electoral appeal derives from their native state, rather than their political views is called a "favorite son". For example, in the United States, a presidential candidate will usually win the support of their home state(s).
 * Especially in parliamentary systems, a "favorite son" is a party member to whom the party leadership is likely to assign a prominent role, for example, Paul Martin while Jean Chrétien was the Prime Minister of Canada, or Gordon Brown while Tony Blair was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

title: Favorite son


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User:ExParrot

Well, here I am, ready to write some interesting if completely useless articles.

A bit about me: I hail from the fine country of New Zealand. My current occupation is officially "student" although I do a fair bit of technicial work (mostly involving computers) as well.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: User:ExParrot


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First Republic

First Republic may refer to:

Businesses

 * First Republic Bank, of San Francisco, California, U.S.
 * First Republic Bank Corporation, of Dallas, Texas, U.S.

Africa

 * First Egyptian Republic (1953–1958)
 * First Republic of Madagascar (1958–1972)
 * First Republic of Ghana (1960–1966)
 * First Republic in the Constitution of Niger (1960–1989)
 * First Nigerian Republic (1963–1966)
 * First Republic of Uganda (1963–1971)
 * First Republic of Sierra Leone (1971–1992)

Americas

 * First Vermont Republic (1777–1791)
 * First Republic of Venezuela (1811–1812)
 * First Mexican Republic (1824–1835)
 * First Dominican Republic (1844–1861)
 * First Costa Rican Republic (1848–1948)
 * First Brazilian Republic (1889–1930)
 * First Republic of New Granada, Colombia (1810–1816)

Asia

 * First Philippine Republic (1899–1901)
 * First Republic of China (1912–1928)
 * First Republic of Armenia (1918–1920)
 * First Republic of Azerbaijan (1918–1920)
 * First Republic of Georgia, also known as the "Democratic Republic of Georgia" (1918–1921)
 * First Syrian Republic (1930–1950)
 * First East Turkestan Republic (1933–1934)
 * First Republic of Korea (1948–1960)
 * First Republic of the Maldives (1952–1954)
 * First Republic of Vietnam (1955–1963)
 * First Cambodian Republic (1970–1975)
 * First Republic of Afghanistan, also known as the "Republic of Afghanistan" (1973–1978)

Europe

 * First Roman Republic, established c. 508 BC
 * First Polish Republic, an informal term for the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795)
 * French First Republic (1792–1804)
 * First Hellenic Republic, sometimes used for Greece during the War of Independence (1822–1832)
 * First Spanish Republic (1873–1874)
 * First Portuguese Republic (1910–1926)
 * First Hungarian Republic (1918–1920)
 * First Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938)
 * First Austrian Republic (1919–1934)
 * First Slovak Republic (1939–1945)
 * First Italian Republic (1948–1994)
 * First Republic of Kosovo (1991–1999)

Other uses

 * 1st Republic (TV series), a South Korean television show
 * First Republic Square, Tbilisi, Georgia
 * The First Republic, a Czech television show

title: First Republic


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Pierre Mendès France

Pierre Isaac Isidore Mendès France (11 January 1907 –18 October 1982) was a French politician who served as prime minister of France for eight months from 1954 to 1955. As a member of the Radical Party, he headed a government supported by a coalition of Gaullists (RPF), moderate socialists (UDSR), Christian democrats (MRP) and liberal-conservatives (CNIP). His main priority was ending the Indochina War, which had already cost 92,000 lives, with 114,000 wounded and 28,000 captured on the French side. Public opinion polls showed that, in February 1954, only 7% of the French people wanted to continue the fight to regain Indochina out of the hands of the Communists, led by Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh movement. At the 1954 Geneva Conference, Mendès France negotiated a deal that gave the Viet Minh control of Vietnam north of the seventeenth parallel, and allowed him to pull out all French forces. He is considered one of the most prominent statesmen of the French Fourth Republic.

Early life
Mendès France was born on 11 January 1907 in Paris, the son of a textile merchant from Limoges. He was descended from Portuguese Jews who settled in France in the 16th century. He studied at the École des sciences politiques and the Faculty of Law of Paris, graduating with a doctorate in law and becoming the youngest member of the Paris bar association in 1926, at age 19. In 1924, Mendès France joined the Radical Party, the traditional party of the French middle-class centre-left (not to be confused with the mainstream SFIO, often called the Socialist Party). He married Lili Cicurel, the niece of Salvator Cicurel.

Third Republic and World War II
In 1932, Mendès France was elected member of the Chamber of Deputies for the Eure department; he was the Assembly's youngest member. His ability was recognized at once, and in 1938 the government of Léon Blum appointed him Under Secretary of State for Finance. After the surrender of France to Nazi Germany in World War II, he fled to French North Africa with other army and air force units, but was arrested by the Vichy government authorities and imprisoned for desertion. He escaped and succeeded in reaching Britain, where he joined the Free French forces led by Charles de Gaulle. Mendès France later described his trial, conviction and subsequent escape in the famous documentary The Sorrow and the Pity.

During the latter years of the war, Mendès France served in the Free French Air Forces and flew in a dozen bombing raids. After the Liberation of Paris in August 1944, he was appointed Minister for National Economy in the French provisional government by de Gaulle. He later headed the French delegation to the 1944 United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at Bretton Woods.

Mendès France soon fell out with the Finance Minister, René Pleven. Mendès France supported state regulation of wages and prices to control inflation, while Pleven favoured generally laissez-faire policies. When de Gaulle sided with Pleven, Mendès France resigned. Nonetheless, de Gaulle valued Mendès France's abilities, and appointed him as a director of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and as French representative to the United Nations Economic and Social Council.

Fourth Republic
In 1947, after democratic French politics resumed under the Fourth Republic, Mendès France was re-elected to the National Assembly. He first tried to form a government in June 1953, but was unable to gain the numbers in the Assembly. From 1950 he had been a consistent opponent of French colonialism, and by 1954 France was becoming hopelessly embroiled in major colonial conflicts: the First Indochina War and the Algerian War of Independence. When French forces were defeated by the Vietnamese Communists at Dien Bien Phu in June 1954, the government of Joseph Laniel resigned, and Mendès France formed a government with support from the centre-right.

Mendès France immediately negotiated an agreement with Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese Communist leader. There was, he said, no choice but total withdrawal from Indochina, and the Assembly supported him by 471 votes to 14. Nevertheless, nationalist opinion was shocked, and Roman Catholic opinion opposed abandoning the Vietnamese believers to Communism. A tirade of abuse, much of it anti-Semitic, was directed at Mendès France. Jean-Marie Le Pen, then a Poujadist member of the Assembly, described his "patriotic, almost physical repulsion" for Mendès France.

Undeterred, Mendès France next came to an agreement with Habib Bourguiba, the nationalist leader in Tunisia, for the independence of that colony by 1956, and began discussions with the nationalist leaders in Morocco for a French withdrawal. He also favoured concessions to the nationalists in Algeria; but the presence of a million Pied-noirs there left the colonial power no easy way to extricate itself from that situation. The future mercenary Bob Denard was convicted in 1954 and sentenced to fourteen months in prison for an assassination attempt against Mendès France.

Mendès France hoped that the Radical Party would become the party of modernization and renewal in French politics, replacing the SFIO. An advocate of greater European integration, he helped bring about the formation of the Western European Union, and proposed far-reaching economic reform. He also favoured defence co-operation with other European countries, but the National Assembly rejected the proposal for a European Defence Community, mainly because of misgivings about Germany's participation.

His cabinet fell in February 1955. In 1956 he served as Minister of State in the cabinet headed by the SFIO leader Guy Mollet, but resigned over Mollet's handling of the Algerian War, which was coming to dominate French politics. His split over Algeria with Edgar Faure, leader of the conservative wing of the Radical Party, led to Mendès France resigning as party leader in 1957.

Fifth Republic
Like most of the French left, Mendès France opposed de Gaulle's seizure of power in May 1958, when the mounting crisis in Algeria brought about a breakdown in the Fourth Republic system and the creation of a Fifth Republic. He led the Union of Democratic Forces, an anti-Gaullist group, but in the November 1958 elections he lost his seat in the Assembly. After being expelled from the Radical Party, whose majority faction supported de Gaulle, in late 1959 he joined the Autonomous Socialist Party (PSA), a breakaway group from the SFIO.

In April 1960, the PSA merged with several other groups to form the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). He made an unsuccessful bid to regain his seat in the National Assembly representing Eure in the 1962 election.

In 1967 he returned to the Assembly as a PSU member for the Isère, but again lost his seat in the 1968 landslide election victory of the Gaullist party UDR. Mendès France and the PSU expressed sympathy for the sentiments and actions of the student rioters during the events of May 1968, a position unusual for a politician of his age and status. One year later, Pompidou's socialist opponent in the presidential election of 1969, Gaston Defferre of the SFIO, designated him his preferred Prime Minister prior to the election. The two campaigned together in what was the first – and so far only – dual "ticket" in a French presidential election. Defferre gained only 5% of the vote and was eliminated in the election's first round. When François Mitterrand formed a new Socialist Party in 1971, Mendès France supported him, but did not attempt another political comeback. He lived long enough to see Mitterrand elected president.

Political career

 * Governmental function
 * President of the Council of Ministers : 1954–1955.
 * Minister of Foreign Affairs : 1954–1955.
 * Minister of State : January–May 1956 (Resignation).

National Assembly of France
 * Electoral mandates
 * Member of the National Assembly of France for Eure : 1932–1942 (Deposition by Philippe Pétain) / 1946–1958. Elected in 1932, reelected in 1936, 1946, 1951, 1956.
 * Member of the National Assembly of France for Isère (2nd constituency) : 1967–1968. Elected in 1968.

General Council
 * President of the General Council of Eure : 1951–1958. Reelected in 1955.
 * General councillor of Eure : 1937–1958. Reelected in 1945, 1951.

Municipal council
 * Mayor of Louviers : 1935–1939 (Resignation) / 1953–1958 (Resignation). Reelected in 1953.
 * Municipal councillor of Louviers : 1935–1939 (Resignation) / 1953–1958 (Resignation). Reelected in 1953.

Mendès France's first Ministry, 19 June 1954 – 20 January 1955

 * Pierre Mendès France – President of the Council and Minister of Foreign Affairs
 * Marie Pierre Koenig – Minister of National Defense and Armed Forces
 * François Mitterrand – Minister of the Interior
 * Edgar Faure – Minister of Finance, Economic Affairs, and Planning
 * Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury – Minister of Commerce and Industry
 * Eugène Claudius-Petit – Minister of Labour and Social Security
 * Émile Hugues – Minister of Justice
 * Jean Berthoin – Minister of National Education
 * Emmanuel Temple – Minister of Veterans and War Victims
 * Roger Houdet – Minister of Agriculture
 * Robert Buron – Minister of Overseas France
 * Jacques Chaban-Delmas – Minister of Public Works, Transport, and Tourism
 * Louis Aujoulat – Minister of Public Health and Population
 * Maurice Lemaire – Minister of Reconstruction and Housing
 * Christian Fouchet – Minister of Moroccan and Tunisian Affairs
 * Guy La Chambre – Minister of Relations with Partner States

Changes
 * 14 August 1954 – Emmanuel Temple succeeds Koenig as Minister of National Defense and Armed Forces. Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury succeeds Chaban-Delmas as interim Minister of Public Works, Transport, and Tourism. Eugène Claudius-Petit succeeds Lemaire as interim Minister of Reconstruction and Housing.
 * 3 September 1954 – Jean Masson succeeds Temple as Minister of Veterans and War Victims. Jean-Michel Guérin de Beaumont succeeds Hugues as Minister of Justice. Henri Ulver succeeds Bourgès-Maunoury as Minister of Commerce and Industry. Jacques Chaban-Delmas succeeds Bourgès-Maunoury as Minister of Public Works, Transport, and Tourism and Claudius-Petit as Minister of Reconstruction and Housing. Louis Aujoulat succeeds Claudius-Petit as Minister of Labour and Social Security. André Monteil succeeds Aujoulat as Minister of Public Health and Population.
 * 12 November 1954 – Maurice Lemaire succeeds Chaban-Delmas as Minister of Reconstruction and Housing.

Mendès France's second Ministry, 20 January 1955 – 23 February 1955

 * Pierre Mendès France – President of the Council and Minister of Foreign Affairs
 * Edgar Faure – Minister of Foreign Affairs
 * Jacques Chevallier – Minister of National Defense
 * Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury – Minister of Armed Forces
 * François Mitterrand – Minister of the Interior
 * Robert Buron – Minister of Finance, Economic Affairs, and Planning
 * Henri Ulver – Minister of Commerce and Industry
 * Louis Aujoulat – Minister of Labor and Social Security
 * Emmanuel Temple – Minister of Justice
 * Raymond Schmittlein – Minister of Merchant Marine
 * Jean Berthoin – Minister of National Education
 * Jean Masson – Minister of Veterans and War Victims
 * Roger Houdet – Minister of Agriculture
 * Jean-Jacques Juglas – Minister of Overseas France
 * Jacques Chaban-Delmas – Minister of Public Works, Transport, and Tourism
 * André Monteil – Minister of Public Health and Population
 * Maurice Lemaire – Minister of Reconstruction and Housing
 * Christian Fouchet – Minister of Moroccan and Tunisian Affairs
 * Guy La Chambre – Minister of Relations with Partner States

National honours

 * Commander of the Legion of Honour
 * Croix de Guerre 1939–1945
 * Resistance Medal

Foreign honours

 * 🇧🇪 Belgium: Grand Officer of the Order of Leopold (Belgium)
 * 🇲🇦 Morocco: Grand Cordon of the Order of Ouissam Alaouite
 * 🇲🇨 Monaco: Gran Cross of the Order of Saint-Charles
 * 🇹🇳 Tunisia: Grand Cordon of the Order of Glory (Tunisia)

title: Pierre Mendès France


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Intermission

An intermission, also known as an interval in British and Indian English, is a recess between parts of a performance or production, such as for a theatrical play, opera, concert, or film screening. It should not be confused with an entr'acte (French: "between acts"), which, in the 18th century, was a sung, danced, spoken, or musical performance that occurs between any two acts, that is unrelated to the main performance, and that thus in the world of opera and musical theater became an orchestral performance that spans an intermission and leads, without a break, into the next act.

Jean-François Marmontel and Denis Diderot both viewed the intermission as a period in which the action did not in fact stop, but continued off-stage. "The interval is a rest for the spectators; not for the action," wrote Marmontel in 1763. "The characters are deemed to continue acting during the interval from one act to another." However, intermissions are more than just dramatic pauses that are parts of the shape of a dramatic structure. They also exist for more mundane reasons, such as that it is hard for audience members to concentrate for more than two hours at a stretch, and actors and performers (for live action performances at any rate) need to rest. They also afford opportunity for scene and costume changes. Performance venues take advantage of them to sell food and drink.

Psychologically, intermissions allow audiences to pause their suspension of disbelief and return to reality, and are a period during which they can engage critical faculties that they have suspended during the performance itself.

Plays
The term "Broadway Bladder" names "the alleged need of a Broadway audience to urinate every 75 minutes". Broadway Bladder, and other considerations (such as how much revenue a theater would lose at its bar if there were no intermissions), govern the placement of intermissions within performances, and their existence in performances, such as plays, that were not written/created with intermissions in mind.

William Shakespeare
The plays of William Shakespeare were originally intended for theater performance without intermissions. The placement of intermissions within those plays in modern performances is thus a matter for the play's director. Reviewer Peter Holland analyzed the placement of intermissions in 1997:
 * Of The Winter's Tale he noted that there was "as natural a break as anyone could wish for" before the speech of Time as Chorus, and that he had never seen a production that placed an intermission other than at that point.
 * Trevor Nunn's production of Measure for Measure in 1991 is given as an example of intermissions placed in the middle of a scene. It stopped halfway through act 3 scene 1, moving some of the lines from later in the scene to before the intermission.
 * Performances of King Lear, he observed, often place the intermission "disproportionately late", after the blinding of Gloucester.
 * The 1991 RSC production of Julius Caesar directed by Stephen Pimlott is pointed out as noteworthy for its extraordinary intermission length. Pimlott had placed the intermission after act 4 scene 1, after the action leaves Rome. This allowed the striking of the scenery. But it took sometimes as much as forty minutes for stage crew to remove the scenery, which comprised a "massive set of columns and a doorway" designed by Tobias Hoheisel, a period that was longer than the remaining length of the performance, some thirty-five minutes.

Many modern productions of Shakespeare plays have thus eschewed the introduction of an intermission, choosing instead to perform them straight through, as originally intended.

Kabuki
The intermissions in Kabuki theater can last up to an hour. Because this often results in people returning to their seats several minutes after the performance has resumed, playwrights generally take to writing "filler" scenes for the starts of acts, containing characters and dialogue that are not important to the overall story.

Noh
In the Noh theatrical tradition, interludes called nakairi are staged between the first and second halves of a performance, during which time kyōgen actors sum up the plot or otherwise further the action through performances known as aikyōgen. These interludes also give the main actors a chance to change costumes and rest.

Films
Intermissions in early films had a practical purpose: they were needed to facilitate the changing of reels. When Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth (The Loves of Queen Elizabeth), starring Sarah Bernhardt, opened on July 12, 1912, in the Lyceum Theatre in New York City, the four reel film was shown in four acts, with an intermission at each reel change.

The technology improved, but as movies became progressively longer, the intermission fulfilled other needs. It gave the audience a breather, and provided the theater management an opportunity to entice patrons to its profitable concession stand. A well-known 1957 animated musical snipe suggested, before the main feature in theaters and during intermission at drive-ins, "let's all go to the lobby to get ourselves a treat". During the 3D film trend of the early 1950s, intermissions were a necessity because even though many theaters used two projectors that could skip intermission by shifting from one reel to the other, 3D films required the use of both projectors – one for each stereoscopic image – and so needed an intermission to change the reels on both projectors.

The built-in intermission has been phased out of Hollywood films, the victim of the demand to pack in more screenings and advances in projector technology which make reel switches either unnoticeable or non-existent (such as digital projection, in which reels do not exist).

Indian cinema
Despite the phasing out of intermissions in the West, they have remained prevalent in India. There is a mass reluctance to abolish intermissions as they bring a large revenue to cinemas through customers buying snacks during these periods. The films Sangam and Mera Naam Joker had two intermissions each. Very few Indian films have been screened without intermissions, including Dhobi Ghat, Delhi Belly, That Girl In Yellow Boots and Trapped. Forced intermissions are common during screenings of western films in India.

Indian films shown in cinemas in the United Kingdom also commonly include intermissions, yet in the United States and Canada, these films play from start to finish without any pauses in between. Many Indian films released on DVD include the "intermission" card for cinematic screening.

title: Intermission