Over on the home page, Victor Davis Hanson details the “great Anglo-American spat.” While our president stumbles into special-relationship trouble, France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is doing what he can to honor the historic leadership of Britain. Today, according to the Times of London, Sarkozy delivered an “unexpectedly heartfelt speech marking the 70th anniversary of General de Gaulle’s call to arms from a BBC studio in London.”

“We come as friends, and friends who remember the past and what France owes you,” Sarkozy told an audience of about 1,500 veterans and dignitaries at London’s Royal Hospital Chelsea, a hospital and retirement center for ex-soldiers.” Amid pomp and ceremony, Sarkozy bestowed the French Legion d’Honneur on six World War II veterans — three British and three French.
“Britain and France will be true to those who died for them in the skies above London, in the Libyan desert, on the Normandy beaches and the plain of Alsace, when all that we hold most dear was threatened with annihilation,” Sarkozy told veterans who attended the ceremony. He spoke in French. Sarkozy and Cameron said commemorations of the past must be matched by strong ties between their two governments on present challenges. . .

Sarkozy is keeping busy these days as a champion for history and tradition:

The government of President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose political party is descended from the World War II general’s followers, has included De Gaulle’s wartime memoirs in the curriculum for next year’s high-school literary classes. Sarkozy is in London today to commemorate De Gaulle’s June 18, 1940, radio broadcast urging a defeated France not to give up.
De Gaulle’s inclusion in the curriculum has sparked opposition from literature teachers and their unions, who say that his writings are historical, not literary, and that he’s too identified with conservative political parties. De Gaulle, who died in 1970, is revered by almost all French for leading the resistance to the Nazis and their French collaborators. His role as president from 1959 to 1969, and as the founder of France’s main conservative party, remains more divisive.