[11th Earl of Mar]

through all of the twists and turns of their history, the French have managed to maintain a recognisably French culture

A culture like spitting on the American troops that rescued them from the Nazis? We know all about that culture.

And the reason we don't like them is BECAUSE they have "mangaged to maintain" this same culture.

[habs4ever]

Don't be too quick to dump on the Froggies.They know they have a serious security problem, and in major cities like Lyon, Lille, Marseille, Nice and Bordeaux, you'll find the electorate is a whole lot more conservative than the crowd that reads Le Monde.Paris and Strasbourg were to be prime targets of Bin Laden, and you can bet the French security services are working overtime at rounding up the networks in the burbs around Paris that harbour these maggots.The Eiffel Tower was to be the first target back in 1994..they are in it up to their necks with us,and they know it too.

[LaBelleDameSansMerci]

"...A culture like spitting on the American troops that rescued them from the Nazis? ..."

I'm sure anecdotes have their place in human history. But to reduce French culture to spitting upon American soldiers is a bit too myopic--don't you think?

And even if the spitting incidents were indicative of something larger I would argue that larger thing was a war weary civilian population, many of whom were killed by Allied "liberation" bombing--their properties destroyed by the liberation invasion.

There are many angles in the prism of wartime and sadly, the USA killed many French people in WWII. Wars and ancient loyalties are too complicated and messy to be reduced to a single anecdote.

It's astonishing to me, in the wake of the horror and grief of September 11th, that, so far, Americans have evinced very little heightened empathy for those who have died or lived through war's devastation...