duce the unchallenged leaders of world fashion its top couture houses employ British, Italian and Russian designers to give them that end-of-century edge but these designers still want to work for the top houses in what, for the global imagination, remains the city that epitomises high style. Boutiques from Oslo to Osaka call themselves by French names in the quest for smartness. Rag-trade workshops around the world stitch in `Arc de Triomphe' or `Tour Eiffel' labels. Paris still means fashion, even if the frocks are financed and dreamed up by people who can't speak to the limo driver on the way home. It was, after all, Christian Dior who invented international haute couture, and his successor, Yves Saint-Laurent, who carried on the tradition even if, as his lover and manager once said, he was born with a nervous breakdown. The great figures of French history have a universal dimension. Make what you will of Napolon a mountebank chancer or the ultimate meritocratic inspiration but the sheer scale of his achievements remains unequalled: commanding some of the greatest military victories the world has seen while reforming the legal code and the educational system, establishing a national police system, rebuilding his capital, encouraging arts and science, introducing the sugar beet to beat the British blockade, conducting tempestuous love affairs, and ruling an empire whose power stretched across a continent even if he only got a bargain basement price for Louisiana. Joan of Arc is the symbol of the defiant heroine, invoked to describe everybody from Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma to Paula Jones. Marie Curie stands for the triumph of women in science. Brigitte Bardot is the most natural sex-symbol the cinema has known. France fascinates, irritates and intrigues. It has a unique capacity to be brilliant one moment, self-destructive the next. Nowhere is this more apparent than in its global dealings, particularly when it is pursuin...
