| Philippe Roger, who teaches at the École des Hautes Études
It's probably a chain, like those Kumon Math Centers. The French all send their kids to special schools where they learn haughty attitudes. We should have known. |
Posted on 02/16/2003 4:32:38 PM PST by MadIvan
Washington will focus this week on persuading France to soften its opposition to war against Iraq. Patrick Bishop toured France to find out why anti-Americanism is so entrenched there
In Cantigny, at least, they are grateful. The main street, winding between the low northern houses is called the Rue Première Division USA. There is a monument to the dead planted in the chalky mud at the entrance to the village.
And in his garage, 86-year-old Joseph Lefever has created a little museum, recording the times when Americans crossed the sea to come to Cantigny's rescue.
"I have three reasons to be thankful." he says. "They liberated us here in 1918. They did it again in 1944, and they set me free from a prisoner of war camp near Munich a year later." In Cantigny, perched on the wide, bare fields of the Somme, the current transatlantic row is barely registering.
The Americans are not expected to break their habit of returning, year after year, to stand in front of the monument to the 199 doughboys killed and 867 wounded in the fighting of May 1918. Then, as always, the visitors will join the villagers for a glass of wine at the mayor's house.
Cantigny, though, is only a tiny scrap of France. Most of the inhabitants are elderly, and the evidence of American sacrifices in two world wars confronts them every day.
Elsewhere, memories are shorter and sentiments harsher. For French people under 60, the ambivalence towards America was there long before the eruption of this latest bagarre.
Even America's best friends here are often dismayed by its political attitudes; even its biggest critics can be enthusiastic consumers of its exports.
The one thing that Americans can be sure of is that they will never receive unequivocal, unwavering backing from the French in their war against terrorism.
Nor, most people here seem to believe, should they be asking for it. They reserve the right to change their mind in politics - as in love. Anyone who doesn't, they imply, is not a serious, sensate or - the beloved word - logical person.
Fallings-out between France and the United States are nothing new, but it is clear that this one is different. In the past, the French have affected not to notice outbreaks of Frog-bashing by tabloid columnists or rent-a-quote politicians. This time, the jibes are stinging.
"We are now in a real war of words," says Philippe Roger, who teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and is the author of L'Ennemi Américain, a study of French anti-Americanism which became a bestseller when it appeared last September.
"According to them, we are now dirty, cowardly rats and weasels." The change of tone, he believes, merely sharpens an antipathy that has always been there. "French anti-Americanism is not a short-term phenomenon," he writes. "It is anchored in history."
He thinks that it predates the protests against the Vietnam War, the passions of 1968 - though it was strongly present in both - and French anxieties during the Cold War.
France, he says, believes it has a stake in the birth of the US through the agency of General Lafayette, who fought alongside George Washington against the British and loved the idea of America with an almost erotic intensity.
Ever since, the French have seen the US as a potential Utopia, he says, and have reacted to its failure to conform with their desires with an exasperation that has often shaded into something like hatred.
By the end of the 19th century, anti-Americanism was already providing an ideological cement that bound together the many different intellectual and social strains of French political culture.
"In a time of strident divisions," says M Roger, "anti-Americanism was the most common value in France. It didn't belong to the Left or the Right. It brought together religious and non-believers, nationalists and internationalists."
Sylvie Kauffmann is a journalist at Le Monde, the intellectual citadel of French liberalism. After eight years in Washington and New York with her husband, a diplomat, she has grown to like and respect Americans.
Nor does she have any objection to going to war against Saddam Hussein. She bristles, though, at the way Washington is setting about it.
"It's true that the French sometimes appear not to have come to terms with the fact that they are no longer a major power - but we are not the pygmies the Americans say we are, either.
"We are a medium-sized power, like Britain, which happens to have a permanent seat on the [United Nations] Security Council. You may not approve of that, but it's a fact. This gives us the power to oppose US policy in a forceful manner if we think it's right."
Mme Kauffmann feels that France proved its essential loyalty with the spontaneous flood of sympathy that followed September 11 and that it should be granted the latitude that exists within strong friendships for allowing disagreement.
"There was an incredible outpouring after 9/11, the like of which I have never seen among French people," she says. "But the Bush administration never took advantage of it… I've been struck by their total inability to do anything about anti-Americanism, to the point where I wonder whether they really want to."
Michel Kenedi, a businessman with a lifelong admiration for America, is also bewildered by what he is beginning to regard as a personal repudiation of his affection.
"I feel alienated. My two sons are half-American. I always believed that we were fundamentally the same - that we shared the same basic values, but that there was room for our differences. Now, it's like being part of the Roman empire - an empire that is more intolerant than ever of criticism."
Even the sharpest observers of America are quick to say how much they like Americans. José Bové became a hero to many of his countrymen when he led a party of Green warriors to dismantle a half-built McDonald's in his home town of Millau in the South-West. He has now become a star of the anti-globalisation movement.
M Bové, who spent three years growing up in the US, insists: "People make a big distinction between American people and the American government. America is part of my youth.
"I have a lot of friends there like Ralph Nader [the anti-corporation campaigner]." Nader, he says, exemplifies a parallel set of American virtues that counterbalance the attitudes of the current administration.
It is true that there is much - both in the ideological and material sense - that the French admire in the US and, in the past, they have been willing to acknowledge its contribution to Europe.
There are probably more Rue Wilsons - named after the last American president to try to deliver "Old Europe" from its cynical, selfish ways - than Rue Bonapartes in France.
President Wilson, like George W Bush, saw the world through thick moral lenses. Post-1918, a lasting peace could be achieved, he believed, by the application of his famous 14 points.
The programme provoked one of the great Old Europe witticisms from the French leader Clemenceau. "Even the Good Lord," he growled, "only had 10 commandments."
The nation's greatest rocker, the nuclear-tanned dinosaur Johnny Hallyday, keeps a fleet of Harley-Davidsons and produces hits with titles such as Quelquechose de Tennessee.
Jacques Chirac, currently in full cocorico mode, is, in truth, a bit of a mid-Atlantic man, who prefers beer to wine and counts his days in the 1950s - hitchhiking across America and falling in love with a Southern belle he called Honeychile - as one of the happiest times of his life.
Despite occasional ambushes mounted by traditionalists, American films and fashions continue to overwhelm the country's puny cultural defences.
Yet some Americans living in France sense schadenfreude lurking behind the affection. "People were really supportive in the aftermath of 9/11, but it was very short-lived," says Andrea Maier, an American entrepreneur who has worked for the past 10 years in Paris.
"I heard a lot of surprisingly anti-American remarks soon afterwards. They seemed to think that there was an element of retribution - that the Americans had somehow brought this on themselves."
This, she reckons, went beyond the routine condescension that she finds among friends and acquaintances. " I think, in France, if you're at all smart or sophisticated, you're expected to be slightly anti-American. It's part of being a thoughtful French person.
"The form it takes depends on your level in society. Further down the scale, people like the cars and clothes and movies - the things the Americans do well. But they deplore the ghettos and the food. The top cliché is that all America's problems stem from its Puritan origins."
Sylvie Kauffmann believes that the further up the social ladder you go, the more pronounced the hostility is likely to be. "Structured anti-Americanism is mainly found among the elite - people who have given it a lot of thought."
Intellectuals of the Left, she believes, are just as susceptible to it as those on the Right. One Frenchwoman described a dinner at which a chief adviser to the former prime minister Lionel Jospin - on hearing that she had just returned from America - exploded that he "hated these people and their country".
At a less august level, there is a willingness to accept a comic-strip view of America, especially if it is an American who is peddling it. The documentary Bowling For Columbine?, made by the pudgy dissident Michael Moore, was a box-office smash.
The cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo magazine portray Mr Bush and co. as mutants - kept alive by the fossil fuels whose continued supply they are willing to wage war to protect.
But it is Mr Bush's perceived stupidity, as much as his alleged warmongering, that generates French concern and, yes, contempt. The French expect their politicians to be clever.
"Most French people are irritated by the public postures of the American government," says Mme Kauffmann. "They despise George Bush because they don't think he's up to the job."
When he went to the Normandy beaches in 2001 for the ritual visit, his wooden performance was a letdown. "Reagan had been brilliant, Clinton had been brilliant. French people might not have agreed much with Reagan, but they could still be impressed by the show."
Reports of White House Bible study sessions baffle and alarm a people for whom religion is purely a private matter. "This really doesn't play well," said Pierre Buhler, the former French cultural counsellor in New York, who is now a visiting professor specialising in transatlantic relations at Sciences Po in Paris.
"It carries a whiff of fanaticism, dividing the world between those who are good and those who are evil. These are not categories that we feel at ease with."
He fears that the distinction that M Bové has pinpointed is in danger of dissolving. "There is a blurring of the border between anti-American and anti-Bush," he says.
"Before, people were against the US - not because of what it was, but for what it did. That difference is hardly being separated out in argument."
Anglo Saxons tend to suspect that France's bouts of contrariness towards Americans stem from an inferiority complex. But Andrea Maier is doubtful.
"Certainly, the French do find them more fascinating than they would like to. Scorn, after all, means you are paying attention. It would be easy to say they envy America, but I'm not sure it's true. The French are pretty happy with who they are."
Whatever Washington may think about the motivations of France's leaders, there is little doubt that their stance reflects a heartfelt national unease at the prospect of war, as well as profound annoyance at America's hectoring manner.
"Some people have called what is going on 'Wilsonism with heavy boots'," says Pierre Buhler. "But the difference is that Wilson wanted to share his message by persuasion. What we are seeing here is more of a bullying approach."
The French like to be asked nicely to change their minds. They prefer that the asking is done by someone who at least pretends to respect the country's glorious past and the place it stakes for itself in the history of political thought.
Bill Clinton played along. They warmed to him and sympathised during his Monica Lewinski travails, while privately mocking America - and the president himself - for a hopeless lack of sophistication in such matters.
Mr Bush has made it clear there will be no flattery - no coaxing. The French, therefore, assume that he hates them. The feeling, in many quarters, is now mutual. But the likelihood, still, is that when the crunch comes at the Security Council, chilly realpolitik considerations will prevail.
Continued defiance would launch France on a long diplomatic war which it knows, deep down, it can never win. The veto will stay unplayed, to be brandished another day.
France and America share too much history to break up now. The Americans will come back to Cantigny for many years to come - to the monument and M Lefever's little museum.
The optimists here say it is best to regard the current crisis merely as a bad patch. But it seems certain to be a lengthy one that will endure as long as George W Bush remains at the White House.
Think how you would feel if on a couple of occasions, you were about to get beat up by the schoolyard bully, and the quarterback of the football team rescues you. After a couple of times, you may begin to feel quite "impotent"--and may grow to resent your "hero" for rescuing you. You might become like France--an ungrateful, self-loathing, jealous, angry little twerp. That's how I always viewed France as acting like.
And that is why you are irrelevant...
Michealangelo, da Vinci, Reubens, Rembrandt, Botticelli, etc. WERE NOT FRENCH!
The French just happened to grab those paintings when they had lots of cash.
Yes, I know there were some great French painters, but they didn't corner the market on artistic expression.
If I were a pygmy I'd sue for slander. One can respect pygmies.
On the other hand, fellatio in the Oval Office is tres chic, so . . . je ne sais quoi!
Well of course. For France, a country that has produced just about every decadent thing that ails society, good and evil are categories that make them feel "ill at ease." The French have no redeeming value. They are a deadweight that America and Great Britian have had to lug around for too long.
I would love to see this country withdraw from any organization (UN/NATO/WTO)that allows France to remain a member. I think we are going to find out that France has been an actual ally of Saddam Hussein. If so, France should be placed on the list of countries that support terrorism. It would not bother me one bit to bomb Paris.
Barbara Walters did a piece on Saddam's son Uday on 20/20 Friday night. Again the links to France from Iraq were very interesting:
A double of Uday who wore the same French suits and aftershave as his boss to fool potential attackers.
In Paris a former French official told 20/20 of an equally bizarre, more recent account allegedly involving Odai and a delegation of French college students in 2000.
Two of the students, a man and a woman, told French authorities that Odai invited them to a party in their honor at a Baghdad hotel. But when they got to Odai's room, they say three of his bodyguards forced them at gunpoint to have sex with each other while being taped on video.
According to Alexis Debat, who was a desk officer at the French Ministry of Defense at the time, the French government concluded there was little they could do about it. "I mean, after all, this is Saddam Hussein's son," said Debat, who is now a consultant for ABCNEWS.
Full story: 20/20 Profile of Uday Hussein
What the heck are the French doing sending exchange students to Iraq?!
And then the NATO decision that I loved today:
NATO broke a monthlong impasse Sunday over preparations in case of war in Iraq, reaffirming alliance solidarity while supporting U.N. efforts for a peaceful solution.
"Alliance solidarity has prevailed," NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson said. "We have been able collectively to overcome the impasse."
After France was shut out of the room, two other holdouts Germany and Belgium dropped their objections to starting the planning for Turkey's defense immediately, NATO officials said.
link: NATO Breaks Month-Long Impasse on Iraq
Way to go Mr. Robertson! May the rest of the world follow your lead and shut out the French. I feel the time has come to call an enemy an enemy. France is in my opinion an enemy and a backer of world terrorism.
If only we cared.
"There was an incredible outpouring after 9/11, the like of which I have never seen among French people," she says. "But the Bush administration never took advantage of it… I've been struck by their total inability to do anything about anti-Americanism, to the point where I wonder whether they really want to."
Yup, we never took advantage of it. Meanwhile it was not too long after this 'incredible outpouring' the the Frogs made a best seller out of a book where the author claimed the Pentagon was never hit by a plane and the terrorist attacks were carried out by right wingers within our government.
Not to mention an Iraqi leader waging a JIHAD against America!
So far, I haven't heard the French say anything to lessen my bad opinion of them. They need to just shut up.
| Philippe Roger, who teaches at the École des Hautes Études
It's probably a chain, like those Kumon Math Centers. The French all send their kids to special schools where they learn haughty attitudes. We should have known. |
...Ever since, the French have seen the US as a potential Utopia, he says, and have reacted to its failure to conform with their desires with an exasperation that has often shaded into something like hatred...
The information about our failuresis conveyed to the French elite and general population through the tightly focused lens of the American Elite--a Class who despises Americans even more than the French do---and for the same reason. Our failure to conform to their utopian projections and, worse, the failure to hate ourselves as much as their conscience dictates we should.
The role of American political and cultural elites in training the French to dislike us properly cannot be overestimated. The most obvious example is their view of our race relations. The French pride themsleves on their nuanced approach to complex problems but when it come to American racism, their view is stricty black-and-white, broad brush cartoons.
Common Americans have no control over most of their institutions and therfore cannot speak to the world in their own voices. That is not the fault of the French.
The fault, dear Americans, is not in the frogs but in ourselves that we are misunderstood---to paraphrase some Limey scribbler....
It's good training for becoming snotty waiters!
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École... that's a "school," right? So they actually have a school for haughty attitudes? Am I reading that right? My French is limited, but that sure is what it looks like to me.