Curious Frenchmen

This time I mean in the sense of being interesting.

Ever since the Iraq war, Chirac's posturing and Villepin's poseuring, I've been curious about the French line of thought. This article puts gallic flesh on the bones.

I think that the French have, at least in recent years, overestimated the extent to which we see we Brits see ourselves in competition with them. We're deluded enough to think they are our friends.

The article takes us back to 1945, and outlines an idea of the French future as part of a Latin/Mediteranean bloc- the writer humorously (?) talks of the need 'to replace Franco with a Francophile Government'. That made me smile since all the Spanish people I met while I lived there hated the French. Perhaps that indicates a diplomatic failure somewhere.

As the American Thinker points out (and no, the Ed who posted it is not this one), Alexandre Kojève, an influential philosopher with a line to De Gaulle 'called for an accommodation and partnership with Islamic nations, and stated that this unity can be based on a mutual opposition to other trends'.

That's a possibility- given France's demographic trend to Islam- that has intrigued me for quite a while. Why did this Catholic country permit such high levels of immigration from Islamic countries? Could the answer be the French fixation with empire which Kojeve exemplifies? After all, it was Britain who created the huge Islamic nation of Pakistan , much of which later became Bangladesh, yet we have about half the levels of Islamic people that France has. (via Instapundit)