July 11, 2003	Friday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 10, 1424

PARIS, July 10: Constitutional Convention President Valery Giscard d’Estaing has submitted the final version of the text of Europe’s new constitution to the Academie Francaise, the assembly of 40 specialists in French culture and language — who have given the text of the European Union’s constitution a facelift which incorporates 900 corrections, some of them as slight as the placing of a punctuation mark.

According to Helene Carrere d’Encausse, the president of the 400-year old institution that continues to this day to provide the official definition of words used in the French language, not only in France but around the world, the Academie Francaise was sought out by Mr Giscard d’Estaing, a former president of France, to give Europe what he referred to as “a document with a beautiful text.”