Following French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s initial and semi-disastrous decisions to support the Egyptian and Tunisian governments against their democratic rebels, Sarkozy has recently embraced a new form of French diplomacy: supporting revolutionaries. Most notably, Sarkozy’s decision to close Libya’s embassy in France and open on reserved for the Opposition Government and Rebels has drawn international attention as a refreshingly humanitarian and ideologically sound action on the part of the French. This has buoyed the popularity of the French president, too often referred to as President Bling-Bling by his vast legion of detractors. There is nothing new in the New Sarkozy, though, just as there is nothing new in the New France.
From the establishment of the French Empire in 1804 and its dismantlement at the hands of the Sixth Coalition in 1814, France has lived up to its imperial ambitions in matters both military and diplomatic. Although this hunger for empire and influence in fact had predated the French Empire with the ambitions of the revolutionary leaders of the French Republic and earlier kinds, never before had there been a gathering of political power in Paris than in the era of the Napoleonic Empire.
It had in its possession dozens of small client states throughout Europe with whom it could maintain trade and military pacts while it continued to retain an intercontinental colonial empire which provided the Mother country with luxuries at low prices. All nations within the French orbit, whether they be allies, protectorates, mandates or simply leery friends, the French would follow a pattern that has suddenly thrust itself back into our own age.
All the way up through the 1950’s and the presidency of Charles de Gaul, this dream of empire and the greater “Francosphere” had been artfully executed by endorsing groups of rebels and political revolutionaries, especially during the era of the Empire. More than half of the Confederation of the Rhine – a group of puppet states under Napoleon’s control where western Germany stands today – had come into being due to political revolutionaries who owed their victory to the French; and across Italy, the Italian Republic, followed by the Italian Kingdom, owed both of their existences to France’s interference, the first to the French Republic, the second to the French Empire. Most famously, the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, a protectorate in modern-day Poland, saw Napoleon and the French as liberators, and became his greatest ally during the invasion of, and the retreat from, Russia.
The French have never truly let go of their dream of le Monde Francais,with parades – more than one of which the American Word editors have enjoyed personally – every summer on Bastille Day, with Legionnaires and troops from across the French-speaking world pouring across Les Invalides to the tumultuous cry of “Vive la France!” When we observe the actions of Sarkozy and this new form of French Diplomacy acknowledging the Opposition Government and Rebels of Libya and North Africa, there is not a doubt that this ‘humanitarian’ diplomacy is a self-serving, centuries-old imperial inclination. It is deeper than the surface, but in its depths lay ancient ambitions.
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