Not Your Sweetie

French Correction: Revising

L'histoire to Justify War

By JUSTIN VAISSE


As a Frenchman, I have certainly learned a lot about my country in recent weeks.
''How dare the French forget,'' read a recent headline in the New York Post, on a
page
with a photograph of a military cemetery in Normandy.

I apologize for being so ungrateful. It's just that I learned in school that France
and Britain
declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939, while the United States was
enacting
isolationist laws, and that America entered the war two years later, only after
Japan attacked
Pearl Harbor. But now I see that was just Gallic propaganda. How could I have
believed it?

I now know what really happened: Franklin D. Roosevelt felt that a country with
more than
300 kinds of cheese was worth liberating and for the love of France, he came to
our rescue.
Joseph Stalin came to the same conclusion, but fortunately for us, he was slower
and had to stop in Berlin.