dn't win many wars, but no European doubted that his Sun King court at Versailles was the centre of the Universe and just imagine what would have happened if his successors hadn't made a hash of the Anglo-French wars of the mid-eighteenth century and had emerged dominant in North America. The most famous Corsican of all time may have ended up in poisoned exile on an island in the Atlantic, and become an overblown inspiration to dictators and press barons alike, but Bonaparte could still appear to Hegel as the master of the world, inspire an estimated 45,000 books and set Beethoven to write the `Eroica' Symphony, even if the composer did withhold the dedication in what may have been the awakening of the Romantic movement to reality. Charles de Gaulle could be, in the words of an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, `one of the biggest sons-of-bitches that ever straddled a pot', yet his style of national leadership equalled Napolon's in coining a new adjective for the world. Wherever they go, the French take their country with them from Corsican restaurants in Indochina to their unrivalled network of lyce schools around the world, which ensures that French children follow the central curriculum from Bonn to Beijing. Lenin and Mao may have overthrown empires, but they were johnnies-come-lately in the revolutionary stakes. The uprising of 1789 set the template for getting rid of tyrants, and the national anthem still urges citizens to take up arms to defend the day of revolutionary glory. That being the case, the French are nurtured in the knowledge that they belong to the mother of modern republics, erected into a lay religion in the nineteenth century and epitomised in every mayor's office by the bust of the young woman Marianne, with her revolutionary headgear and exposed bosom. The fact that the bust is modelled on the most beautiful actress of the day helps: for the historian Emmanuel Le Roy-Ladurie, it is enough that `France is, first...
