DISQUS

Chaterine Fletcher · 3 years ago

France is a people of the same quality as Greece and
Italy. She is Athenian in beauty and Roman in
grandeur. Moreover, she is generous. She gives
herself. More often than other peoples, she knows the
mood of devotion and sacrifice. But it is a mood that
comes and goes; and this is the great danger for those
who seek to run when she is content to walk, and to
walk when she wishes to stay still. France has her
relapses into materialism, and at certain moments the
ideas which obstruct the working of her splendid mind
contain nothing that recalls her greatness but are
rather of the dimensions of Missouri or some other
southern state. What can be done about it? The
giantess plays the dwarf; great France has her
fantasies of smallness. That is all.

--Victor Hugo

So, yes, it could be French protectionsim. Or it
could be contrariness (even Hugo admits to this). Or
it could be both.

Rogel · 3 years ago

It seems that France didn't realize ,when established the EU, that cultural and political influence can go both direction. As they realising that they might not achieve hegemony in Europe and might even be target to other countries influence they got scared.