ench are by nature inclined to bully the weak and to fear the strong. Although they are boastful and vainglorious, as soon as an enterprise becomes difficult they abandon it; they are better at starting things than following them through.' That was the judgement of Marquis Tseng, the Chinese minister in Europe, who negotiated with the French over Vietnam in 1881. Echoing the familiar description of the French cavalry as being magnificent when it advances but ragged in retreat, this is a verdict which many, including some friends of France, would regard as an apposite piece of Oriental wisdom. But when I put the notion to a French professor, she gave me a Gallic response from a 1930s film: `The locomotive of your ignorance runs on the rails of my indifference.' Et schlack so there! The international self-confidence is not hard to understand. All over the world, traces of France pop up. Archaeologists reckon that the greatest symbol of Britain's prehistoric past, the stone circle at Stonehenge, was probably the work of invaders from Brittany. The remains of a tenth-century monastery transposed from Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa in the Pyrnes-Orientales department stand above the Hudson River in New York; down below, the Statue of Liberty was a gift from France, and the televisual Friends have a poster of a park in northern Paris on their wall. Frederick the Great named his palace in Potsdam Sanssouci, and his successors called their supreme military medal Pour le mrite. The French architect Joseph Rame was the progenitor of the American campus plan with the Union College of Schenectady. Bonaparte `discovered' Egypt's ancient civilisation for the outside world, and a French team freed the Sphinx from the sand. Louisiana is home to half a million Cajuns descended from French settlers who were ethnically cleansed from their Acadia in Nova Scotia by the British, and who keep the language of the Hexagon alive on the bayous 250 years later. Lenin h...
