Sipping a petit café in Le Fouquet in Paris watching the spenders, scam artists and beggars on the Champs Elysee I wonder what makes this country tick.
Partly still the French Revolution, I guess. It started right there, from the chair of the President of the Assemblee Nationale, (AN).Its goals are well know: freedom, egality and fraternity. This means no group has more say or rights, no previledges. It also means that all are free of arbitrary rule and that citizens are formed in public schools to be thinking free agents. The brotherhood is the solidarity needed to keep a society falling appart.
Good values,
but you need to be elected in order to help govern the country, for that TV is essentials and French like beauty, so the A.N. has a place to beautify its representatives of the peopple. They also like pomp and circumstance. The President of the AN walks through the Garde while drums roar loudly. The symbolic meaning is that the army protects the representatives of the people. So I watch the high heeled and well heeled, sit and dream of these lofty ideals.
Perhaps Frenchmen 'tick' today because they have a living, breathing symbol to make them aspire to total freedom, equality, and fraternization with the Leading Woman of the nation, Carla Bruni. I can't imagine what makes Frenchwomen 'tick' though. Unless they are sapphic, or take pity on short, dumpy little presidents.
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