THE GEOGRAPHY OF EUROPE:

Geographically, the continent of Europe is a busy place. On the one hand it is riddled with geographic features that impede the formation of any large political entity. Mountain ranges impede trade and armies alike. Nearly omnipresent peninsulas and islands limit the ability of larger powers to intimidate or conquer smaller powers. Among these three features it isn’t so much a surprise that Europe has never united under a single government as it is a surprise that anyone has ever tried.

That is because there are two other geographic features that push Europe together rather than pull it apart.

The first is the Northern European Plain (NEP), an expansive stretch of lowland extending from the Russian steppe in the east to the Pyrenees in the west. The region is blessed with the densest concentration of navigable water ways in the world. The combination of an easily traversable fertile (and coastal) plain with seven major rivers guarantees both agricultural surpluses and the ability to easily and cheaply move them. It is textbook perfect for trade, communication and technology transfer -- and from those activities the accumulation of massive amounts of capital. Consequently, Northern Europe is home to the densest concentration of wealth in the world.

The second feature -- the Mediterranean Sea – plays a similar role to the continent’s south. Maritime transport on the Med is far simpler than oceanic transport in Northern Europe: the North Sea is one of the world’s stormiest bodies of water. But mitigating that advantage is the simple fact that much of the southern side of the continent lacks a robust coastal plain. So while Southern Europe is still rich by global standards, it is a distant second by the high standards of Northern Europe. The two regions have very little to do with each other geographically, and their relative isolation has spawned a raft of differing political and economic cultures.

Mix the geographic features that inhibit unification with the features that facilitate trade and communication, and Europe becomes a very rich, very violent place. None of Europe’s rivers naturally interconnect, giving most European ethnicities their own independent capital base. (LINK: http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20100602_eu_us_european_credit_rating_agency_challenge) But these rivers are all close to each other, and most flow across the NEP to empty into the Atlantic, ensuring constant interaction. It is a recipe for wars of domination, a simple fact born out in centuries of European history.

Yet there are three places on the Continent where this pattern of fragmentation does not hold. The first are the Seine and Loire Valleys whose upper reaches are so close together, separated by only a narrow stretch of very flat land that the two have always been integrated – the only such multi-rivertine system in Europe. The region therefore gains the economic and trade benefits of the NEP without suffering significant division. The second and third are the Garonne and Rhone river valleys. The Garonne’s head of navigation is at Toulouse, only 75km from the Med, but the river flows west across the NEP to the Atlantic rather than east to the much closer Med. The Rhone is one of the relatively few European rivers that both empties into the Mediterranean and serves as a trade corridor to Northern Europe (the Danube empties into the geographically constricted Black Sea). As such the Garonne and the Rhoneserve as the sole natural connections between the NEP and the Med.

The one thing these three geographic exceptions have in common is that they both have long resided in the political entity known as France. Only France is both a Northern and Southern European power (with perhaps also Northern Italy coming close). It is the singular European power – despite its seeming isolation near the continent’s western end – who can attempt to project power in any portion of the European theater. But the key word here is “attempt”. While France stands out in its unique access, it – especially today -- lacks the size to dominate. Consequently France is nearly always engaged, but is only rarely ascendant.

The French Geography

France is bound by the Alps in the southeast and the Pyrenees in the southwest, the Mediterranean Sea to in the south and the Atlantic in both the west and north. In the east, France is bound by the river Rhine and the low mountains of the Ardennes, Vosges and Jura.

Mountain chains, rivers and seas therefore enclose France at all points save for one: the North European Plain. Access to the North European Plain gives France its most important geographical feature. Because it is at the terminus of the Plain – or its beginning, depending on one’s perspective -- France has the advantage of having to defend itself only on one lowland front and from the sea. However, it is at the same time subjected to the same threats, opportunities and temptations that the North European Plain offers: it can be drawn into thinking that road of conquest is clear ahead or to ignore the threats coming down it at its great cost.

The lowlands of the Northern European Plain enter France at the Flanders in the extreme northeast, where the Belgium-French border abuts the Atlantic. The plain then continues west past the Ardennes -- the heavily forested hills at the southern border of France and Belgium -- before curving southwestward via the Beauce gap, the aforementioned flat lands between the upper reaches of the Seine and Loire. Finally the plain flows into to the Aquitaine region in the extreme southwestern France where it meets the Pyrenees Mountains -- ending at the natural boundary of the Iberian Peninsula.

Internally, aside from the Massif Central in the southeast, France is a country of relatively low lying terrain with occasional hills. It is interspersed by a number of slow flowing rivers, most of which are open to transportation with little or no modification and have through French history been connected by canals to facilitate commerce.

The territory that sports the greatest of France’s advantages – navigable rivers, climate, rainfall, fertile soils – is the Beauce region. The area's limestone soil (rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium and thus providing natural fertilizer), good drainage, and warm climate

made possible by the North Atlantic Drift makes it the most fertile land in all of Western Europe. It has been the basis of French agricultural power for centuries and holds nearly all of the country’s agricultural land. Today it is also the most integrated – via a robust transportation infrastructure – with the rest of Europe.

The Beauce region is therefore the French core. At its extreme northern border, where rivers Marne and Seine meet, lies Paris. Paris itself was founded on an island in the Seine, Ile de la Cite (current location of the Notre Dame Cathedral), an easily defensible location which commands control over the land route between the last major curve of the Seine to the north and the river Marne to the south. Whoever controls Paris therefore controls transportation from the Beauce region to the rest of Europe via the North European Plain.

Paris is also close enough to the Atlantic -- connected by the river Seine -- to benefit from oceanic trade routes, but far enough that a direct naval invasion is difficult. In fact, Paris is as far north as it is (the French at times flirted with more southern Orleans, which is almost dead center in the Beauce, as the capital) in order to keep a close eye on Viking raids from the Atlantic as well as the once independence-minded Normandy, and complicate any English attempts to establish a permanent base of operations on the south side of the English Channel.

In comparison with its continental neighbors, France has almost always been at an economic advantage due to its geography. Germany has poor agricultural land, paltry access to the Baltic Sea and beyond that is blocked by the British Isles to the Atlantic. Italy has the fertile Po valley, but is blocked off by the Alps to the north and trapped inside the Mediterranean. Spain suffers from mountainous terrain, poor agricultural land and relatively useless rivers. Russia lacks reliable maritime access all together. France has therefore been able to parlay its geography into enormous economic advantage, particularly in agricultural production. Prior to the advent of industrialization, this gave France enormous advantage over its continental rivals.

INSERT MAP: Rivers of France https://clearspace.stratfor.com/docs/DOC-3273

The History of France

Phase I: Centralization (843 - 1453)

The Beauce region of France has always been the core of the French state due to its strategic location on the North European Plain and fertile agricultural land. Political power in the region only temporarily migrated southward during time of Roman rule, but it quickly returned to the North when Franks invaded from the northeast. However, extending political power from Beauce to the rest of territory that is today France was a serious challenge, particularly for the fledgling Frankish kingdom that emerged following the Roman withdrawal.

Early France faced two problems, both rooted in geography.

The first dealt with the plains. The Umayyad Caliphate’s invasion of Europe of the 8th Century had introduced heavy cavalry as the preeminent military technology of the time, particularly fitting in France because the lowlands of the North European Plain were quite conducive to charges of heavy horse. Ranks of Beauce infantry were easy pickings, although Charles Martel managed to hold the Muslim advance at the 732 Battle of Tours largely with highly trained heavy infantry. The solution to this military reality was feudalism. To spread the costs of training and maintaining cavalry the king ceded land to his vassals, enabling them to maintain mounted knights.

This ultimately held the Muslim forces at bay, but this “solution” nearly killed early France via decentralization. By granting feudal lords lands and rights the crown further entrenched deep nobility that maintained military forces independent of the crown. Unsurprisingly, the region

devolved into a political free for all following the dissolution of Charlemagne’s Empire in 843, as did much of Europe.

And while the lowlands fractured into dozens of competing feudal lords with the crown looking on helplessly, central power weakened sufficiently so that the hills and mountains of the rest of the country could entrench their own distinctive identities. Modern French is based on the northern Langue D’Oil of the Ile de France dialect dominant in the Beauce region. But southern regions used various Langue D’Oc dialects, a language that shared greater commonality with Catalan, Spanish and Italian. Meanwhile, the Rhone and Saone valleys retained separate but related linguistic identity through Franco-Provencal dialect. And this in regions that for the most part considered themselves ethnically French.

The Bretagne population was of Celtic origin (Celtic refugees fleeing Saxon invasions of Britain) while in Aquitaine the population was a mix of ethnic Basque and Galo-Roman. It took millennia of consolidation – French, one of the Langue D'Oil, not becoming the official tongue until the 1500s and unification not completed until the 1800s -- before all of these ethnic/linguistic differences were assimilated into what is now France.

This political (feudalism) and ethnic (linguistic) disunity combined with France’s position as a crossroads of north and south encouraged the intervention of outside powers. The most pertinent examples are the wars with England from the 11th until the 15th Century. England considered continental France their playpen for much of the Middle Ages, in fact the Norman leaders of England did not distinguish much between their French and English possessions, both were considered integral part of their ancestral lands. The narrowness of the English Channel allowed England continually to threaten the French core in the Beauce, especially as long as it had continental footholds in Aquitaine, Burgundy and Normandy. The threat was so great that in the early 15th Century it looked very likely that an independent French political entity was going to disappear and that England and France would be united under London’s control.

But somewhat ironically the war that nearly destroyed France is in the end what saved it. During the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) heavy cavalry was proven to be vulnerable to fortifications, advanced archery technology and ultimately gunpowder – all technologies which required a much greater centralization of resources than feudalism could provide. Only a strong monarchy could potentially provide the capital needed for massive castles, production of guns and powder on an industrial scale, and free up sufficient peasants to field units of archers. Like in the conflict with the Muslims, it was a technological innovation that forced France’s political system to evolve, and this time the shift was towards centralization rather than decentralization. The result was the initial consolidation of what we now know as France, and a steady increase in the coherence of the French state.

The combination of the political disasters of the feudal period and the success of consolidation in the battles with the English was the formative period of the French psyche. The French learned – the hard way – the value of unity. Ever since France has had the most centralized state in the Western world. Unlike Germany, the United Kingdom or the United States, France does not have a substantial federal structure. There are no substantive regional governments. Instead almost all power is vested in Paris and Paris alone. Having a foot in both Northern and Southern Europe, needing to maintain a navy to keep the English at bay as well as needing a large army to compete in Europe requires a wealth of resources and a high degree of central planning. The contestation with the Enlglish in the Medieval Age thought the French that their geography does not afford them the luxury of decentralization. Whether the leader is Louis XIV, Napoleon or Charles de Gaulle, a centralized government is in the -- and born of -- French blood.

The History of France

Phase II: The Habsburg Challenge and Balance of Power (1506-1700)

Europe’s Habsburg era was a dangerous time for the French. In addition to controlling Spain and the rising wealth of the New World, the Habsburgs also commanded most of Italy and the trade center that

was the Netherlands, threatening France in both European spheres. Paris in particular was endangered by the Habsburg-Dutch connection, with little standing between the two powers on the NEP. With the English still in control of the Channel, Paris understandably felt constrained from all sides.

INSERT MAP OF THE HABSBURG ERA – being made

Facing so many threats forced France to be flexible in its alliances. Scottish separatists were a favorite means of unbalancing the English. France allied with the Muslim Ottoman Empire against the fellow Catholic Habsburg Empire during many of the engagements in Italy in the mid-16th Century, as well as with numerous Protestant German political entities during the brutal Thirty Year War (1618 - 1648) – the latter at the time foreign policy was conducted by Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu, a Catholic Cardinal. Anything to prevent its enemies from massing forces in the Netherlands and Belgium. Anything to avoid having to fight a land war on the North European Plain.

But it was one thing to play the spoiler, and quite another to rule. Well-crafted policy in Paris could prevent the Habsburg’s geographically far-flung possessions and overextended military from coalescing into a single dominating force that could uproot France, but as the Habsburgs weakened, France found itself unable to remake Europe in its own image.

In three major wars – the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Seven Year War (1754-1763) against Britain in North America – France expended great financial resources in efforts to dominate one region or another, only to emerge at each war’s end with little to show for its efforts. Paris kept coming up against coalitions expressly designed to balance its power and prevent it from dominating.

And simply the effort was exhausting. The various global military entanglements of the 18th Century bankrupted the state, severely infringing on Paris’s ability to maintain internal coherence and defend the North European Plain. There were two equally damning results. First, the depleted treasury led to a general breakdown in internal order, contributing to the French Revolution of 1789 (as did the contestation between the landed nobility and the nouveau bourgeois). Second, Paris’ distraction with England and Spain led it to miss the emergence of Prussia as a serious European power that began to first rival and ultimately superseded Habsburg Austria for leadership among the cacophony of German kingdoms.

The History of France

Phase III: Nationalism and the Germany Rise (1789-1945)

One of the many unintended side effects of the French Revolution was the concept of nationalism, the idea that people of a relatively common origin and ancestry, and speaking a common tongue, shared a common destiny. (LINK: http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/love_one_s_own_and_importance_place) From nationalism grew the nation-state, (LINK: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20081027_2008_and_return_nation_state) a political entity that harnesses all people sharing a similar ethnicity into a single governing unit. Combining nationalism, the nation-state and France’s already deep penchant for centralization birthed a juggernaut that was republican France. Rather than having its energies split on various internal regional and class-based feuds, all of French power was pooled into a single government, completing the process that had begun at the end of the Hundred Years’ War against England. This unprecedented capture of a nation’s strengths was going to make France a powerhouse beyond imagining no matter who happened to rule the country, and it turned out it was Napoleon who would hold the reins.

The result was the one near-unipolar moment in European history. France was not only the only state to have caught the nationalism bug, but grafted as it was onto an already centralized system French power poured forth across Europe and North Africa. France suddenly reversed its role on the North European Plain -- that of a cautious power

protecting its borders with fortifications and distraction -- and used the NEP to its own advantage, launching an all out invasion of what was at the time essentially the entire Western world. The rest of Europe -- fragmented among various royal families interconnected through marriage and inheritance and dependent on pseudo-feudal forms of allegiance -- was simply unprepared for the onslaught launched upon them by a modern nation-state led by the brilliant military strategy of Napoleon Bonaparte. From 1803 to 1815 France nearly overwhelmed the rest of Europe before a coalition of nearly every major and minor power on the Continent combined forces to defeat her.

INSERT MAP: Napoleon’s France https://clearspace.stratfor.com/docs/DOC-3280

The lesson was a simple one, again rooted in geography. Even when France is united and whole. Even when she is not under siege. Even when her foes are internally distracted and off balance. Even when she is led by one of the greatest organizational and military minds in human history. Even when she holds the advantage of nationalism. She still lacks the resources and manpower to rule Europe.

The Napoleonic Wars were the highpoint of French power, made possible by a constellation of factors that are unlikely to repeat. The English, Spanish, Dutch, Russians and Italians all recovered. Napoleon was exiled. But most of all the advantage of nationalism spread. Over the next few decades the political innovation of the nation-state spread throughout Europe, and in time became a global phenomena. The result were stronger governments, better able to marshal resources for everything from commerce to war. And no people benefited more – much to France’s chagrin – than the Germans.

The shock of unified Germany to France is palpable. Not only was German Empire directly unified through war against France, Germans made sure to conduct the 1871 unification ceremony and coronation of the German Emperor at Versailles Palace during the German occupation of France.

While the 100 miles of border between France and Belgium always represented the main threat to the French core, prior to Germany’s consolidation that threat was somewhat manageable. But the unification of Germany created a just as populous and more industrialized state hard on France’s most vulnerable point. Instead of being able to use the various German principalities as proxies, all of them save Luxembourg were now united against France.

Post-1871 France battled a united Germany with the same strategies its monarchist predecessors used against Habsburg Spain and England. It cobbled together a complex web of military alliances that eschewed historical precedent or ideology in Triple Entente in 1907, including colonial rivals like United Kingdom and the ideological nemesis that was Imperial Russia. Additional alliances encircled Germany after WWI with a band of weaker states -- the so-called Little Entente Alliance with Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia in the 1920s.

It didn’t work. France knew from the Napoleonic era that even at its height it could not rule Europe. It soon was driven home how indefensible the NEP border with German was, and how much more powerful Germany was when France was not the only player holding the nationalism card. Berlin simply was able to adopt tenets of the modern nation-state with greater efficiency -- in large part because its precarious geographical position in the middle of Europe required efficiency -- and then fuel them with much larger natural and demographic resources than France ever could. The culmination of this dichotomy were the events of May-June 1940 when the French military crumbled in less than six weeks. The defeat was by no means solely the result of geopolitical forces, but it sprang from the fundamental imbalance of power between Paris and a unified Germany.

The History of France

Phase IV: Managing Germany

Most historians will break the modern era into the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. At least as France is concerned, however, Stratfor

views the entire post-World War II era as a single chapter in French history that has yet to come to a conclusion. In this phase France is attempting to find a means to live with Germany, a task greatly complicated by recent shifts in the global political geography.

From the French point of view, the difference between WWII’s beginning and end was stunning. In mid-1940 France was fighting for its life, and losing so badly that Germany in essence swallowed it whole, Five years later Germany was not just shattered, but occupied -- in part by none other than by France herself. In mid-1940 the threat on the NEP spelled doom for Paris. Five years later the threat had not simply evaporated, but the American nuclear umbrella made the thought of hostile military action against France on the NEP highly unlikely. Far from being a threat, post-war Germany was France’s new Maginot Line.

Far from being exposed and vulnerable, France found itself facing the most congenial constellation of forces in its history. The United Kingdom was exhausted and had returned home to lick its wounds and pay down its war debts – and deal with decolonization -- Spain languished under Franco’s dictatorship, the Low Countries had been leveled in the war’s final year, Italy and Austria were under essential control of occupied powers and the Soviets had sealed off all of Central Europe along with the eastern portion of Germany behind the Iron Curtain.

Military options were off the table, but politically and economically there was nothing standing between France and Western European domination. And so France quite easily was able to coax the Low Countries into an economic and political partnership, while Italy and Germany were simply forced to join. The European Coal and Steel Community (and later the European Economic Community)– the precursor to today’s European Union – was born within 12 years of the end of the war.

The stated gains of the EEC/EU have always been economic and political, but the deeper truth is that the European project has always been about French geopolitical fears and ambition. Fears in that so

long as Germany is subsumed into an alliance that it does not control, then Paris not only need not fear a new German invasion, but it need not fear any invasion. Ambition in that a France that successfully can harness German strength is not only a France need not burn resources guarding against Germany, but it becomes a France that is – again – a global power.

It was a solid plan, taking full advantage of the American occupation of Germany, and in part it worked. During the Cold War France was able to plot a middle course between the Soviets and Americans (much to the Americans’ annoyance) and focus on deepening economic links both to Europe and its former colonies. It pursued an independent nuclear deterrent and a relationship with the Second and Third Worlds largely unrestrained by its membership in the Western alliance. Life was good.

But it didn’t last: eventually the Cold War ended. But the Soviet collapse was perceived very differently in France; While most of the free world celebrated, the French fretted. Remember that France was not a front line state during the Cold War, so the French never felt under great threat from Moscow in the first place. However, the Soviet collapse led to the reunification of Germany and that was a top tier issue.

No longer could Paris consider Germany a non-entity content to be harnessed for someone else’s ends. The French knew from their disastrous first-hand experiences in the late 19th century that Germany would claw back its position as the premier power in Europe and attempt to remake Europe in its image – with more resources and thus likely with more success than the French had after World War II.

France’s solution was as creative as ever: ensure that continued German membership in European institutions remained in the German interest. When it became apparent that German reunification was imminent, France rushed negotiations of the EU's Maastricht Treaty on Monetary Union -- essentially handing over Europe's economic policy to the Germans (the European Central Bank is for all intents and purposes the German Bundesbank writ large). Twenty years on, Germany cannot

abandon the EU – even if they wanted -- (LINK: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100517_germany_greece_and_exiting_eurozone) without triggering massive internal economic dislocations because of the economic evolutions Maastricht has wrought, to say nothing of how the Americans would react should Germany attempt to leave NATO. (comes out of nowhere, not really necessary) Considering the tools at hand, it is as tight of a cage as the French were able to weave, but that leaves the French with two long-term concerns, and it is not clear which one the French fear more. (Benjamin point out, rightly in my opinion, that these are not exactly on the French mind right away…)

First, the cage breaks and Germany goes its own way. In what the French find the most chilling example, Germany has been reaching out of late to the Russians, raising the possibility of an economic partnership that could be more useful to Germany than the EU. (that would require an immense amount of explanation, and I personally think that it is completely wrong. So we need to take it out unless you want to spend 1,000 words defending it. The comment, as is, is too off-handish).

Second, the cage holds, but it constrains France more than Germany. With the Germans ever more in control of their own policies, Paris can no longer take for granted its undisputed leadership of the EU as it did during the Cold War. Germany’s recent aggressiveness in seeking a German solution (LINK: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100315_germany_mitteleuropa_redux) to the current financial crisis is an excellent case in point as to how Germany is moving beyond what Paris hoped would be a co-leadership structure. And then there is the simple fact of direct competition. Paris fears the outright Franco-German economic competition that the EU allows could end as badly for France as the direct Franco-German military competition did seventy years ago. They’re probably correct. On at least one level France is in 2010 in an even more uncomfortable situation than it was in 1871, because this time France is in the cage with Germany.

The hope in Paris is that Germany will come to the same conclusion that France has: that it lacks the geopolitical gifts and positioning to rule Europe by itself and that it needs a partner. So long as that is the

case – and so long as Germany chooses France as that partner – France can breathe (somewhat) easy. But the fact remains that this is a decision that will be made in Berlin, not Paris. And with that renewed cognizance in Berlin, France’s strategy of managing Germany is already beginning to fail.

French Geopolitical Imperatives

1 – Secure a larger hinterland.

France is the only country on the Northern European Plain that has an option for expansion into useful territories beyond its core without directly clashing with another major power. This begins with expanding down the NEP to the Pyrenees, but there are many other pieces of real estate that are worth the time: the Rhone Valley, the Mediterranean coast between the Pyrenees and the Alps, the Cotenin and Brittany Peninsulas, and even the Massif Central. While none can compare with the capital generation capacity and fertility of the Beauce, all are valuable pieces of real estate in their own right and most grant Paris influence in regions beyond the NEP.

Assimilating those regions – populated with Huguenots and Basques and Romans -- was not a simple task. Linguistic and ethnic differences require centuries to grind away. But unlike most of the other similar regions in Europe, in France there are no other powers that are well-positioned to interfere with this process. The Scots and Sicilians could be reached via the sea, the Serbs and Bulgarians by any number of routes. But the minorities of France could only be accessed via France itself, making France uniquely able to centralize not simply government, but also identity.

2 – Always look East.

Being situated at the western end of the NEP makes France the only country on the plain that only has one direction to defend against (although the English Channel also requires monitoring). Paris must be ever-vigilant of developments elsewhere down the plain and be prepared to intervene on any stretch of the plain it can reach in order to forestall or hamstring potential threats.

As France discovered that it must centralize, the Beauce became even more important and – due to its position on the NEP – more vulnerable. It became quite clear to its rivals that making a run for Paris and thus knocking out the nerve center of France was a simple means of taking over the entire country. The Maginot Line is simply the 20th century incarnation of a series of fortresses that were first built in the 17th century in an attempt to forestall a military conquest.

In other eras the French were more proactive, sometimes occupying portions of the Netherlands or Germany as it did near the end of the Habsburg era, sometimes carving out buffer states as it did with Belgium in the 19th century.

3 – Maintain influence in regions beyond Western Europe in order to provide distractions for Western European rivals.

Unlike the United Kingdom whose expansion into empire was a natural step in its evolution as a naval power, France’s overseas empire was almost wholly artificial. The empire did not exist to expand Paris’ power per sae, but instead to grant the French any eye and hand in far off places to complicate the doings of others. North African colonies could be used to disrupt Italy, North American and Southeast Asian colonies to cause heartburn for the English. It did not so much matter that these colonies were profitable (although most were not) so long as a French presence in them complicated the lives of France’s foes. This strategy continued throughout the Cold War with France’s veritable rolodex of third world leaders serving to complicate American, British, Soviet and German policies globally (roughly in that order).

These assets serve one more critical role for Paris: they are disposable. Because they were not designed to be profitable, it does not unduly harm France should they be lost or traded away. After all, France’s primary concern is the Northern European Plain. If a piece of the empire needs to be used as a chip on the poker table that is Europe, so be it. Louisiana was sold for loose change in order to fund the Napoleonic wars, while Algeria was ultimately abandoned – despite being home to some 1 million ethnic Frenchmen – so that Charles de Gaulle could focus attention on more important matters at home and in Europe.

4 – Be flexible.

Geopolitics is not ideological. To survive states regularly need to ally with powers that they find less than ideal. For example the United States sided with Soviet Russia during World War II and Maoist China during the Cold War to gain advantage over its rivals.

But France takes this concept to new heights. France’s position on the western end of the Northern European Plain and sitting astride the only reliable connections between northern and southern Europe make it remarkably exposed to European and North African developments. France does possess a great deal of arable land and navigable waterways, but these are not sufficient resources to deal with the multiple challenges that it neighborhood constantly poses it from multiple directions.

Consequently, France has to make a deal with the Devil far more often than other states. Luckily, its penchant for obtaining influence on a global scale (its third imperative) provides it with no end of potential partners. In France’s history it has not only allied with the Ottoman Empire against its fellow Western Europeans, but also with Protestant German states against fellow Catholic states during Europe’s religious wars.