Just over half of Africa's 52 countries speak French, but the number is dropping. This month Rwanda defected, announcing that henceforward only English will be taught in the schools. It would not be overstating the case to say that this caused alarm and despondency in France.

You couldn't help feeling, either, that Rwanda's trade and industry minister, Vincent Karega, was deliberately rubbing salt in the wound when he explained why French was being scrapped. "French is spoken only in France, some parts of west Africa, and parts of Canada and Switzerland," he said. (In parts of Belgium, too, actually, not to mention Haiti, but you get the point.) "English has emerged as a backbone for growth and development not only in the region but around the globe."

Getting very close to the regimes in African countries that have French as an official language, even sending troops to protect them from their domestic enemies, has always been part of Paris' strategy for preserving the status of French as a world language. In Rwanda's case, that put France in bed with the extremist Hutu-dominated regime that ruled the densely populated country before the genocide, to such an extent that Paris largely paid for the tripling in size of the Rwandan army in 1990-91.