In the U.S. Nowadays, Little Love for France

Since the beginning of the year, Edward I. Koch, former mayor of New York City, has signed off most of his weekly radio broadcasts with a declaration of war loosely inspired by Julius Caesar: "Omni Gaul delenda est!" ("All Gaul must be destroyed!")

Mr. Koch says he doesn't mean the phrase literally, of course. But it's become a way for him to express his antipathy toward France. In harboring such feelings, he is apparently not alone. While formal polls routinely show widespread American indifference to France, some experts say anti-French sentiment in the news media is on the rise. A few have even begun to talk of an outbreak of francophobia, marked by the revival of age-old stereotypes about the dirty, arrogant, anti-Semitic French.

Francophobia is to America what anti-Americanism is to France, said Justin Vaisse, a professor at the Institute of Political Science in Paris who was in Manhattan last week presenting a paper on the topic to members of the French-American Foundation, a local group that promotes intellectual exchange between the countries.

Another facet of the two longtime allies' intense and somewhat inexplicable mutual fascination — a classic case of love-hate — is that francophobia has deep roots in American culture, Mr. Vaisse said.

He compared it to a chronic illness, prone to recur whenever there is tension between the countries.

"Francophobia is not a fair criticism of France," he said. "It is a systematic bias against the country, a willingness to see everything painted in black. It is a disease in the intellectual and political debate."

And lately, he argued, there have been signs of a flare-up. "We're currently witnessing a wave of anti-French sentiment in the press that we haven't seen since '86 or '95," he said.

In 1986, France refused to let American pilots fly over its airspace on bombing missions to Libya. In 1995, it publicly accused five Americans of spying, embarrassing the United States. Both incidents triggered a bout of France-bashing editorials.

The causes of the latest outbreak are equally clear, Mr. Vaisse said: a spate of anti-Semitic incidents in France, the unexpectedly good showing of the ultra-nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first round of the French presidential elections and dissatisfaction with French foreign policy in the Middle East, deemed by some in the United States to be insufficiently pro-Israel. There was also the runaway success in France of Thierry Meyssan's book "L'Effroyable Imposture" ("The Horrifying Fraud") attributing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to a United States government conspiracy.

These developments have coincided with a strong surge of anti-Americanism in France. After a brief honeymoon last fall — President Jacques Chirac was the first foreign leader to visit the United States after the terrorist attacks — relations between the two countries soured, with many French expressing vociferous opposition to the Afghan war. Tensions have increased since February, when Hubert Védrine, the French foreign minister, dismissed President Bush's "axis of evil" metaphor as "simplistic," prompting Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to snap that his French colleague was "getting the vapors."

Even the boardroom politics of French corporations have become symbols of cultural mistrust. The ouster this week of Jean-Marie Messier, the hard-driving chief executive of Vivendi Universal, the French media conglomerate, took on an anti-American cast when it was reported that he had been perceived by disgruntled French stockholders as too favorably disposed to America and its business models. (He ditched Paris for Park Avenue and insisted that even the company's French managers use English on the job. Under the new leadership, Vivendi's American executives will get lessons in French history and etiquette, and will be encouraged to "demonstrate that they like France.")Americans have responded to these events — particularly the outbreak of anti-Semitism — with a mixture of anger and anxiety.

Concern over reports of fire bombings at French synagogues and of physical assaults on French and Belgian Jews prompted the Simon Wiesenthal Center to issue a travel advisory for France and Belgium this spring — an unprecedented step. A similar fear led the Pacific-Southwest branch of the American Jewish Congress to urge a boycott of the Cannes Film Festival in April. (The congress mentioned "L'Effroyable Imposture" as well as anti-Semitism in its ad campaign promoting the action.) Last month, the congress decided to suspend its tours of France altogether.

Mr. Koch said he began his own boycott in December, after the French government failed to reprimand Daniel Bernard, its ambassador to Britain, who used an obscenity to refer to Israel at a dinner party. (Mr. Bernard did not deny making the remark but said his words had been greatly distorted.) .

Even the French edition of Saul Bellow's latest novel, "Ravelstein," became grounds for attack when The New York Observer reported in June that the publisher, Gallimard, had selected an image for the book's cover — a photograph of a large-nosed old man with hornlike tufts of hair — that verged on anti-Semitic caricature. (Denying that the company had acted with anti-Semitic intent, a Gallimard employee told the Observer that the image had been chosen for its humor.)

While many French experts admit that such reactions are understandable, but some fear that genuine political disagreement and legitimate concern over anti-Semitism may also be giving way to crude caricatures of the French.

"This wave of francophobia is accompanied by classic negative stereotypes," Mr. Vaisse said. His examples included opinion pieces by the conservative commentators Anne Coulter and Charles Krauthammer and the iconoclastic journalist Michael Kelly , who in defending President Bush's "axis of evil" speech from French government criticism in The Washington Post, referred to the "French foreign minister, whose name is Pétain or Maginot or something."

He might also have cited "Saturday Night Live." In a spoof of a French tourism commercial that was broadcast on the show in April, a series of iconic images — the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, a little girl toting a load of baguettes — flashed by on the screen while a female voice recited the pitch in a dulcet murmur: "The French: cowardly yet opinionated, arrogant yet foul-smelling. Anti-Israel, anti-American and, of course, as always, Jew-hating. With all that's going on in the world, isn't it time we got back to hating the French?"

Some French blame the American news media for making such remarks acceptable. The press, they say, has failed to distinguish between the anti-Semitic acts occurring in France today — mostly attributed to Muslim teenagers angry about the conflict in the Middle East — and those that occurred during World War II. They point out that thousands of French citizens have protested the anti-Semitic acts in demonstrations, and they say Mr. Le Pen's resounding defeat proves that the vast majority of French are staunchly opposed to racial and religious hatred.

In a sternly worded opinion piece published in The Washington Post last month, François Bujon de l'Estang, France's ambassador to the United States, lashed out at American commentators who have drawn analogies between the Holocaust and contemporary France. Calling the anti-Semitic incidents a "spillover from the Israel-Palestinian conflict," he argued that "they don't make France any more anti-Semitic than the persistence of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacists makes the United States a racist country on the verge of restoring segregation or slavery."

Many Americans — particularly Jews — remain unconvinced, saying the French government has shown little interest in punishing perpetrators of anti-Semitic crimes. "The French lay this blame off through a multitude of excuses," said Jack Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress. "There is a historical context that needs to be considered."

But French scholars insist that there is a difference between history and stereotypes. The most troubling expressions of anti-French sentiment, they say, are those like the "Saturday Night Live" parody, which make their appeal simply by invoking all-purpose clichés.

"It's the eternal return of the same," said Eric Fassin, a sociologist at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, who studies French-American relations. "As is the case with anti-Americanism in France, on the one hand you have immemorial rhetoric, so you feel you're always hearing the same thing. On the other hand, it's always being updated for new purposes and contexts."

Some of the negative images date to the early days of the American republic. In his paper, Mr. Vaisse cites the XYZ affair of 1797, when President John Adams sent an envoy to Paris to improve diplomatic relations with France. The French government agreed, but set hefty financial conditions — $250,000 up front as well as a $12 million loan — creating a lasting impression of Gallic moral corruption.

A hundred years later, the Dreyfus Affair helped establish France's reputation as a haven for anti-Semitism, a notion reinforced by evidence of substantial French collaboration with the Nazis under the Vichy regime. Similarly, France's capitulation to the Germans in 1940 made the French into eternal cowards, just as Charles de Gaulle, a famously stubborn and uncooperative ally, secured his fellow citizens a permanent reputation in this country for untrustworthiness and arrogance.

French scholars are quick to point out that positive clichés — about French wine, cheese, art, love and elegance — are just as plentiful. And they are often invoked in the same breath as the negative ones. Even the "Saturday Night Live" parody included references to France's reputation for great art and food.

"You can't fully distinguish between the anti and the pro people," Mr. Fassin said. "The same people can produce articles telling you how great it is in France and how irritating the French are."

In the end, he speculated, the explanation for France and America's love-hate relationship lies not in how different the two countries are but in how similar. "Arrogance?," he said. "They are competing for the gold medal." He called France and the United States the nations of "competing universalisms."

Edward C. Knox, a professor of French at Middlebury College in Vermont, agreed. "These are the two civilizations that think they have lessons to teach the whole world," he said. "Which makes them rivals."

I am not a believer that we could have, in any way, stayed out of WW II, and had Hitler's scientists not posed such a threat, and had the Jewish people's very existence not been at stake, I almost think we should have drug our heels a little more before getting into Europe.

None of these Europeans---at least, to be fair, the ones who seem to get the media---have the slightest bit of gratitude for our saving their damn butts. Even Le Pen, for his correct views on the economy and immigration, was a Yankee-hater. I agree with Julius Caesar, although I do admire Charles Martel.

pho·bi·a (fo'be-?)

A persistent, abnormal, and irrational fear of a specific thing or situation that compels one to avoid it, despite the awareness and reassurance that it is not dangerous.
A strong fear, dislike, or aversion.

[From –PHOBIA.]

The NYT must be using the second definition of extreme dislike, however most people agree with you. I hate the term homophobia, but it must be as acceptable to the Time's style book as Francophobia.

BTW, I must have newyorktimesophobia.

The irony is that if is was not for the French, we would likely have lost the revolt against England.

Napoleon's wars must've used up a lot of France's brave genes, they ended on the battlefields throughout Europe and Egypt.

It is ironic. General Washington actually danced a jig on the dock when the French Fleet under Adm deGrasse came into view in the Chesapeake thus blocking the Brits from leaving Yorktown.

A least somebody with a clear picture of the situation. It is really refreshing.

Bashing is a pretty useless exercise. It sometimes can be funny and even witty in certain cases but most of the time, it is just repeated cliches by people who have never been abroad.

The same uneducated people that bash America in France, bash France in America.

My father was in the Navy WWII, and told about many bar room brawls would erupt after the toast: "Here's to the French, they are a dirty race. The fight with their feet, and xxxx with their face".

The NYT must be using the second definition of extreme dislike, however most people agree with you. I hate the term homophobia, but it must be as acceptable to the Time's style book as Francophobia.

Interesting. Thanks for the info.

It would also be interesting to check out the etymology of the word "homophobia," find out when the word came into common use, and then find a dictionary older than that date and see if "-phobia" had a secondary definition of "dislike" before then.

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