Comment by TacticalCoder

> Deep down, we're an annoyingly arrogant little country with delusions of grandeur ...

The problem is France used to be the world's superpower, with an economy bigger than the one of the UK. Literally number one.

Then the monarchy fell and all it took was a mere 15 years for that little arrogant man that Napoleon was to get its arse (and France's arse) handed to him in Waterloo in 1815.

15 years to throw away centuries of greatness: what an amazing success the revolutionaries managed to pull. They fucked up so bad they realized it and tried to, peacefully, re-instate monarchy, but it was too late. Charles X was king of France after the Waterloo SNAFU (1824 to 1830) but it was too late to fix things.

It's nice and all, on paper, to want no king. But France is considered to have lost, forever, its place as the world's n 1 superpower when Napoleon lost in Waterloo.

I'm not saying monarchy is better: what I'm saying is that the french revolution coincides with France losing its status as the world's 1st super power.

And France has been arrogant ever since but it went from 2nd to 3rd to 4th to 5th to 6th to now 7th place.

It's a never ending fall.

With the biggest public deficit and the biggest public debt in the entire EU, and the level of primary education going down the drain (university is still doing OK), I fear it's only ever more pain ahead for France.

The country is literally crumbling left and right and communists, siding with islamists (the party of Melenchon are downright commies, who understood that if they were cozy with islamists, they'd get a chance a winning the elections), are planning to destroy the little that's left of France's past grandeur.

If you think those in charge now are negative towards their own country, you haven't seen anything should either the communists (Melenchon) or the national-socialists (Le Pen / Bardella: which are for a national preference with a deeply socialist program) win the next elections.

Besides an aching aircraft carrier France still has the atom bomb and that's it.

No more money. No more education.

France is toast.

P.S: the biggest success, from their leftist point of view, of french intellectuals is managing to present national-socialists as "far right" (as if they were fascists)