Quatorze Juillet - 14th July

An uncustomary look south across the Channel, where France is celebrating the 218th anniversary of the French Revolution. The Royal House of Capet was overthrown after showing itself wholly out of touch with the sentiments of the populace - infamous quote from Marie Antoinette: "The people are hungry? Let them eat cake". On 14 July 1789, the Bastille prison in Paris was stormed, the inmates freed and the building demolished.

As per usual, this Revolution too ate its own children. Revolutionary Robespierre was despatched through the same mode that despatched the Capets: the Guillotine. At the drop of a head.

They are now into the 5th Republic down there in France, and the guillotine has long gone from the streets. Napoleon held sway until 1815, after he tried to conquer Europe and foundered at the hands of Jack Frost in Russia. Like Nazi Germany 130 years after him, Napoleon could not cope with the extreme winters of Russia, sending his troops there in garments more suitable to the temperate climate of Western Europe.

Three wars with eastern neighbour Germany marked the period between 1870 and 1945. The north of the country was reduced to a mud-and-blood bath in the trench warfare that took the lives of 1.5 million between 1914 and 1918, in a war that solved nothing. France was ignominously overrun by Nazi Germany in 1940. The north of the country was occupied, the south was ruled by a marionette of the Nazis. This was referred to as the Vichy regime. They acted in the same fashion as the Nazis, deporting Jews and other non-politically corrects to concentration camps and their deaths. Following the liberation of France in 1944, General Charles de Gaulle held sway. It was the Franco-German axis that helped found the European Economic Union in 1957, alongside Italy and the Benelux countries.

Now that the European Union has expanded as far as Brest on the Polish / Russian border, and could even incorporate the Ukraine at some point in the future, the position of France as one of the powerbrokers in Europe is under review. France's relationship with the USA has never been as warm as the UK's has been. Successive French administrations have adopted policies on the world stage that can be held to be at loggerheads with the US and UK policies.

A new administration has been elected in Paris this spring. Nicolas Sarkozy is the new president. It is a strange coincidence that changes in governments have occurred almost simultaneously in London and Paris. George W. Bush is into the last 18 months of his presidency, so come 2009, the landscape of the political world will have changed dramatically.