As in Senegal, which until 1960 was a colony of France, Islam is the predominant religion and French the default language, heard wafting out of hair salons and among groups of men in bright robes gathered outside the mosque on Frederick Douglass.
Free, which provides Internet to an estimated 5.2 million French users, proposed default ad-blocking on some advertisements.
French cooking was the default mode of the upper classes in Georgian England, particularly in the years following the French Revolution.
The annual cost to insure $10 million in French government debt against default jumped to a record $175,000 on Wednesday, up from only $100,000 three weeks ago.
If the Economist Intelligence Unit assessment is correct and the Republic does default, the French – and especially the Germans – will be looking for some payback, possibly in the guise of Ireland's low corporation tax.
Recent titles include "La nuit de la faillite", a racy thriller by Gaspard Koenig, a former speechwriter for Christine Lagarde when she was finance minister, in which he imagines a New York trader provoking a default on French sovereign debt.
With shares of the bank plummeting earlier this week on the increased threat of a Greek default, the French and Belgian governments came to the rescue, three years after bailing out the bank during the financial crisis.
A default would hurt French and German banks in particular.
Rates for credit default swaps on French debt, a form of insurance against default, are at 175 — meaning it now costs $175,000 to insure $10 million in French government debt.
