When Jean-Paul Sartre refused the Nobel in 1964, it wasn’t a stunt of one kind or the other. Many felt that Sartre, above all, had the moral authority to do so, such was his stature as France’s foremost public intellectual. And that stature wasn’t the least affected, one way or the other, by the embarrassment of the Swedish Academy or the irrevocability of its decision. That invincibility of the writer-thinker mattered, for France was the one nation-state that had built its identity almost wholly on culture. It didn’t need to be legitimised by anybody. France was an exception to the rule, the closest realisation of the European ideal after World War II. The “French Exception” didn’t begin and end in the political and strategic sphere — it didn’t begin with a self-dramatising Charles de Gaulle’s exit from NATO’s military command in March 1966. Nor is it ending in Nicolas Sarkozy’s march back. The French Exception ended years ago, over time, with a dying fall.

When Sarkozy stands accused of betraying de Gaulle’s legacy by the old guard Gaullists or Socialists, he should tell them that La Grande Nation had betrayed the Fifth Republic’s father long ago. France is but a shadow of its former self, and he, Sarko the American, its obvious child. The fact about the NATO business is this: Sarkozy and Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, are right. French misgivings of the ’60s about losing independence to a US-dominated alliance are irrelevant — lock, stock and barrel — in a post-Cold War world with new geopolitical concerns and threat perceptions. What’s more, France has for some time now been the fourth-largest contributor of troops and the fifth-largest of funds to NATO. It has troops stationed in as news-making and critical a place as Afghanistan. Sarko makes perfect sense when he says that it’s foolish to send your boys to war without having a say in what they should do and how.

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