In your first comment you mentioned you used Mistral because of its permissive license (so guessing you used 7B, right?). Then you compare it to a bunch of cutting edge proprietary models.

Have you tried Mistral's newest and proprietary models? Or even their newest open model?

"patriotic Europeans" is an... interesting combination of words. I'd almost call it an oxymoron.

To me that's a clue that it's written by an American :-).

Interesting. I'd say that Americans tend to overestimate the degree of common identity among Europeans. The polls are clear: for most Europeans, their European identity comes a distant second. The EU in particular is an elitist project and it's only slowly gaining popular legitimacy.

That said, I personally am a very patriotic European.