STEPHEN GREEN is back and blogging. He poses this question:

French soldiers and ships helped bring us victory in our Revolution. French farmers gave us brie and crème fraîche and the wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux. French thinkers gave us Voltaire and Victor Hugo. France stands second to only the United Kingdom as the European nation contributing most to Western Civilization.

But after WWI, France went as bad as potato salad left out at a sunny summer picnic.

From victory at the Marne to occupation after Ardennes in ’40. Defeat in Vietnam. Defeat in Algeria. From confidence against rising German power to subsuming to it under the EU. From a muscular foreign policy to carping from the sidelines.

What the hell went wrong?

I blame an insufficiency of healthy lycopene, but Stephen has a different explanation.