http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/281497
Francois the XVIII The 2012 French Restoration
Nicolas Sarkozy has a lot in common with Napoleon: He’s short, he likes pretty women, and he is a successful war leader (ask Qaddafi’s ghost). He lacks refined tastes and he continually rubs France’s establishment the wrong way. In his European economic policy he is also facing his Waterloo at the hands of an uneasy alliance of Germans and Brits. From an American point of view this is too bad, since he has been the least anti-American French leader since the Marquis de Lafayette.
After Napoleon’s downfall he was replaced by the “legitimate” king, Louis XVIII. The man who had been known as the Corsican usurper was gone, and the Bourbon dynasty was back. In 2012, France’s powerful establishment hopes to see the political demise of the man it considers the “Hungarian usurper” and his replacement by Francois Hollande, who, in the context of modern French politics, represents a “safe pair of hands.”