To allay Gaullist-Socialist fears further, it’s the backdrop of the 60th anniversary celebrations in Strasbourg, France and Kehl, Germany (poignantly, just across the Rhine), that’s adding to their sense of a new Fall of France. Take that anniversary out, and one sees the real import of Sarko’s betrayal: little more than symbolic, with France already having reintegrated with NATO in phases since the early ’90s, even advising NATO’s political bosses on strategy at the military committee it rejoined in 1995. It will still retain its discretion on troops and its nuclear arsenal, and perhaps make the US accept the European Defence Pact.

It’s hypocritical for the Lionel Jospins, Dominique de Villepins and Laurent Fabiuses to decry France’s loss of guts to stand up to the US, to lament becoming “a clone of Great Britain”. Because, whatever Sarko’s doing now lies under the umbrella of France’s greater fall; in fact, it’s the inevitable culmination of a process that began soon after the tumult of May 1968 subsided.

While the British believed in the early years of this century that they were undergoing a sort of national renaissance, thanks to the fruits of Thatcherism on Tony Blair’s table, Britain had produced nothing in the realm of ideas in the post-WWII decades to avoid a terminal decline, so quiet that no one noticed. Post-war France however was a defeated nation. It would almost erupt in civil war over Algeria. Its collapsing Fourth Republic had to be aborted and the state resurrected in the Fifth. While De Gaulle managed that bailout, and not without his dreams of French “grandeur”, it was the frenetic, world-conquering intellectual activity in that very troubled Fourth Republic and in the early days of the Fifth that made France the exception it was. The French, much like their ur-European language of civilisation, knew their own universality. And thus, the exception they were. De Gaulle’s idea of a France for and by itself was born of a national disposition to original thinking as much as cultural pride.

... contd.