The Gaulic Dismay: "We were Robbed"

The New Yorker's August 22 'all Target ads issue' included among the creative uses of the red and white bullseye, a look at the sour mood in France by Adam Gopnik. He writes.

"When the name "London" was announced, a punch-in-the-stomach silence struck Paris. The French Olympians insisted that the British has somehow cheated, or failed to show "fair play"--an idiom borrowed from English and used regularly in French. Almost unbelievably, Bernard Delanoe, the green-gay mayor of Paris, was still making the accusations of English trickery and cheating four days after the truly horrible news from London arrived---a failure of decency and common sense that had left-wing newspaper Liberation, a natural ally, lecturing him on the meaning of 'sore loser' and reminding its readers that no instance of British Olympic treachery has even vaguely been discovered."

Further in the story, Gopnik discusses the French tendency to throw out whoever was the incumbent. 'veering wildly from the left to the right side of the road, like Cary Grant trying to drive while drunk in North by Northwest. 'We and North Korea are the only countries left that still have a military parade on their national holiday,' adds Alain Minc, of the Le Monde newspaper, who says the stock market in France, despite all the naysayers, beat out New York, London and the rest of the world in gains this summer.