OK, OK. Numerous people have written in to complain about my failure to provide a translation of those words by Talleyrand. Je m’excuse. I was lulled into linguistic insensitivity by the virtuosity of all the Corner readers who tackled the translation challenge posed by those cheese-eating surrender monkeys (recent efforts have included Greek, Hawaiian, Esperanto, Hebrew, Persian and a blatantly faked ur-language).
Anyway, Talleyrand’s phrase (“Ils n’ont rien appris, ni rien oublié.”) translates as “they have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing”, appropriate words to read in conjunction with de Villepin’s remarks about “an old country that does not forget”.
Talleyrand’s original comments, of course, referred to aristocrats forced to flee France in the early years of the French revolution. They are a reminder that while France may be an “old country”, the structure of its government is relatively novel. Despite a tricky patch in the early 1860s the US has operated under the same system since 1788, a time when France was still a monarchy. As a reader points out, since then, France has restored its monarchy once, been an empire twice, and a republic five times.