Over at France's Cité Gay, a writer asks ("Le Pacte Civil de Solidarité (Pacs) fête ses 10 ans," ""The PACS celebrates its 10th birthday) what the PACS, a " form of civil union between two adults (same-sex or opposite-sex) for organising their joint life [that] brings rights and responsibilities, but less so than marriage," is like now. Right-wingers worst-case claims, are, of course, decidedly counterfactual.

The PACS at its adoption was assailed by opponents on the grounds that it would lower the birth rate of France and it would devalue marriage. With a fertility rate that exceeds two children per woman, France ranks alongside Ireland as the champion of the birth rate in Europe. INSEE in its Demographic Balance in 2008 report was the beginning of the observation that France was the top European countries in terms of births and the number of marriages remained relatively stable.

But is the success of the PACS that does not contradict this. 146,084 PACS were registered in 2008 by the Statistical Office of the Ministry of Justice, an increase of 43% compared to 2007 (against 32% between 2006 and 2007). With these figures, France had passed since the millionth PACS mark. PACS' endings are also stable: 23,354 civil partnerships were broken in 2008, against 22,783 in 2007. Finally, same-sex couples constitute a stable rate percetnage of about 6% of registered partnerships in total, but their number continues to grow in absolute numbers although less so than for same-sex couples.

This, as the author notes, compares nicely to the stability of relationships in general.

The critics of Pacs suggest that PACS are unstable despite the facts without commenting on specific statistics of divorce, which continues to grow in number and has risen percentage-wise (over 72 000 divorces in 2007) and to a lesser extent the acceptance of divorce has almost doubled in ten years (28 000 divorces in 2007), only twenty years after it became possible. the fault is now 20 years into a minority when it was the rule.In 2007, the number of divorces totaled 134,477, after a period of stability around 120,000 divorces a year from 1996 to 2002.

It is society as a whole that wants more flexibility in organizing our families, as is reflected in the success of PACS and the modes of termination of marriage; births and unions are increasingly disconnected with number of births outside marriage in the majority.

Survivor rights and binational PACS remain major problems.

Sometimes when links accumulate too much they just need to be posted all at once. This may become a regular Monday feature, who knows?

• Gilbert Casasus at Marianne2 notes (in French) that Germany is now seeing net emigration, with Switzerland being a major destination and with East Germans being especially likely to leave.


• Silicon India observes that over 2003-2008 remittances sent by Keralan guest workers in the Middle East have risen by 135%, with the United Arab Emirates emerging as a major target and with Muslim Keralans providing a disproportionately large share of remittances.


• The Portugal News reports that Chinese trade with Lusophone countries fell by 34% in the first half of 2009, with trade with its most important Lusophone partners Brazil then Angola falling the most. In addition, efforts to promote trade between Lusophone countries aren't working.


• Loro Horta in Thailand's The Nation comments on the long-term consequences of an increasingly close Sino-Brazilian relationship on the wider Americas.
National Geographic News' Brian Handwerk reports on new research suggesting that large differences between juvenile and mature dinosaurs may have led to a misidentification of juveniles as separate species.</li>

• National Geographic News also reports that, for a variety of reasons, indigenous peoples are suffering more at a per capita rate from swine flu than the general population.


• Wired Science's Alexis Madrigal covers the news that some space scientists would like to dispatch a probe on a return mission to a Martian moon, carrying life, in order to see whether or not life could survive in space and panspermia would be possible.


• The Times Online reports on the latest effort by the (disputed) heir to the French throne to try to reestablish the French throne in the face of general disinterest.

By now I'd expect, most of you will have read New York Times' "The High Cost of Being a Gay Couple". This article, detailing how same-sex couples suffer financially compared to opposite-sex couples since the US federal government doesn't recognize their marriages, whatever individual states do, is a fairly compelling read, not least because of the numerous parallels with other officially disapproved couples. There are any number of bigots opposed to intermarriage because it'll damage the cultural integrity of the children, and more who oppose unfortunate couplings because they're visit apocalypses on an unwisely approving society, and many more hostile to the idea just because it's icky. Whether it's Danes marrying disfavoured non-EU citizens, Lebanese clerics who want to keep the different breeds of Christians and Muslims separate for their own good (who's "their"? good question), or Israelis who can't get married to people of different religious backgrounds without either frequently demeaning conversions or leaving the country, these couples definitely illustrate the boundaries of what their societies consider to be violations of basic boundaries. If you look at historical examples, like bans on black/white marriage in the United States (for example) or the apartheid-era ban on interracial marriage in South Africa, it's easy to recognize that marriage laws say quite a lot about a particular polity.

Of course intermarriage isn't the only kind of boundary violation out there. In a Financial Times article ("Immigrant Muslims in Belleville", 2 October 2009), Simon Kuper makes the point that French Muslims, far from constituting an irreconcilably foreign body bound to create Eurabia, actually are fairly well integrated into French society and are being changed by France rather more than they are changing their homeland.

Anyone wanting to understand the situation of Muslims in Europe should visit Belleville. The rundown Parisian neighbourhood just east of the city centre is packed with couscous restaurants, Islamic bookshops and French citizens of Arab origin. About 1.5 million nominal Muslims live in the Paris region, more than in any other ­European city.

But the narrow streets of Belleville are also packed with people of ­Chinese, Jewish, sub-Saharan African and middle-class French origin. A class of children pours out of a kindergarten: toddlers of four different colours hold hands while their teachers issue commands in French.

The Moroccan novelist Abdellah Taïa lives in the Belleville building on whose steps, according to legend, Edith Piaf was born. (In truth, “The ­Little ­Sparrow” was born in a local hospital.) “I’m even overjoyed to go to ­McDonald’s,” says Taïa, as he pours a version of Moroccan mint tea ­reinvented by a posh French tea house. “The servers are white, black, Arab, Chinese. It’s almost too philosophical-existential an experience, to see this mélange”. On Taïa’s street, the vagrants are French, Algerian and ­Portuguese. There is a café for white creative types run by Arabs and frequented in the mornings by Chinese businessmen. By the metro around the corner, older Arab men consort with Chinese prostitutes.

The problem is that too many French Muslims are stuck in relatively isolated suburban housing projects, and that many of those who aren't find it exceptionally difficult to get past discrimination on the job markets. One sort of boundary--the idea that French Muslims are legitimate members of French society--has been crossed. Another boundary, their full integration into French society on the same terms as everyone else, remains to be crossed.

What are my culture's inviolable boundaries? I suppose that, as in France, it's the idea that immigrants are rapidly and fully assimilated into their new society. Another might be the idea that multiculturalism, far from ghettoizing immigrants by dividing them into static ethnic groups, is a way to integrate immigrants. Yet another might be violating the belief, done more frequently now than before, that Canada has nothing to learn from the Americans, and another--a specifically English Canadian one, here--might be contradicting the belief that English Canada has always represented Québec fairly and that this province is in fact full of bigots unlike the rest of Canada. As for the question of the couplings I mentioned above, well, Canada has improved significantly, but . . .

What are your culture's inviolable boundaries>

Michael Kimmerman's New York Times article highlights yet another way in which Catalonia, at least its nationalists, is separating itself from Spain and Spanish cultural norms as it moves towards something like nationhood.

Here in Catalonia, this persistently separatist-minded region of Spain, bullfighting has been in trouble for ages. And the economy hasn’t helped. Ticket prices are akin to opera’s. Fights are expensive to produce. The number of bullfights plummeted across Spain this year.

But José Tomás still draws enormous crowds. For aficionados, he is the last best hope for toreo, as bullfighting is called. Reclusive, a matador of unearthly fearlessness and calm, steeped in history and mystery, he retired in 2002, at 27 and the height of his fame, only to return unexpectedly five years later in Barcelona for what turned out to be the first sellout in 20 years at the 19,000-seat Plaza Monumental, this city’s beautiful old brick-and-tile bullring.

Sunday he was back, for another special occasion: perhaps the last bullfight ever in Catalonia.

Over the last three decades or so, dwindling interest among young Catalans has combined with pressure from animal-rights advocates and from Catalan nationalists to cripple toreo in Catalonia. Across the region’s four provinces, bullrings have closed; Barcelona’s is the only one still active.

Now a referendum before the Catalan Parliament would end bullfighting here altogether. There has long been talk in this part of Spain about a total prohibition on toreo. Fans have played it down. But this time, even aficionados think a ban is likely to pass.

[. . .]

That the issue remains, above all, political is demonstrated over the border, in the Catalan region of southern France, where bullfighting is embraced as fiercely as it is opposed in Spanish Catalonia, for exactly the same separatist reasons, in that case because it is banned in Paris.

“At a point when Europe is becoming bigger and more multicultural, Barcelona is becoming smaller and more Catalan,” is how Robert Elms, a British travel writer who has lived here, saw the situation. He had come to see José Tomás and remarked, before the corrida, how the dark but magical city he once knew has become a shiny, designer-label hub that nonetheless looks increasingly inward.

This AFP report, written by Suzanne Mustacich, is certainly interesting.

The priest is a married woman, the Anglican service is in English, yet the old stone chapel in Bordeaux is definitely 100 percent French Roman Catholic.

In southwest France, once a battlefield between medieval English and French armies, expats are breathing life into borrowed Catholic churches left empty by their local flocks, quietly sprouting a dozen Anglican congregations.

As sunlight filtered through the stained glass windows of the 19th century chapel, Reverend Gill Stratchan unpacked the chalice she would use for the Sunday service while her husband sorted prayer books.

"I was ordained a priest in a magnificent abbey in the Dordogne in 2007," said Stratchan, a retired British schoolteacher resident in France since 1996.

Two Catholic priests and a bishop attended her ordination in their abbey. "It was a fairly unique situation for them to see a woman ordained," she said.

But the broad-mindedness on the part of the French was not entirely unexpected. "What brings us together is stronger than what divides us," said Father Lanuc, in charge of ecumenical relations for the Archbishop of Bordeaux.

"An English Anglican has the right to take Holy Communion in a French Roman Catholic church, which is not allowed anywhere else," added Reverend Paul Vrolijk, Chaplain of the regional Anglican Diocese and unofficial diplomat.

Mustacich goes on to describe how the Anglicans of southwestern France, products of the recent large-scale emigration of Britons to this region, are fitting into a predominantly Roman Catholic area. The idea of female priests, for instance, is starting to cause some curiosity.

I've had this review stored for seven years. Now as good a time as any to post it.

Eugen Weber. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870-1914. Stanford, California: Stanford University, 1976. 615 pp.

People tend to forget how heterogeneous--ethnically, culturally, and otherwise--modern states used to be. Canadians are probably less likely to forget than citizens of other Western states, simply because their country is prone to innumerable fissures--Québec versus English Canada, West versus East, South versus North, even downtown versus suburbs, heartland versus periphery--but other countries evidence much the same fissures. Sweden, for instance, is traditionally thought of as the epitome of homogeneity; yet, throughout its history Sweden has received so many immigrants (Walloons, Germans, Finns, Balts, Dutch) as to become a melting pot even as successive Swedish sovereigns have fought to establish uncontested boundaries. (Sweden's modern boundaries were only defined in 1815, with the cession of Finland to the Russian Empire.) This convenient memory lapse might have been produced by the Western traditions of sovereignty established with the Peace of Westphalia: Thongchai Winichakul's excellent article “Siam Mapped: Making of Thai Nationhood,” (The Ecologist, September-October 1996), explores how Thailand and the Thai national identity have been molded by successive Thai governments the better to establish Thailand's maximum sovereignty and ethnic homogeneity.

At least people seem to forget this less often than before. We can probably thank Eugen Weber's classic Peasants into Frenchmen for this. France was Europe's first modern republic, and well into the 19th century France arguably ranked as the single most powerful state in the West. Most people believe the stereotype that France is a homogeneous society, yet well into 19th century as many French citizens regularly spoke languages other than French--Breton, Occitan dialects, Basque, Catalan, Flemish, Alsatian, Corsican--instead of French, and even in French-speaking areas provincial loyalties often transcended the putative bond of the nation. The introduction of immigrant languages only complicated this picture. Renan, in his famous attempt to define the French nation, said that any nation was defined by the consent of its component communities; Weber argues that if consent was involved, it was manufactured, engineered.

We know, thanks to the research that Weber inspired, the French case is prototypical for most other nation-states. The post-Revolutionary French state was concerned with eliminating troublesome political identities, but by and large for the first half of the 19th century this was limited to the centralization of national affairs in Paris and the pursuit of national glory. Under the Second Empire and--still more--the Third Republic, active steps were made to encourage the elimination of provincial loyalties. Urbanization and industrialization helped immensely, of course, dislocating traditionally agricultural rural communities and allowing a specifically Francophone modernity to penetrate. The growth of mass media--book and magazine publishing, popular music, and the like--also played an important role in making French trendy for the non-Francophone young and diminishing the intergenerational transmission of language. Weber brought a new perspective on the school as vehicle for francophonization; though it was less than successful in homogenous non-Francophone peasant societies (Brittany is the most spectacular example), in areas even minimally open to the French language it removed the children from the traditional norms of peasant society. In one interesting passage, Weber recounts how it took generations to convince the French masses to use the metric system, with measurement in the public sphere (distances, say, and commerce) succumbing more quickly than measurements relating to one's person. I myself, living in a country that converted to metric just before me birth, use kilometres but not kilograms. And now, almost all of France's minority languages are nearing extinction, and the Fifth Republic is far more universally Francophone than any of the previous republics or monarchies of France. Where France has gone, any number of other countries have followed or are trying to follow in their different ways--Thailand, for instance. The French nationalizing project mostly worked.

If this book has a fault, it is that it does not consider the substantial foreign immigration to France. Over the lifetime of the Third Republic, perhaps five million Europeans (at first Belgians, then Spaniards and Italians, then Poles, White Russians, and Armenians, among many others) immigrated to France, making their homes in town or country, assimilating with remarkable speed. This immigration has continued to the present, of course: The Frenchman of the early 21st century is now likely to have at least one grandparent of foreign birth, just like his/her American contemporary. It seems certain that the same methods used to acculturate Limousins to French norms were used to acculturate Ligurians; yet, there was little mention of foreign immigration apart from a mention of Flemish immigrants in Nord and other passing statements. One passage, in which he describes how the folkloric traditions of certain Parisian neighbourhoods disappeared as old generations died off and new residents came in, strikes me as useful. It would have been nice if there had been a sufficiently updated version to cover this, or an updated version to cover all of the scholarly innovations, for a fuller perspective on the integration and assimilation of all the unofficial non-Francophone cultures of France in English. We can, however, look forward for followup works--Graham Robb's The Discovery of France, for instance--to carry the torch.

At A Fistful of Euros, Douglas Muir--great blogger, he--makes the very important point that French in Africa is well-implanted and growing.

If you’re a human being who is literate in French — say, at a high school graduate level — you’re probably European. But not for much longer. Demographic growth plus the slow-but-steady rise of literacy rates in most of Africa means that by the next decade, most literate Francophones will be African too.

Given time, this is going to have interesting effects on French literature, language and culture. African writers are going to be more interesting and important. African dominance will take much longer — Africa is still very poor, after all — but it’s not a completely daft idea; if Africa ever starts converging on European income levels, there’ll be a lot of money in making French language products for them. In the nearer term… oh, watch for African script and screen writers drifting north to Paris. Longer term, well, the Academie Francaise has always allowed non-French citizens to be members; by 2050, I’d expect these members to be approaching a majority.

[. . .]

rench is now one of the major languages of Islam. There’s been a lot of hand-wringing about the Muslim populations in Europe. But we never hear much about their mirror images: the Muslims who stayed behind, but who’ve become linguistically — and to some small degree, culturally — French. Northwest Africa in particular, Senegal and Mali and Mauretania and Niger, is a land of Francophone Muslims. And many of them have picked up more from France than just the language; Senegalese love croissants and fine pastries and read Tintin and Le Petit Prince to their kids.

Join the discussion at my source.

Vaiju Naravane's long article in The Hindu exploring the Tamil community in Paris and how its members are reacting to the defeat of the LTTE.

‘Little Jaffna’ in Paris is a cluster of streets branching off from the rue du Faubourg Saint Denis in the capital’s 10th district. It stretches all the way from the Gare du Nord railway station to the metro station Chapelle on the northern fringes of Paris, in what is generally referred to as the “immigrant neighbourhood.” The area is usually tight with people, alive with commercial activity and the hum of business. It is packed with “cash and carry” stores, sari “palaces”, sweet meat vendors, restaurants, video and music shops, butchers selling goat meat, tailors, barbers, travel agents, and fresh fish-wallas.

For the last week, however, this hub of commerce has come to an eerie standstill. Peeling posters bearing the face of LTTE leader Velupillai Prahakaran’s are spattered across the walls. Not a stray cat seems to walk the byways and black drapes and flags cover closed shop fronts. The Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in Paris, estimated to number between 60,000 and 75,000, is in mourning. There was shock and disbelief when news arrived that the LTTE supremo had been killed.

“No one believes he is dead,” Shalini, a 20-year-old medical student who came to Paris at the age of 10, told The Hindu the day Sri Lankan television announced Prabakaran’s death. “I am certain he has already left the country and will soon give us a message on how the struggle should go on. He is the only true leader of the Tamil people. We revere him, we worship him, and I am sure later today he will give us a sign that he is still alive.” Now that the LTTE has formally acknowledged his death she seems rudderless, adrift.

Other Tamils in Little Jaffna are happy that the LTTE was defeated, not least because it can no longer intimidate the community's members.

[N]ot everyone has kind words for the LTTE. “I feel terrible when I see those innocent civilians killed. What have they done to deserve this, herded into camps like cattle? Prabakaran did not know when to negotiate. He became too fond of the gun and made his people here into Mafiosi,” says Shanthamma, a Pondicherry Tamil whose parents once owned a shop in Little Jaffna. She said agents of the Tigers forced them out of their original premises in what has now become Little Jaffna. “First they came with a ridiculous offer to buy our shop. Then there were threats on the phone and through the post. Finally, we found our windows were being broken, our merchandise tampered with. We preferred to quit. How else do you think did they manage to lay their hands on this entire street [Faubourg Saint Denis] and all the streets around it? It was done with threats and coercion. We do not care for the Tigers. They did terrible things in the name of self-determination. What had the members of the Pondicherry Tamil Community done to them? Yet they forced us out in order to put up their own shops so that they could collect their so called Freedom Tax.”

Angélina Etiemble, a sociologist and researcher who has carried out extensive studies on the Sri Lankan Tamil population in Paris, told The Hindu: “The LTTE was so well organised that every individual Sri Lankan Tamil was more or less forced to pay between 536 and 839 euros per year — the rate was 2.32 euros per day, deemed to be a ‘decent’ living wage for those engaged in the cause or deprived of their livelihood by the war. Shop owners had to pay up more, between 1,678 and 2,287 euros per establishment.” Ms. Etiemble says she is not surprised by the level of loyalty to the LTTE or the almost total indoctrination of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. “They used their media network to the full — newspapers like the Poobalam Weekly, controlled directly by the all-powerful Tamil Coordination Committee.

North of the equator, the people of Saint Pierre et Miquelon, an island group located off the Newfoundland coast, aren't doing nearly as well as their Falklands counterparts, with an economy that has been decidedly unproductive since the collapse of the cod fisheries. Some Saint-Pierrais want France to renegotiate seabed and fisheries rights with Canada.

Xavier Bowring points to the row of rusting, 19th-century cannons that overlook the harbour of this tiny French territory and jokes: "We'll use these to defend ourselves from an attack by Canada."

Then he says, "We don't want a war with Canada. We only want discussions, so we can have a piece of the resource -- a piece of the pie."

Bowring is an outspoken member of a citizens group on St-Pierre-Miquelon -- the French archipelago off the coast of Newfoundland -- that since February has galvanized many of the 6,000 residents here behind a passionate campaign for a new economic arrangement with Canada.

[. . .]

For most of the 20th century the islanders prospered off the East Coast cod fishery, not as fishermen but as merchants who processed fish and who served the foreign fishing fleet that used St-Pierre as a refuelling and resupply base.

"The big money was made here by merchants selling food, fuel, and lodging to Spanish, Korean and Japanese boats," said Gilles Borotra, a local businessman who co-owns one of the islands' last remaining fish plants.

"We had 25 bars, 14 nightclubs, and the town was filled with foreign fishing crews. There was lots of traffic in the streets. Now there are only three bars and one nightclub and almost all the hotels are closed. Everybody's in financial turmoil."

The collapse of the cod fishery in 1992, and Canada's decision to ban the foreign fleet from inside its 200 mile limit, put an end to St-Pierre-Miquelon's prosperity.

Only the occasional fishing trawler now comes to St-Pierre, and the territory relies increasingly on handouts from Paris, which the town's Mayor Karine Claireaux says amount to as much $166 million every year.

Paris not only sends money but also civil servants -- police, customs officers, technocrats -- to help run the local government and provide services. More than a third of the population are now expatriate bureaucrats from France, who come on two-or-three year assignments and then return home. The big money here now is not in business, but in a well-paid government job.

[. . .]

[D]reams of a new future fuelled by petroleum wealth are hampered by the fact that St-Pierre-Miquelon's offshore rights are confined to a small sliver of seabed -- 2.5 miles wide and 200 long ---- known derisively here as "the baguette."

Awarded two decades ago by a U.N. commission, France has a looming legal deadline of May 13 to appeal the boundaries of "the baguette."

Islanders want either an enlarged French economic zone in which to exploit petroleum resources, or at least the right to share with Canada revenues from undersea natural gas fields believed to lie across French-Canadian offshore boundaries.

Saint Pierre et Miquelon, as the islanders note, isn't such a large constituency-- fewer people than could fit in a soccer stadium--as to be unignorable by French politicians, and that change is probably unlikely. Still, there's hope.

The Globe and Mail's Anita Flash writes about how Québec is successfully attracting students from the heavily immigrant-populated Paris suburb and department of Seine-Saint-Denis to its universities.

Second-year business major Zine Rekik has been saving the euros he earns as a part-time supermarket cashier for two years so he could study abroad.

So when Mr. Rekik encountered Quebec university recruiters in the rough and tumble Paris suburb of Seine-Saint Denis last month, it was a match made in heaven.

It was the first time any foreign university had come searching for students in the Seine-Saint Denis or 93 region, an area that most French postsecondary schools ignore and most foreigners know as the centre of riots by disadvantaged minority youth 3½ years ago.

After a day of visits with students in the battered halls of the region's two universities, the recruiters had persuaded more than 40 young people, including Mr. Rekik, that Quebec was the place where they could "live the difference."

Mr. Rekik, 19, hopes to attend University of Quebec in Montreal this fall, where he wants to earn a master's degree in business. After that, he hopes to start his career in Quebec as a manager.

"It will be so good," he says of his hoped-for stay in Montreal. "I will go to class in the morning with a big smile. Then I will study in my little room in the student residence, then I will do some sports and I will make a lot of friends and maybe I will travel. I know I am going to blossom."

The Globe and Mail's Lysiane Gagnon argues ("That French remedy still works") that Canadians interested in health care should seek to learn from the experience of other systems, like those in western Europe.

Anyone who dares criticize the overly rigid Canada Health Act meets a standard reaction: "So you'd rather live with the American system, where 40 million people are deprived of health insurance?" This is an irrational reaction, as if there were only one alternative to medicare. (Let's hope America's health-care system will soon undergo the much-needed reforms envisioned by President Barack Obama.)

The head of the Canadian Medical Association, Robert Ouellet, should be credited for breaking with this obsession with the United States and broadening the issue by using the European experience to promote changes. He recently met health experts in France, Denmark, Belgium and the Netherlands and uses the European model to call for a blend of public and private medicine in Canada.

The European model is successful, indeed. According to the last World Health Organization ranking, in 2000, the top 20 countries with the best overall health performance were all in Western Europe, except for Singapore, Oman and Japan. France was No. 1; Canada placed 30th and the U.S. 37th.

What's interesting is that most Western European states have lived under socialist governments for long periods, while the Scandinavian countries have pioneered social democracy. Left-wing European leaders have never sought to outlaw private medicine, a fact that contradicts the prevalent view in Canada that allowing private clinics to co-exist with public institutions is a right-wing ploy.

Dr. Ouellet told a reporter that the European experts he met were shocked by the Canadian waiting lists. "They don't get it," he said. That's absolutely true. In Canada, people keep exchanging horror tales about how long they had to wait in emergency wards or for an operation or even for a doctor's appointment. It's a common topic of conversation. In France, a country I know well, waiting times is a subject no one talks about, for the simple reason that people are cared for without delay.

Occasionally, though, my French friends do complain about their health-care system. They say it has deteriorated. One friend, for instance, recently told me that "we no longer can call doctors at their home on the weekend, and house calls are difficult to get." To a Canadian ear, this sounds like a description of paradise.

In the article "", the Times covers the deteriorating situation in the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.

A union activist has died on the French island of Guadeloupe after a month-long strike escalated into riots and shootings.

Jacques Bino, who was in his fifties, was shot dead after being caught in crossfire while driving his car near a roadblock manned by armed youths, who opened fire at police in the capital Pointe-à-Pitre, an official from the local administration said.

He was the first victim of the escalating violence on the island, which has been crippled since January 20 by a general strike over the high cost of living.

The violence, which has caused growing concern in Paris, flared again overnight when gangs of youths looted shops, smashed shop windows and set up burning roadblocks along the main streets of the capital and in at least two other towns. At least 13 people were detained.

Paris appealed for calm and Michèle Alliot-Marie, the Interior Minister, called crisis talks on the deteriorating security situation.

Six members of the security forces were injured in shoot-outs with armed youths, including three police officers who were hurt while helping emergency teams that went to Mr Bino’s aid, police said.

The activist, who worked in a government tax office, was returning from a meeting, said Elie Domota, leader of the Collective Against Exploitation (LKP), the coalition of unions and leftist groups that organised the strike.

“The Government’s message is first of all to appeal for calm, that is the most important thing,” said Luc Chatel, a government spokesman, in Paris. “Everyone is better off finding a place at the negotiating table than on the barricades,” he told Europe 1 radio.

[. . .]

The LKP has said it plans to step up protests this week after the government refused to bow to demands for a monthly €200 (£177) pay increase for low-wage earners.

Mr Domota appealed for calm but also accused French authorities of treating the island, one of its four overseas departments, like a colony.

“Guadeloupe is a colony because they would never have allowed the situation to fester for so long in a French department before taking action,” Domota said on RTL radio.

The conflict has exposed race and class divisions on the island, where the local white elite wields power over the black majority.

The economy is largely in the hands of the “Bekes", the local name for whites who are mostly descendants of colonial landlords and sugar plantation slave owners of the 17th and 18th centuries.

A Socialist opposition leader, Malikh Boutih, said it was shocking to watch a police force “almost 100 per cent white, confront a black population” and drew a parallel with the 2005 suburban riots in France.

Le Monde has more on the ground reports from Guadeloupe.

Guadeloupe--along with Martinique in the Caribbean, French Guiana in South America, and Réunion in the Indian Ocean--is an overseas department of France, as integrated politically into the French mainland as Hawai'i is into the American mainland. These islands' economies have not been able to fully make the transition to a high-productivity high-wage economy--even French Guiana, home of the French and European space programs, has a dual economy--and rates of unemployment in these overseas departments remains high while living standards remain low, financed substantially by income transfers by the French state. Given France's economic troubles something like this was probably inevitable somewhere in overseas France. We'll have to wait to find out when, and how, it gets resolved.

From the Montreal Gazette comes more evidence that Sarkozy has decisively broken from the traditional French policy, first and most famously set under De Gaulle, of not opposing if not outright supporting Québec separatism.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy downplayed Quebec sovereignty Monday, saying the world needs unity, not hatred and division, in Canada as it tries to face down an unprecedented economic crisis.

Sarkozy, who is preparing a major speech Thursday on the global economic collapse that is shaking Europe’s political foundations, appeared almost exasperated as he raised France’s role in the ongoing Canadian unity polemic.

“Do you really believe that the world, with the unprecedented (economic) crisis that it is going through, needs division? Needs hatred?” Sarkozy said at a ceremony at which he presented Quebec Premier Jean Charest with the France’s Legion of Honour medal.

He said disunity sends the wrong message to the Francophonie alliance of 56 French-speaking countries, many of them underdeveloped.

The Francophonie should be about unity, tolerance and openness, he told a gathering that included Francophonie Secretary General Abdou Diouf.

"Those who do not understand that, I don’t think they like the Francophonie, I do not think they have understood the message of the Francophonie - the universal values that we share in Quebec as in France: the rejection of sectarianism, the rejection of division, the refusal to retreat into oneself.”

Sarkozy seemed anxious to bury France’s long-standing policy of non-interference and non-indifference - called “ni-ni” in shorthand French - in Quebec’s possible separation from Canada.

Sarkozy, who outlined his pro-Canadian unity views in Quebec City last October, repeated his position that Canada is France’s close friend but Quebeckers are like siblings.

The ni-ni concept - long considered an irritant by Canadian federalists because the vague “non-indifference” statement implied possible support for Quebec separation - isn’t appropriate for friends or family, he said.

“The non-interference, non-indifference, honestly, it is not really my thing,” Sarkozy told a group of guests that included various senior French and Quebec government officials as well as Canadian billionaire Paul Desmarais, Quebec songwriter Luc Plamondon and Quebec actress-singer Carole Laure.

First off, I'd like to welcome pauldrye's blog Passing Strangeness to my blogroll. This blog takes a look at some of the more unexpected events and facts in human history.

• Centauri Dreams examines recent research suggesting that, with sufficiently high-resolution telescopes, it might be possible for astronomers to observe the large-scale features of ecologies and biomes of distant Earth-like worlds.


• Edward Hugh at A Fistful of Euros reports on the ongoing Russian economic slump.


• Far Outliers touches briefly upon the interesting question of the existence of African slave diasporas within Africa as well as without, as well as upon the plight of Japan's burakumin, a traditionally discriminated-against caste.


• Gideon Rachman's speaks for me when he concludes that, at least in the short term, no one won from the Gaza unpleasantness.


• Joe. My. God reports that the New York Post is calling for a war on Canada geese in response to their apparent involvement in the recent Hudson River plane crash.


• Marginal Revolution quotes Kevin Drum's analysis of Sweden's response to its own early 1990s banking crisis.


• Passing Strangeness discusses the implications, including nearly-averted wars, surrounding an intermittantly present island in the central Mediterranean--the Two Sicilies, Britain, even France all cared about it.


• Slap Upside the Head lets us know that Google has come out squarely in favour of marriage equality in California.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer makes the point that high crimes rates don't mean that the Mexican state will collapse and that Brazil's recent good fortune reflects a recovery from bad conditions as much as anything else.


• Torontoist confirms that the number of new students at York University can be expected to collapse, with "a 10.8% drop in overall student applications to York, and a 15% drop in the number of students who ranked York as their first choice for schools they wanted to apply to."


• Windows on Eurasia discusses the importance of Abkhazia's recent decision to produce its own stamps on its relations with Georgia and the wider world. Stamp collectors can expect to profit, at least.

France's population continues its relatively strong growth.

Boasting one of the highest fertility rates in Europe, France saw its population grow by 0.6 per cent last year, to an estimated 64.3 million people, the government's statistics office INSEE said on Tuesday. Some 834,000 children were born on French territory in 2008, the highest number since 1981, INSEE said. That figure was all the more remarkable in that the number of child-bearing women has declined by some 2 per cent since 1999.

France's population growth was therefore the result of a fertility rate that surpassed the threshold of 2 children per female, which represents the highest rate, along with that of Ireland, among the 27 members of the European Union.

In addition, the percentage of children born out of wedlock continued to increase in France, with more than 52 per cent registered last year, an increase of 10 per cent over 10 years, INSEE said.

At the same time, both life expectancy and infant mortality rate remained stable in 2008.

A boy born in France last year can expect to live 77.5 years, while the life expectancy of a French girl born in 2008 was 84.3 years, virtually the same as in 2007.

French infant mortality rate stood at 3.8 per 1,000 births in 2008, identical to that from the previous two years but considerably improved over the figure of 4.8 in 1998.

INSEE has more, in French, here, making the additional point that France includes another seven hundred thousand on top of the cited 64.3 million, in the French overseas collectivities of French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Mayotte, Saint Pierre-et-Miquelon, Wallis and Futune, Saint-Martin, and Saint-Barthélemy.

Over at Inter Press Service, Haider Rizvi tackles the question of why the Western Sahara, occupied by Morocco in defiance of international law.

"The main reason behind the U.N. failure to address this issue is the French support for Morocco," said Ahmed Boukhari, Western Sahara's ambassador to the U.N., in an interview with IPS. "France is behind Morocco. It finances Morocco."

Western Sahara is the last decolonisation case in Africa, and has been on the U.N. list of Non-Self Governing territories since 1963 when it was under Spanish colonial rule. Saharans lost much of their territory as a result of the Moroccan invasion in 1976.

Saharans argue that the Moroccan occupation is in violation of numerous U.N. resolutions as well as the 1975 ruling of the International Court of Justice that affirmed their right to self-determination.

Following the court's decision, Spain was due to organiae a referendum, but failed to do so as Morocco deployed its army in Western Sahara. In response, the Saharans established a resistance group known as Polisario in 1976. In 1991, the U.N. Security Council devised a plan to end fighting between the two sides and a free and fair referendum on self-determination in which Saharans would choose between independence and integration. The plan never worked.

After holding a series of discussions, the U.N. General Assembly's political committee, which considers matters related to decolonisation, passed another resolution in which it reaffirmed the right of "all peoples" to self-determination in line with the U.N. Charter.

Those who support the Saharans' quest for freedom are critical of the text of the resolution because it overemphasises the role of the Security Council. The Council is currently pushing the two sides for talks for an "acceptable solution". The increased Security Council role in bringing the conflict to an end seems more desirable for Morocco because then its backer, France, can exert its influence in decision-making process as one of the five permanent members who enjoy veto power.

During discussions at the General Assembly's political committee meeting, Morocco and its supporters argued that the question of Western Sahara needs to be addressed with "realism", which means Rabat might be willing to offer an autonomous status to Western Sahara, not the choice for independence.

"Which kind of realism they are talking about? Kosovo or Abkhazia? We are not going to renounce our right to self-determination. We want a free and fair credendum. If people do not want independence, we will accept that," said Bukhari, who sees French backing as a major factor behind Morocco's attempts to bury the issue of Western Sahara's independence.

As the author notes, the Western Sahara is rich in natural resources, so rich that Morocco isn't likely to relinquish its hold on the territory. Worse, unlike Kosovo or Abkhazia, the Western Sahara has no great-power patron with the dubious exception of Algeria.

It's well-known that disputes over the relative statuses of the English and French languages in Québec are commonplace. What isn'tknown nearly as well is the conflict between Québec's local dialect of French and the European French that's the international standard for the language. As pointed out here, there are significant lexical and other differences between the two dialects. These differences becamie major issues during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, as people challenging cultural conventions attacked the belief that Standard French was the only acceptable version of the language and that French as it was spoken was not different but flawed. One of these activists went so far as to write a Dictionnaire de la langue québécoise, with a more moderate sort of language normalization actually taken place, with different versions of Québec French becoming the normal language of spoken discourse, not so much a written one.. As for the accent, well, Francophones from France are said to often find it funny and perhaps incomprehensible. The latest we Anglophones have heard of this debate, as described in Les Perreaux's article in The Globe and Mail ("'Deplorable' Québécois accent has royal roots, linguist asserts") is linguist Jean-Denis Gendron's contentious argument that Québec French is in fact the French of the 17th and 18th centuries.

"The Québécois accent is one from the noblesse of the time, it is a relaxed, natural accent," Jean-Denis Gendron, a retired professor from Laval University, argues in the October edition of Quebec Sciences. "It's only much later that our accent came to be viewed as an abomination."

The Quebec accent's voyage from the king's court to linguistic "abomination" can be traced through historical events and the accounts of visitors to the colonies, Mr. Gendron argues.

Early settlers in New France came from western France and were highly influenced by the Parisien aristocracy. Later, in the colonial era, clergy, military officers and local governors carried on with that influence.

Mr. Gendron's research shows that as late as 1757, the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville wrote that "the Canadian accent is as pure as that of the Parisians." Around the same time, a French clergyman said Canadian French was closer to the language spoken in Paris than the French spoken in Bordeaux or Marseilles.

The language link changed dramatically over the next 50 years.

The English victory on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 cut off links with France even as French academics worked on a massive project to standardize grammar and pronunciation.

"They got rid of all the pronunciations they didn't judge perfect for high society, and the cleanup continued through the 18th century," said Claude Poirier, an expert in French-language history at Laval University.

The French revolution of the 1790s eliminated the French aristocracy who still shared Canadian speech patterns, Mr. Gendron said.

The French re-established links with their French-Canadian cousins in the 1800s and found a language they barely understood. In 1810, the Paris-trained Englishman John Lambert was among the first to note the "deplorable" French-Canadian accent, but he was soon backed by French explorers Théodore Pavie and Alexis de Tocqueville.

"These travellers spoke with the new French accent and they found our accent very bizarre," Mr. Gendron said.

Other commentators point out later in the article that this is only a partial explanation--few of the migrants who settled French Canada came from the Paris basin or had connections with the aristocracy, while the local dialects has words from the regions of northern and western France that provided the most settlers as well as English. It also seems obvious to me that it's an attempt to inverse the pecking order of French dialects. That said, it's certainly a provocative take on the subject of French diaelcts: The periphery, it seems, talks back.

Belgian Gilles Trehin 's Urville is a marvellous uchronia, a vast detailed sketching of a fictional city of Urville. Home to twelve million people and located just off of the cost of Provence, Urville is given full form in a marvellous set of detailed sketches of the major points of interest (builidings, parks, and so on) all placed within the context of French histroy--Trehin's website.provides a sample. My only problem with Urville is that this uchronia is flawed by the fact that a southern French metropolis more populous and wealthy than Paris would surely have radically altered the dynamics of the French state (might Aragon-Occitania live?). That said, it was easy to avoid nitpciking the book as I read about the Hôtel de Ville and the skyscpraers of the financial distrct. Go, read.

The recent war in Georgia, on top of the past several decades of nationalist wars and peaceful separatist movements all around the world, have done me the service of reminding me of an interesting essay written one hundred thirty-eight years ago in the middle of yet another--although more foundational--nationalist war.

Some weeks after the Franco-Prussian War, when it became clear that the German amrmies--led by Prussia--were broadly superior to those of France and bound to triumph, talk of annexing Alsace, a French province at the time populated mainly by speakers of German dialects and with its capital of Strasbourg Strassberg a centre of German learning, eventually became policy in the nascent Germany. The French opposed this and tried to oppose this outcome militarily to the point of creating a provisional government, the Third Republic, that desperately created volunteer armies and a self-governing Commune in Paris that, well, had unexpected side-effects and did nothing to save French Alsace quite apart from saving France's public reputation and allowing it to pose as a victim in many of the circles where it was once a villain.

A lot was written from the French side at the time, but one piece that has interested me--thanks to the Bibliothèque municipale de Lisieux--is one written by classical historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, (French Wikipedia, English Wikipedia, in October 1870 issue of La Revue des deux mondes "L'Alsace est-elle allemande ou française". In this, an address to a German colleague who welcomed Alsace's entry into the German polity on the grounds of its impeccably German background, Fustel de Coulanges questioned his rationale.

Vous invoquez le principe de nationalité, mais vous le comprenez autrement que toute l'Europe. Suivant vous, ce principe autoriserait un État puissant à s'emparer d'une province par la force, à la seule condition d'affirmer que cette province est occupée par la même race que cet État. Suivant l'Europe et le bon sens, il autorise simplement une province ou une population à ne pas obéir malgré elle à un maître étranger. Je m'explique par un exemple : le principe de nationalité ne permettait pas au Piémont de conquérir par la force Milan et Venise ; mais il permettait à Milan et à Venise de s'affranchir de l'Autriche et de se joindre volontairement au Piémont. Vous voyez la différence. Ce principe peut bien donner à l'Alsace un droit, mais il ne vous en donne aucun sur elle.

You invoke the principle of nationality, but you understand that differently from the rest of Europe. According to you, this principle would allow a powerful State to capture one province by force, the only requirement being an affirmation that the territory is occupied by the same race as that state. Following practice in Europe and common sense, this allows a province or a population not to disobey a foreign master. Let me explain with an example: the principle of nationality did not allow the Piedmont to conquer by force Milan and Venice, but it allowed Milan and Venice to get rid of Austria and voluntarily join the Piedmont. You see the difference. This principle may well give Alsace a right, but it does give you no on it.

If this principle was extended, he wondered, would "Prussia" (not, interestingly enough, Germany) have a right to go on to take Holland, Switzerland, Austria, Livonia and Riga? The author can't claim race as a factor, since according to that principle Belgium would be French and Portugal Spanish. Language isn't the issue at hand, since the United States and the United Kingdom are not united. What makes Alsace French?

Ce n'est pas Louis XIV, c'est notre Révolution de 1789. Depuis ce moment, I'Alsace a suivi toutes nos destinées ; elle a vécu de notre vie. Tout ce que nous pensions, elle le pensait ; tout ce que nous sentions, elle le sentait. Elle a partagé nos victoires et nos revers, notre gloire et nos fautes, toutes nos joies et toutes nos douleurs. Elle n'a rien eu de commun avec vous. La patrie, pour elle, c'est la France. L'étranger, pour elle, c'est l'Allemagne.

Tous les raisonnements du monde n'y changeront rien. Vous avez beau invoquer l'ethnographie et la philologie. Nous ne sommes pas ici dans un cours d'université. Nous sommes au milieu des faits et en plein coeur humain. Si vos raisonnements vous disent que l'Alsace doit avoir le coeur allemand, mes yeux et mes oreilles m'assurent qu'elle a le coeur français. Vous affirmez, de loin, " qu'elle garde un esprit d'opposition provinciale contre la France " ; je l'ai vue de près ; j'ai connu des hommes de toutes les classes, de tous les cultes, de tous les partis politiques, et je n'ai trouvé cet esprit d'opposition contre la France nulle part. Vous insinuez qu'elle a une antipathie contre les hommes de Paris ; je me vante de savoir avec quelle sympathie elle les accueille. Par le coeur et par l'esprit, I'Alsace est une de nos provinces les plus françaises. Le Strasbourgeois a, comme chacun de nous, deux patries : sa ville natale d'abord, puis, au-dessus, la France. Quant à l'Allemagne, il n'a pas même la pensée qu'elle puisse être en aucune façon sa patrie.

[. . .]

Ne parlez donc plus de nationalité, et surtout gardez-vous bien de dire aux Italiens : Strasbourg est à nous du même droit que Milan et Venise sont à vous ; car les Italiens vous répondraient qu'ils n'ont bombardé ni Milan ni Venise. Si l'on avait pu avoir quelque doute sur la vraie nationalité de Strasbourg et de l'Alsace, le doute ne serait plus possible aujourd'hui. La cruauté de l'attaque et l'énergie de la défense ont fait éclater la vérité à tous les yeux. Quelle preuve plus forte voudriez vous?

This is not Louis XIV, it is our Revolution of 1789. Since that time, Alsace followed all our destinies; she lived our life. Everything that we thought, she thought; all that we all felt, she felt. She shared our victories and our setbacks, our glory and our faults, all our joys and our pain. She had nothing in common with you. The homeland, it is France. A foreigner, it is Germany.

All the arguments of the world change noything. You invoke beautiful ethnography and philology. We are not here in a university course. We are in the midst of facts and full human heart. If your reasoning tell you that Alsace should have a German heart, my eyes and my ears assure me that it has a French heart. You say, "it retains a spirit of provincial opposition against France," I who have seen it close up say that I have known men of all classes, of all faiths, of all parties and policies, and I have found this spirit of opposition against France nowhere. You insinuate it has an antipathy against the men in Paris and I am proud to know how it has sympathy with Paris. By heart and by mind, Alsace is one of most French provinces most French. The Strasbourgeois, like each of us, two homelands: his hometown and then, above, France. As for Germany, he never thought that it could be in any way his homeland.

Speak no more of nationality, and most importantly never say to the Italians that "Strasbourg is ours for the same right that as Milan and Venice are yours," because when you meet the Italians they will tell you that they have not bombed Milan or Venice. If we could have had any doubt about the true nationality of Strasbourg and of Alsace, doubt would no longer be possible today. The cruelty of the attack and energy of the defence have pushed the truth into everyone's eyes. What more could you wantr?

Nous souhaitons que l'Alsace reste parmi les provinces françaises, mais sachez bien quel motif nous alléguons pour cela. Disons-nous que c'est parce que Louis XIV l'a conquise? Nullement. Disons-nous que c'est parce qu'elle est utile à notre défense ? Non. Ni les raisons tirées de la force, ni les intérêts de la stratégie n'ont de valeur en cette affaire. Il ne s'agit que d'une question de droit public, et nous devons résoudre cette question d'après les principes modernes. La France n'a qu'un seul motif pour vouloir conserver l'Alsace, c'est que l'Alsace a vaillamment montré qu'elle voulait rester avec la France. Voilà pourquoi nous soutenons la guerre contre la Prusse. Bretons et Bourguignons, Parisiens et Marseillais, nous combattons contre vous au sujet de l'Alsace; mais, que nul ne s'y trompe ; nous ne combattons pas pour la contraindre, nous combattons pour vous empêcher de la contraindre.

We hope that Alsace continues to be one of the French provinces, but know well what reason we want this. Is it because Louis XIV had conquered it? Not at all. Is it because it is useful to our defence? No. Neither the reasons drawn from force, nor from strategy are relevant in this case. This is only a matter of public law, and we must resolve this issue according to modern principles. France has only one reason for wanting to keep Alsace, and it is that Alsace has valiantly shown she wanted to remain with France. That is why we support the war against Prussia. Bretons and Burgundians, Paris and Marseillais, we are fighting against you on the Alsace, but make no mistake: we do not fight to take it, we fight to keep you from taking it.

This essay strongly reminds me of Ernest Renan's suggestion in his famous formulation, in the 1882 lecture Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? that a nation is formed by the day-tio-day referendum of the people who choose to live in it. While it's true that the arguments of Fustel de Coulanges and Renan are vulnerable to exploitation by people who'd like to manipulate the popular will ("Look, the people of Vermont want to be Canadians!"), they're still highly relevant to the day-to-day world, especially in the light of the nationalism-associated conflicts in our worlds. For whatever it's worth.

The Story of French, by Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, is the sort of book that I wish was better than it is. It aspires to be an informative book combining a histoy of the development of the French language with a survey of its future. The fact that this title received a mention in the International Herald Tribune review of 's recent tome The Story of French shows the non-trivial impact that this book has made among laypeople interested in the dynamics of international language change.

As the authors demonstrate, contrary to the arguments of some the French language remains a vibrant international language and is in fact facing a hoepful future. French, they point out, is the first language of more than seventy million people living in some of the wealthiest countries in the world (France, Canada, Switzerland, Belgium), but it is a second language deeply entrenched in Africa. In place like Gabon, Côte d'Ivoire, and even French/English bilingual Cameroon, French or a French-based creole is superceding local languages. Beyond Francophone Africa, as one of the major Africa vehicular languages it seems to be gaining a foothold outside in South Africa.

The authors also make the very important point that la francophonie was triggered not by France but rather by Francophone societies on the periphery of France, as a result of of a Québec government that wanted to boost its own international profile, a Canadian federal government that wanted to keep track of Québec, and of Francophone African governments which wanted to diversify their international relationships. The institutional francophonie is in the authors' increasingly being joined by a popular francophonie, based on the sharing of popular culture (literature, music, film, Internet) and best practice (education, governance, health care, technology) between different Francophone communities.

The problems with the book? Sometimes, the authors make exaggerated claims. Nick Gillespie's review makes some points.

Languages tend to rise and fall with the economic and cultural powers that speak them and no one is expecting France to be a major player in the centuries to come. While there's no doubt that, at least for now, French "offers a counterbalance to the influence of English," it's unlikely that the language will prosper as the planet's economic energy shifts more toward Asia and Latin America.

Look instead for today's language of global hegemony, good old American English, to counterbalance the influence of Mandarin and Spanish in the not-too-distant future.

In my opinion Gillespie significantly underestimates both the prospects of the French language and the economic possibilities of Francophone Africa and France. Equally, Nadeau and Barlow are a bit too enthusiastic in promoting the prospects of French as a fully-fledged world language capable of taking on alongside Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. It might be better to compare the situation of the French language with that of Portuguese: two large and relatively wealthy countries that includes the vast majority of first-language speakers, smaller countries with significant numbers of first-language speakers, and a considerable number of second-language speakers in recently decolonized territories. Portuguese--at least in Angola--like French, is gaining ground as a first-language in urban areas in Lusophone Africa. For whatever reason, they chose to be boosters instead of neutral observers, speaking to a particlar committed market perhaps instead of trying for something more neutral.

In addition, the authors also come up with some howling mistakes. African democracy is not an oxymoron; Berlin was not founded as a Huguenot refuge; Africans do not speak pidgins; the atrocities of Leopold II in the Congo Free State are not allleged. These and serious errors if not outright slurs errors really distracted me from what was otherwise an interesting enough book.

And in the end? The Story of French is a worthwhile read, but I'd be exceptionally critical in regards to many of its background assumptions and claimed facts. Alas, this book does not provide the definitive English-language statement of the Frenh language. I just wonder when that book will come.