LETTER FROM PARIS/ Lara Marlowe: More than any other former colonial power, France still sees herself as a mother to the countries she took over and left.
Three French protégés, the Senegalese Léopold Senghor, the Tunisian Habib Bourguiba and the Cambodian Norodom Sihanouk, created la francophonie as a union of French-speaking nations 30 years ago.
President Jacques Chirac shrewdly nurtured la francophonie as a French-led, miniature United Nations. He gave the organisation a headquarters in Paris and chose the former UN Secretary General, Mr Boutros Boutros-Ghali, to lead it since 1997.
Paris pays two-thirds of its €200 million annual budget.
From October 18th until October 20th, Beirut will host the ninth summit of la francophonie. All but one of the 56 member- and observer-states will attend.
It is worth noting that France is the only country where French is the sole official language; Belgium, Switzerland and Quebec are bi- or tri-lingual. Albania and Vanuatu do not spring to mind as French-speaking countries. Algeria, whose fraught relationship with the former colonial power led it to ban the use of French in public, is attending a francophonie summit for the first time - as a non-member.
"Any country can join," Mr Boutros-Ghali said in a telephone interview from Beirut. "It is purely voluntary."
(At this point, I wondered whether there were any Francophiles in the Irish Government. John Hume, Mary Robinson, John Bruton and Pat Cox speak excellent French, but judging from the Taoiseach's decision not to attend the inauguration of the new Centre Culturel Irlandais on Friday, I'm probably dreaming.)
Under Mr Boutros-Ghali's stewardship, la francophonie has shifted emphasis from promoting the French language to La Diversité Culturelle. From a public relations point of view, it was a stroke of genius.
"If we were only defending one language, we would be a small minority," he explains, "but when you take on the defence of multi-culturalism, of multi-lingualism, you receive the support of Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese and Russian speakers - and you become a majority."
The heritage of mankind is at stake, Mr Boutros-Ghali continues. "If we can protect white whales and Bengal tigers, we can protect cultural diversity."
This "last bastion protecting us from uniformity" could help "to humanise and democratise globalisation" and be a factor for peace. "If you have regular contact with other linguistic groups, you are no longer afraid of others, of things that are different," he explains.
If President Bush's ears are burning next Saturday morning, it won't be over French verb conjugations.
A third of la francophonie is to be devoted to international politics, including a heads-of-state-only, closed-door session. It is an ideal forum for propagating French views on Iraq and the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
No wonder Mr Boutros-Ghali announced two years ago in Bamako that la francophonie was "subversive". All those men in shiny suits, snoozing through plenary sessions and issuing declarations - subversive?
"You have to be subversive to come up with new ideas," he explains. "A few years ago, the idea of cultural diversity didn't exist; it's as important as plant and animal diversity, which we defended in Rio in 1992."
Did cultural diversity have anything to do with that French obsession, a "multi-polar world", I asked Mr Boutros-Ghali. "Exactly, it's the same idea," he said. "Nothing is more dangerous than a world based on unilateralism."
That, in a nutshell, is Mr Chirac's position on Iraq.
The summit was supposed to take place a year ago, but had to be postponed in the aftermath of September 11th. The venue is in a sense a gift from Mr Chirac to his good friend, the Lebanese Prime Minister, Mr Rafik Hariri, who has spent millions sprucing up his capital for the occasion.
Since its 1975-1991 civil war ended, Lebanon has never received so many heads of state.
The theme of the summit - The Dialogue of Civilisations - is also a discreet form of resistance to US domination.
The phrase was invented by the Iranian President, Mr Mohamed Khatami, whose country Mr Bush has consigned to "the axis of evil", and it is a rejection of the prediction of US Professor Samuel Huntington of The Clash of Civilisations.
"The Lebanon-isation of the world, in a negative sense, started on September 11th," the Minister of Culture, Mr Ghassan Salamé, said. Yet the inevitability of a clash of civilisations "resonates like a death sentence for this country", he added.
"That is why we are are militant 'anti-Huntingtonians' . . . At the very least, Lebanon provides an example of the exorbitant cost of what happens when identity is asserted with blood and weapons."