I'm not convinced there is much of a linguistic issue in the French case. It could just be that the linguistic issue is so much worse in Belgium that I consider it to be negligible elsewhere, but I really don't see it being much of an issue. Let's not forget the vast majority of the Muslims in France hail from former French colonies and places where France remains an important language to this day (I've always wondered about that in Algeria's case, how they keep using French for so much even though there was that horrible, bloody war...). In France, like in Britain, the language argument is fairly minor in the whole immigration debate, as far as I can see.

I think most of what is in that book is probably quite sensible and not so controversial at all. But coming from an author in his position, and at the time it did, it was always going to cause a minor fuss, and some rather dubious details in the book (such as the part where he somehow convinced himself it'd be a good idea to comment on Jewish genetics) turned the minor fuss into a huge one. Merkel's reaction was particularly absurd, though, moving from a strong disapproval of the book to "the multicultural society has failed" in the space of two weeks.

As I said, the position of the passé simple in the fifties was not very different from its current position: nearly extinct in the spoken language, not so in literature. The real question here is why a tense that has gone out of use is stubbornly clung to by authors for so long, and successfully at that (though several sites I've seen make the point that even among modern authors who still use the tense, many use it only in the third person). As for why it went out of use in the first place, the answer is fairly simple: because it's superfluous. Anything you want to use the passé simple for can be said in the other tenses, as you can see if you compare it to Spanish. The way it used to be, the three tenses - imperfect, simple past, present perfect - were used in roughly the same way in the two languages: imperfects for descriptions and background information, simple past for actual action, present perfect for actual action that was in the immediate past (I've seen claims that in sixteenth century French there was a simple rule specifying the line was drawn at 24 hours ago; in Spanish it's less clear-cut, at least nowadays). In Spanish, it still is that way, but in French the distinction between passé simple and passé composé was felt to be not very useful, the two started being used interchangeably, and so it became superfluous to have two tenses for the same thing. I'm going to need better sources than random internet pages to go into detail on the timeline of that whole evolution, but it's definitely something that had started long before the current malaise in France.

Yeah, prehistorical monstrosity, as I said. It's hard to find any French politician that I'd prefer above Sarkozy, either because of their views or because of their personality. Fillon or Borloo, I suppose, but they aren't really serious candidates.

I don't think there is much of a difference between Western countries in terms of intelligence or short-sightedness of "the average voter". It's just that every country has its own hang-ups and points on which voters are blind or morons (or both). Far too many European voters really seem to think that if the state pays for something, it means they won't have to; American voters are quite clear on that point (and I definitely envy that sometimes), not so much on others.

What, so you think the gradual extinction of the genitive in German is indicative of a reduction of the richness of German culture as well? Or perhaps you think Anglophone culture deteriorated as it lost its "thou"-form and was reduced to a single word "you" for all second-person personal pronouns, whereas French has two, Dutch and German have three, and Spanish has four? Or when it (mostly) lost its subjunctive tense? (Interesting that Southern American differs from the English-language mainstream in both of those aspects.) It's been often remarked that a good number of modern languages are less complex grammatically and morphologically than their ancestors - whether you compare the Romance languages to Latin, the Germanic ones to Old-Germanic, the Indic ones to Sanskrit, or the various kinds of modern spoken Arabic to Classical Arabic. I can't really see how you'd tie any link to deterioration in culture to that.

Of course, the statement goes for Canada as a whole, to some extent, or at least the big three liberal bastions of Quebec, Ontario and BC.