Why the French wouldn't help "thwart Gog and Magog"

President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

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Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. . . . The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled. . . . This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

Then-President Chirac declined to assist the U.S. in invading Iraq, leading to the sudden proliferation of "freedom fries" being sold across the U.S.

So while the right-wing pundits and chickenhawk war-mongers were calling the French "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" for not helping the U.S. invade Iraq, the real reason was that President Bush had called President Chirac in a religious frenzy, trying to convince the leader of one of the most secular states in the world that the biblical end days were upon us, and we needed Mirage jets and sacrificial French bodies to fend off monsters from the Book of Revelation.

Look, about France. Nearly 28% of the French are complètement athées, as some friends described themselves when I spent a few undergraduate months near Rouen. The citoyens consider that the separation of church and state is second only to universal suffrage in importance to the fundamentals of their republic (PDF). More from the 2008 survey:

• 87% of respondents "mostly agree" that "religions can create tensions at the heart of society"
  
• 60% of respondents "mostly agree" that "believing in god is a help and a support in everyday life"
  
• 56% of respondents think that President Sarkozy is wrong to emphasize, in his speeches, "the civilizing role of religion"

Anyone with a lick of sense would have tried to secure military contributions from France by going some other route. Instead, we had a dry-drunk eschatological Methodist politician trying to convince a French politician, probably an atheist and almost certainly deeply averse to mixing religion and government, that he should help bring along the Rapture. And in any event, the French are Catholics, culturally even if not practicing, not evangelical Protestants. And Catholics don't really "do" Revelation.

I'm not a French constitutional scholar, but here are a few lines from the constitution that appear to need little judicial interpretation:

La France est une République indivisible, laïque, démocratique et sociale. (France is an indivisible, secular, democratic, and social Republic.) This is from Article 1, which is almost the very beginning of the document, so it's probably important.

La République française, fidèle à ses traditions, se conforme aux règles du droit public international. Elle n’entreprendra aucune guerre dans des vues de conquête et n’emploiera jamais ses forces contre la liberté d’aucun peuple. (The French Republic, faithful to its traditions, conforms itself to the rules of international public rights. It will undertake no war of conquest and will never use its forces against the liberty of any people.) This is from the Preamble to the 1946 constitution, which governed the Fourth Republic, 1946-1958. The Fifth Republic replaced this constitution, but the 1946 document's preamble is considered included in the current constitution.

In short, you don't ask a French politician for help in a war for oil, and you definitely don't ground your appeal for such a war on religion, and especially not on John's end-times hallucinations. A diplomat or historian with the slightest knowledge of French political history could have told President Bush that.