Continuing from here.

The French, or at least the dominant part of its elites, together with a more ambiguous but largely assenting public opinion, sees the chance to maintain a large European role and an accompanying global role through the EU, using the EU to maintain the importance of French as an administrative language and the influence of France on European affairs without war, and ideally without aggressive winner takes all attitudes to diplomacy. It is a matter of reasonable debate whether this has worked well, it is not reasonable to think that France has given up on being France.

There is a strong steak of grandiose French ambition and memories of the more universality moments of the French state, under Bourbon monarchs who tried to dominate Europe, the French Revolution, and the Bonapartist Empire. Despite what some sovereigntist-Euroseptics claim, France is not obviously less global than Britain in…