Paris-Rome: games of prestige

Italian friends ask me about our prestige beyond the Alps... At seven o'clock in the evening in the second arrondissement, Fucxia, our chain of wine shops, is crowded. Usual queue even in front of Amorino, while the rue de Petits Champs tickles your eyes with very expensive italian products.
Shop windows apart, at the end of January Le Monde defineds us as: " Un pays immobile et divisé, alors que le reste du monde a changé”" and a few days later: " La compétitivité de l'Italie s'est effondrée depuis cinq ans." Liberation ends the analysis on our government crisis with: " Ce pays est réellement à la dérive”. It’s better not to ask about our current prestige. What about the recent past? On the 5th of February, France5 broadcasts E. Amara’s documentary on the Moro. Pieczeik, "psychological expert" sent by Carter in support of Cossiga’s secret cell, says that Moro was kept alive to take back control of the secret services and that the fiction of the negotiations was interrupted for fear that he might reveal state secrets. Cossiga, interviewed subsequently this, confirmed this and said his conscience as a statesman was clear but not catholic soul, less his soul of catholic, these issues will be solved face to face with God. French viewers were dismayed.

At seven o'clock in the evening in the second arrondissement maybe it’s better to come back window shopping. But other questions assail us from one window to another: why, with the profound crisis that France is going through, Italians are so concerned much about their prestige here while the French couldn’t care less about theirs? Why is the French image almost intact? Prestige or prestidigitation? I would say to those friends who ask that prestige is less evident in the judgment of others than in self-criticism.