Nicolas Sarkozy made a slip yesterday linguistic connotations historical and geopolitical. The president of the French Republic in public mistook the French region of Alsace (where the president was speaking to farmers) with Germany. "I can accept distortions of competition with China or India, but not with Germany (...) This is completely incomprehensible," Sarkozy said first, later adding: "I do not mean simply, dear Philippe Richert (Chairman of the Alsace region), because it is in Germany." During the ceremony the French president has been corrected. The lapse is especially significant because the region of Alsace has shifted from French into German hands several times. In 1870, after the Franco-Prussian War, Alsace-Lorraine became German territory. At the end of World War I Alsace returned to French hands.
In the Second World War in 1940, it belongs to the Third Reich and the war ended after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the territory returns to belong to France. Alsace's history explains its cultural uniqueness. It has a dialect (or family of dialects) and Germanic Franks ingredients, and certain educational standards (such as religious education at school) or infrastructure (trains run from the right instead of left (as do in the rest of France.
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