France’s media frame the East through strategy and interest, not brute power
Evidence
The French view is consciously an alternative one, neither like a superpower’s nor like the other Europeans’ view. Moreover, France’s (and by extension Le Monde’s) attitude to the East is an old and experienced one: studiously postcolonialist yet with colonialist attitudes toward its former colonies and protectorates; concerned less with brute power than with deployment, strategy, and process; focused more on the cultivation of interest rather than on protecting top-heavy investments in isolated regimes; selective, provisional, and nuanced (some would say opportunist) in the choice of what to regard with favor, what to criticize. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 292