Bonjour !

Well, I would like to rectify some mistakes.

Catarina, Asterix and Obelix are French! Only the publisher was Belgian.
René Goscinny was born in Paris. His parents were Jewish emigrants (his father was from Poland, his mother from Ukrainia). He lived for a while in Argentina and in USA before coming back to France. He died 25 years ago (5/11/77)
Uderzo was born in Fisme (France) from Italian emigrants.
They both worked for a Belgian publisher.

Asterix and Obelix are caricature of French people : grousers, undisciplined, inflated with the sense of their own importance, proud of their glorious past story (forgetting all we did wrong…)
I remember my History lessons when I was a kid : there were few heroes :
-        Vercingetorix, the first French resistance fighter (What was France when Cesar created Gaul?);
-        Joan of Arc, treacherously burnt by the English ;
-        Saint Louis (number IX) ;
-        The sly Louis XI ;
-        François I with the castles along the Loire ;
-        Louis XIV and Versailles ;
-        Barras, the teenager who died for Revolution ;
-        Napoleon the Great;
-        Pasteur and thevaccine against rabbies;
-        And the last bu t not least Général de Gaulle.

Dead Horse you're right. A kind of guillotine seems to have been used in England (likewise Germany, Italy and even Persia). Dr Guillotin and a German harpsichord maher, Tobias Schmidt improved(?) the English machine. I'm glad we abolished death punishment in 1981. The guillotine had a lot of juicy names in French slang in the late 19th century and the early 20th. (If someone is interested, I can give some).

Dead Horse: if Châteauneuf-du-Pape is an excellent wine, 69 du pape has a strong sexual connotation!

I don't think Mrs Bardot is a good example of what French people should be. Though she is really concerned by baby seals survival, she is also known for her affinity with French National Front ideas (You know, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the guy who proclaimed that the nazis had good ideas…) Don't touch seagulls but chase out of France African people…

Even if we are proud of Marie Curie (for a lot of youngsters, it's just the name of their school), who was probably one of our best scientist with Pierre her husband, she was born Marya Sklodowska in Warsaw.

Is Napoleon French? You'll have to decide. He was born two years after Corsica joined France.

Some Bretons musician may not regard themselves as French.

Why did nobody mentioned the Lumière brothers who invented cinema, or Georges Melliès who first used visual effects in movies. Louis Pasteur ?

It was quite a long post.

A bientôt!
Laurent