This famous remark by Pascal is the basis for what we now call counterfactual history. And counterfactual history is not only for the historians, or teachers, or students. It is the basis for a song, Le nez de Cléopâtre, sung by Ray Ventura and his orchestra, back in 1938, a song I put up here last August.

The recent riots in Marseilles, Toulon, and elsewhere in southern France, by Muslim Arabs, wishing to take advantage of whatever flimsy excuse offered itself -- and the win of Algeria over Senegal at Blida constituted such a flimsy excuse -- to engage in a show of force and aggression, with the usual vandalism of cars and smash-and-grab operations with shop-windows, put me in mind of a line in that song.

Here, once again, is the song.

Prompted by the impulse that Pascal's famous counterfactual produces -- "Le nez de Cléopâtre : s'il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé" -- the singers suggest others: if Romeo had not met Juliet, if all roads hadn't led to Rome, if La Gioconde had not smiled, if Francois Premier had bought himself a bicycle, If someone could understand the verses of Paul Valéry, and so on. I don't know what the reference to Francois Premier and the "bicyclette" is all about, but there is another line I don't understand, and it occurs at 1.03, when the singing waiter appears at the left of the screen and moves across it. His second line is: "Si les musulmanes n'avaient plus l'accent de Toulon." 

What might that mean? I conclude that in France, in 1938, the Arabs of North Africa one was likely to encounter, all sounded as if they came from Toulon. This might well be, One assumes that many of the French who settled in North Africa came from the south, and carried with them their local accents. Toulon, a major port, the port from which ships left for, and came back from, Africa, might have had an outsize effect on the character of French in North Africa. And, too, the few Arabs or maghrebins who were then in France might have settled, in numbers, mainly in Toulon and Marseilles.

Listen to that song again. I wonder if that line would be sung quite so cheerfully today.