1. You don't put your military on alert before doing a secret strike.
2. You generally aren't at the secret strike stage when your foreign minister is saying for the second time or so that the enemy country is dangerous. Ask yourself how manytimes our SecStates said "Libya/Iraq/Panama" are trouble before we actually began kicking their butts.
France waited quite a while after Germany invaded Poland. In fact they waited until France was overrun.
True enough. My comments were more directed to the idea that Francy is loathe to involve it’s troops in these endeavors.
This begs the question of where the French would strike from. We have long range bombers, airfields in theater, and substantial Naval capability. The French have only a very limited naval capability.