Rou

This is ridiculous. I would prefer Chirac to be a little schocked when meeting Poutine or going to Ryad.
As a french myself, I find it pretentious and harmfull to France that the president fails to understand that English IS the language of the world whereas French no longer has any weight!
Basically it's just basic politness to speak in English in front of an international audience so that people can understand.
I am deeply ashamed by Chirac' reaction and sad that my country is so out of touch with the world.

I submit to your speed at posting!

Merde - if only I had posted this when I had first thought of it!

Yeah, and Soyooz even linked to my version on her blog.

Btw, thank you very much Soyooz!!

Hi, Chirac did not walked away because M.Seilliere spoke english (Chirac is fluent in english and has certainly no problem with the language!), but because M.Seilliere, who started his speech in french, suddendly turned to english because he said "english is the language for business". English is no more the language of business than french is the language of poetry, or italian the language of arts. Any speech can be given in any language, in other words, a language is not used according to the content of a speech but according to your audience. In this case, the audience was the european council and as far as I know, the very vast majority of attendants don't have english as their mother tongue. All speeches are translated anyway and english was absolutely not necessary. M. Chirac was right to point out this anomaly, but wrong to walk out, he should have said to the audience "Et maintenant, mesdames et messieurs, we are going to hear M.Seilliere speech". That would have had much more impact...

I never claimed he didn't understand English. I said he walked out because he got pissed off that a French native would address the Summit speaking English. Hence, the stick up his bum comment.

Walking out of the conference because of it is immature. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it was borderline childish.

Personally I'd call it "Gauche" n'est pas?