They've changed. In 1985 the prime target on Jewish backs was the Vichyite "Auschwitz was a detail" LePeniste far right led by Marine LePen's father. Now there are two targets on Jewish backs: 1. One put by Islamist theocrats. 2. the other by the Palestinophile far left. The LePenistes, like Orban in Hungary, AfD in Germany and Salvini in Italy, put pro-Israeli lipstick on their xenophobic pigs. With friends like these, please send us some enemies.

What hasn't changed: France continually incubates a simulation of civil war that never quite explodes without an external trigger, like the 1940 defeat. In 1982 I read Le Temps from 1934-1947 on microfilm to research the Popular Front, the 1940 defeat and the occupation and liberation period. Unlike Italy, France had an institutionalist elite and conservative business class that would never push the country over the authoritarian precipice on its own, and no monarch to put a Mussolini in power.

The two Marseillaise sisters who adopted me for six weeks in Villefranche in 1986 were Algerian born daughters of a colonel in the French army who grew up in the Algerian war of independence. They were soixantehuitarde lefties who hated LePen. But they also said "l'Islam est tres dure, tres dure."

Merci pour votre reponse.