Posted on 06/30/2003 8:34:21 PM PDT by aculeus
IN A desperate attempt to show Americans that France has no lingering ill-feeling towards the United States,the main Paris tourist bureau on the Champs Elysées will be decked out in the stars and stripes this Friday.
It is - for the French - an unusually demonstrative celebration of the 4th of July. "It’s a symbolic gesture of friendship to show Americans that they are extra welcome in Paris this summer," a tourism spokeswoman said.
Hotels and restaurants will also mark the US holiday, she said, "offering American visitors a free glass of champagne or a box of chocolates, for example.
"We want to show Americans that we still consider them to be our friends, and that they will be well received despite the difference of opinion between our two countries over Iraq."
Many Americans apparently do not share French willingness to forgive and forget. The number of US tourists visiting Paris from January to April this year plunged by 27 per cent compared with 2002.
US travellers, who previously topped the French capital’s league of foreign visitors, have been overtaken by the British. The French have reacted by launching an intensive marketing and public relations drive, optimistically entitled "Let’s Fall in Love Again", to bring them back.
It includes a video in which the Francophile comedian and filmmaker Woody Allen talks about his love affair with France and declares: "I don’t want to have to refer to my French fry potatoes as freedom fries, and I don’t want to have to freedom kiss my wife, when I really want to French kiss her."
The campaign does not appear to have elicited the hoped-for response across the Atlantic, where the New York Times described it as "maladroit".
It will take more than a video to improve the two countries’ trade relations. French exports to the United States dropped by 21 per cent in the first four months of the year, excluding the military category.
Fears that the US would extract its revenge for President Jacques Chirac’s intransigence over Iraq by boycotting French products were further confirmed by sales figures at the 12th biennial Vinexpo wine fair in Bordeaux.
US sales of French wine have plunged by almost 25 per cent, a fall blamed on a backlash against French products by US consumers.
The US accounts for less than 10 per cent of all French exports, but the US market is the biggest buyer of Bordeaux wines.
"Over the past two months we’ve seen a fall of practically 25 per cent, and that’s ... worrying," said Roland Feredj, head of the Bordeaux Interprofessional Wine Council.
"It’s clear from our American distributors that there is a hesitation to promote French wines for the time being," Bruno Finance, sales manager for Yvon Mau, one of Bordeaux’s largest wine merchants, told the New York Times.
Bernard Hervet, director of a large vineyard in Burgundy, has seen his US exports drop by nearly a third this year.
Louis Régis Affre, general manager of the Federation of Wine and Spirit Exporters, said retail sales of French wine continued to fall sharply in May, even though overall US wine sales were growing.
US wine merchants stayed away in droves from Vinexpo. Even the US wine guru Robert Parker, publisher of the Wine Advocate, did not come to France to taste the 2002 wine, saying he had cancelled because he was worried about travelling during the war.
His influential ratings control price and demand for Bordeaux’s top wines and his absence is a severe blow to last year’s vintage.
At this year’s Paris Air Show, the world’s largest gathering for aerospace executives, military brass and flying fans, the US presence was down markedly from that of previous years. Not a single top executive from a leading US defence contractor attended.
The Pentagon did not allow the US military aircraft present, including an F-16 fighter jet that had just returned from action in Iraq, to take part in the daily flying shows.
Despite an upbeat assessment by the US ambassador in Paris, many political and business leaders on both sides of the Atlantic believe it will take time to patch up French-American relations following the war.
Writing in the right-wing daily Le Figaro last week, the ambassador, Howard Leach, said France and the US have mended the rift over the Iraq war and are focused on working together.
"The differences that we experienced over the disarming of Iraq are in the past and are now part of our history," Mr Leach wrote. "They are not forgotten, but each of us is now better served by focusing on our current international problems and the future."
He insisted the decision to skip the air show was not political but financial. "Companies that elected not to participate this year were reducing expenses because of the difficult economic time in aviation or decided this air show was not the right market for their products," he wrote.
However, Washington insiders said the Pentagon had put pressure on firms not to attend.
Great towns and villages along the way.
Then last year we flew into into DeGaulle on the way to Amsterdam for another river cruise through the Federal Republic of Germany.
Ugly body odor people near Paris in the filthy airport, a strike, our luggage was delayed for four days by baggie handlers.
When we got to Amsterdam and got to our river boat it was queer day, and all the queers were out in their underwear and inflatible penii in the harbor.
Europe reminds me of Kalifornistan, and New York.
This year we are going to Vancouver.
Buy Corning Glass. Its American!
My first thought was: "Well, isn't that special? No Americans will be there to see it!"
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