Well, I only went to France once as an adult in the mid-Seventies when I was in the Navy, to Brest. The people were damned rude to us and sure gave the outright impression they hated us.
It could have been the uniform. Who knows. But my everlasting impression of that place was typically passing an older French couple who openly glared at me.
And it wasn’t just me. It was a homogenous impression. Without exception, every guy I spoke to when I got back to the ship had the same experience.
I went there as a young teenager in the Seventies, and I don’t remember anything like that. But as an adult, my overriding impression of being in France was black dislike.
How odd.
In the 1970s, I went to France for a year as an exchange student. It was the best year of my life. I loved France and the French.
I was introduced to an old man who had been in occupied territory during WWII. While he told us of the difficulties of that time, the indignities the French townspeople suffered at the hands of the German occupiers, and of their joy at being liberated by the Americans, he broke down in tears. He was grateful to me, a 17 year old girl, for what American soldiers had done a generation before my birth. I felt awkward, because I really had nothing to do with those soldiers’ actions.