Mitterrand was right, particularly twice — and that is perhaps what he was never forgiven for. Like de Gaulle before him, he had said out loud what Paris prefers to keep quiet: “France does not know it, but we are at war with America”, he confided to Georges-Marc Benamou in the last months of his life. And as early as December 1989, he had seen what Bush was opening in Mainz without naming it: that a reunified Germany could, in his own words as reported by the British archives, “gain even more ground than Hitler did” — not by arms, this time, but through the vacuum that America was preparing to leave behind. This Anglo-French link between Mitterrand and Thatcher, deeper and older than was said at the time, Admiral Philippe de Gaulle once confirmed to me in person.

Latest sign: the programme of President Steinmeier’s state visit to France was not limited to ceremonies. In Bordeaux, on Friday 9 October, it included Ariane Group and the Laser Mégajoule, the French facility for simulating nuclear tests. This stop came the day after the hearing of the Chief of the Defence Staff before the Defence Committee, and just as Pascal Lorot, of the Institut Choiseul, recalls in Le Figaro that Paris alone holds two assets that Berlin lacks: nuclear weapons and the experience of fire