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We are a big country, with lots of advantages and history. We are proud to be French. We have to call on patriotism at this time... to ask for an effort in the battle against debt.

The French are very bizarre. There is this collective depiction: 'We're in decline, we're being assailed, we must protect ourselves.'

France can never accept that it is no longer a dominating power in the world of culture. This is true both of the French right and the French left. They keep thinking that Americans are primitive cowboys or farmers who do not understand anything.

There's something I will say: In the U.S., people are very patriotic. Their patriotism is obvious. In France, for many years, you had to fight to be patriotic. People are pushing us from loving our own country.

The United States, for a French citizen, is a friend, an ally, to whom we owe, along with most Europeans, our freedom.

All the evils of France have been produced less by the perversity of the wicked and the violence of fools than by the hesitation of the weak, the compromises of conscience, and the tardiness of patriotism. Let every deputy, every Frenchman show what he feels, what he thinks, and we are saved!

The French consider themselves the guardians of the world's culture and do not bother to hide the fact, which is annoying, but Paris is still where good Americans want to go when they die - and Brits, Russians, and Chinese as well, these days.

What unites us is an unconditional love for France.

What the French want is coherence, stability and justice. If I am in a favorable position today, it's because my fellow citizens want to make the effort to straighten out the country, and at the same time they want it to be just and equitable.

France, land of human rights and freedoms, was attacked on its own soil by a totalitarian ideology: Islamic fundamentalism. It is only by refusing to be in denial, by looking the enemy in the eye, that one can avoid conflating issues.