The French have this habit of attempting to put things that they do not fully grasp in baskets of their own invention.

This is the basis of their education from the age of 5 up to and including ENA: the dossier, its compilation involving classification of issues and their subsequent filing to acheive a semblance of organised thought, the definition of a problem, and a solution baed on that definition.  It works, so long as the problem is correctly defined

The favorite dismissal of the "unknown" as being of marginal significance and unworthy of educated thought is to place the issue in the category of "Anglo-Saxon thinking": la pensée anglo-saxon(ne).

The above map if produced on a portable telephone might cause a French national to hesitate before making the usual sweeping generalisations on American or British indelicacies.  The Dystopian state of Anglo-saxoney is under Merkel's current jurisdiction.

It is also worth pointing out that Descartes' much missquoted principle, upon which missquotation most "neo"-cartesian rationale is based; is not "I -me- think therefore I am - "Cogito ergo sum", but rather "I am ijn a state of doubt, therefore I am thinking therefore I am" perhaps in dog latin: "dubitans cogito, ergo sum"?  The first step in most French minds is to opine on a situation as an idea or ideal, rather than to self-question as to one's perception of reality first . The Cartesian thought process was worked out by Descartes whilst he was hiding in total darkness in a poêle alsacienne, some say a wine cask, in Belgium from French civil servants out for his head. In either case it was in total darkness and after a long period of sensory incarceration that he defined this logical progression to remain sane. Perhaps certain French intellectuals might care to indulge themselves in a sensory deprivation fast to improve their analytical capabilties? I personally have always found the arrogance of the adoption of the term "anglo-saxon" somewhat disturbing, as it has inflitrated the basis of French reactionary thought to the point of rendering it falsehood. No doubting,  no "independent" peer review, no real thought in its scientific rational or secular sense.  As every French intellectual uses the term "anglo-saxon" to designate the unknowable, there is no advance in knowledge.

At the risk of invoking the Scarlet Pimpernel principle, perhaps we should support and invoke Descartes initial invitation to self questioning prior to accepting the somewhat ludicrous comments that are sometimes passed on non-French thought processes.  For those unfamiliar with the somewhat violent settlement of Britain, the Angles the Saxons and the Jutes came into these sceptr'd isles after the Romans, but before the Normans. Ther can only therefore have been a slight genetic cocktail going Westwards over the pond with the Celts.

Curious how the modern successors to those French Civil servants have managed to extinguish the legacy of the man according to whose thought processes they pretend to act.

That is a not an anglo-saxon comment, but one of mere common sense.