An American Cultural Loss

Les Français will forgive me, but the best — and most powerful — rendering of La Marseillaise was in a Hollywood classic.

As "France — the historic image of La Belle France — [goes] up in smoke", Diana West offers us a not-quite random list of movies that fixed the 20th-century-image of Paris in the American imagination.

This has more than geopolitical ramifications; it's an American cultural loss. That's because France, as an American muse, has long inspired some of the best of American arts and letters.