The French have always been associated with aesthetic taste. This can also be negatively understood as basic shallowness. What are regarded as Enlightenment values, the values of Western Civilization, have never gone particularly deep with the French;; they are primarily decorative. This is true to one extent or another across Europe, but, it seems to me, that with the French, it is an artifice of sophistication laid over a a uniquely gruesome primitivity.