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Banning religious symbols from public schools? Small potatoes in the French war against cultural diversity -- it goes back five centuries. More on the making of modern France and the triumph of social engineering with a boot and a gun:

As fellows of the Institute of Current World Affairs, of Hanover, N.H., we spent two years studying the French and trying to explain what makes the French tick. One of our main conclusions was that the French system functions according to values and assumptions alien to Canadians, who pride themselves on their multicultural, British-style democracy. Democracy à la française involves a huge central state whose purpose it is to determine the common good, and this calls for a lot of social engineering.

French social engineering began five centuries ago.

To understand what France was back then, it is more useful to compare it to today's Balkans — it was a patchwork of lesser and bigger duchies, each with their own language, culture and religion. In order to create a single French identity, French kings set out to erase these differences.

This process was brutal and slow, but successful. At the time of the French revolution, half of the French still didn't speak French. By 1900, most understood it and left their local language — Occitan, Breton, Alsacian, Corsican, or Basque — at home.

During this period, the French closed parishes, and forbade many religious orders. To this day, the French never appoint high civil servants to work in their home region, for the purpose of breaking down social ties and avoiding local power cliques. Now that's social engineering.

Part of the reason France waged total war on its own cultural differences was to overcome an essential trait of the French political culture: extremism. Just to give a sense of this: From 1789 to 1958, the French went through four democratic regimes, three monarchies, two empires and one fascist dictatorship, each ending in a coup, a war or a revolution.

The reason France didn't dissolve into a banana republic throughout this was that their very strong central state acted as an arbitrator of the common good in spite (some say, because) of the political instability. Whether they were Protestants, Breton or Corsicans, French citizens had to fall into line, and they did ..

(thanks to Richard Jensen of Conservativenet listserv)