ave won. My power will fail if I do not feed it on new glories and new victories.' Or, as le Gnral remarked: `The French need to be proud of France. Otherwise, they fall into mediocrity.' This nation's special character looms far larger around the globe than any country containing only 1 per cent of the planet's population has the right to expect. Presidents of the Republic play on their double role as head of state and head of executive government to impress the world. As they travel abroad, they carry Europe `on the soles of their shoes', one French minister declared. France was the last Western nation to test nuclear weapons, and one of the first to take serious action in Bosnia, where seventy of its soldiers died. In the postcolonial world, it maintains territories stretching from the North Atlantic to the South Seas, not to mention its shared suzerainty over the tiny tax haven of Andorra, high in the Pyrenees. Its natural position as the leader of Southern Europe puts it at the head of 175 million people from Portugal to Greece. Long after decolonialisation, Paris retained a chasse garde in Africa, from where half a dozen rulers looked to the banks of the Seine for guidance and protection. France ranks ahead of Britain, Germany, Japan and the USA in the proportion of its gross national product devoted to overseas aid, and has produced a truly great humanitarian organisation in Mdecins Sans Frontires. Open the record book and the achievements come tumbling out. French women have the longest life-expectancy in Europe; until her death in 1997 at the age of 122, the world's senior inhabitant held court in an old people's home in Arles, making rap recordings and complaining about the food. At the other end of the age scale, tienne Bacrot became the youngest-ever chess grandmaster at the age of fourteen. France has the world's largest opera house, one of Europe's most extensive and least crowded road networks, and as big a railwa...
