The U.S. and France: Why the dislike?

"Villepin's new law catalyzed anxiety among the French because its message to the young seemed to be that they should no longer expect good jobs and security," says William Pfaff in the New York Review of Books ("France, the children's hour").

Aren't those facts?

I've never heard/read anything particularly negative about the French surrender to the Nazis. (I mean, pretty much everyone did in the end, didn't they?)

really?? the vichy government and all that? i have.

i take issue with this - i assume by 1790s you are referring to the anti-monarchic revolutions that occurred in america and france. they were similar in what they were rebelling against, but they had extremely different ideas about freedom and the role of government. america was working with a negative conception of liberty ('freedom from') while france was more interested in positive liberty (freedom to do). this has persisted for the most part, with the notable exception in america of affirmative action and the welfare state. and still, affirmative action is only allowed under the guise of "righting historic wrongs." it's a restriction of negative liberty that seeks to redress a similar past restriction.

both countries may come off as self-absorbed assholes to the rest of the world, but i don't think they're coming from the same place.

that's what i meant by no

N 1941-42 the United States intended that France, together with soon-to-be defeated Italy, Germany and Japan, was to be part of a protectorate run by the Allied Military Government of the Occupied Territories (Amgot). According to the agreement of November 1942 between Admiral Jean-François Darlan and US General Mark Clark, which secured France’s commitment to the Allied cause, Amgot would have abolished its national sovereignty, including its right to issue currency.

Some US historians believe this plan stemmed from President Franklin D Roosevelt’s antipathy towards Charles de Gaulle. Roosevelt saw him as a dictator-in-training and sought to prevent him from ruling post-Pétain. (Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain led the pro-Nazi government of unoccupied France at Vichy,1940-44.) The argument that Roosevelt intended to establish universal democracy is compelling but wrong (1).

The US was concerned that France, although weakened by its 1940 defeat, might reject the plan, especially if its presidency went to De Gaulle, who had vowed to restore French sovereignty. It feared France might use its nuisance capacity as it had when it opposed pro-German US policies after the first world war. France would not have wanted to relinquish its empire, rich in raw materials and strategic bases. The US had long called for an open door policy for goods and investments in all colonial empires (2). The US relied on twin strategies: ignoring De Gaulle, and dealing with Pétain’s regime with a combin ation of accommodation and toughness. It realised that Vichy, like the Latin American regimes dear to its heart, was more malleable than a government with broad popular support.

The US plan for a "Vichy-sans-Vichy" took shape. French elites supported the idea: they clung to the Vichy regime, which had restored privileges taken away by the pre-war republican government, and were eager to make a painless transition from German rule to the pax americana.

After December 1940 the US prepared to send troops to North Africa, with Robert Murphy, Roosevelt’s personal envoy. It attempted to cap italise on a symbol of French defeat: General Maxime Weygand, commander-in-chief during the German invasion and Vichy’s delegate- general to French Africa until November 1941. When this failed, it turned to General Henri Giraud. Soon after, US forces landed in Morocco and Algeria on 8 November 1942. The next to be wooed was Admiral Jean-François Darlan, stationed in Algiers, a collaborator who served as Pétain’s vice-premier and foreign minister from 1941-42. He remained at Pétain’s side when Pierre Laval returned to power in 1942-44 (3).

General Clark had Darlan sign an agreement on 22 November 1942 placing North Africa at the disposal of the US and making France a "vassal" state, subject to "capitulations" (4). The US assumed unprecedented rights over French territorial extensions in Africa, including overseeing troop movements; ports, airfields, military defences and munitions, communications networks and the merchant navy. The agreement also provided for US requisitions of goods and services; tax exemptions; extraterritorial rights; and US-determined military zones. Joint commissions would be responsible for law and order, current administration, censorship and economic policy.

Laval had sealed his fate by hoping for "a German victory" . Assisted by his son-in-law, René de Chambrun, a collaborationist corporate lawyer with dual US/French citizenship, Laval believed the US pledge that he would play a key role after a separate peace agreement, pitting Germany, Britain and the US against the Soviets, was reached. But US support for Laval was not compatible with French internal power struggles, and the separate peace proposal failed to take into account the Red Army’s key role in crushing Hitler’s Wehrmacht.

Darlan was assassinated by an anti-Vichyite with Gaullist connections on 24 December 1942. The US turned to General Giraud, who briefly served with De Gaulle as co-president of the French National Liberation Committee (CFLN), founded in 1943. After the battle of Stalingrad which marked the end of the German advance, Giraud was supported by senior Vichy officials, including Maurice Couve de Murville, overseas finance minister, who defected to the Allies in 1943. His supporters included industrialists such as Jacques Lemaigre-Dubreuil, a former member of the pro-fascist Cagoule group, who headed Lesieur oils and the Printemps department stores. Also onside were collaborationist bankers such as Alfred Pose, chief executive officer for the National Bank of Commerce and Industry.

Pierre Pucheu was the next Vichy official to embrace the US option, joining Giraud in Algiers. No one personified the Vichy regime better than Pucheu. In 1941 he became Darlan’s industry minister and then interior minister. He had served as a fundraiser for the fascist French People’s Party . He also championed economic collaboration with Germany and anti-communist repression, working on behalf of the Nazi occupation (including selecting communist prisoners executed in 1941 in retaliation for the assassin ation of German officers, and establishing special sections - anti-communist tribunals).

Spurned by Giraud, Pucheu was imprisoned in May 1943 and sentenced to death; he was executed in Algiers in March 1944. This appeased the communists, whom Pucheu had martyred; but de Gaulle was also warning the US and Britain, and frightening those who expected US saviours to supplant the Vichy regime. In 1943 a police officer joked: "The French bourgeoisie always presumed that US or British soldiers would fight on its behalf if the Bolsheviks won" (5).

The US depicted De Gaulle as a rightwing dictator and a puppet of French communists and the USSR. But it had to abandon plans to impose the dollar in liberated territories. On 23 October 1944 the Allies officially recognised De Gaulle as head of the French government: the USSR had recognised France’s true government two and a half years before. On 10 December 1944 France signed a treaty of alliance and mutual security with Moscow, to offset US power. De Gaulle described it in glowing terms (6).

Excluded from the Yalta conference in 1945 and dependent on the US, France became a key part of the US sphere of influence. But only vigorous resistance, internal and external, had saved it from becoming a US protectorate.

think you are underestimating the french connections

"The following States were part of Louisiana: Louisiana, Mississipi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakoata, South Dakota"

there were a lot of immigrant from france after the french revolution and they gave you the statue of liberty a while later, too

etc

The general assumption is the the standard American mindset was/ is shaped out of British Empiricism, while French culture is informed by Continintal Rationalism, as much as that means anything. I also assume any American university student who had to deconstruct the phone directory in order to root out the underlying hegemonic constucts harbors some sort of resentment towards Derrida and all that lot. Also, art-school chicks who think they're French but aren't are the worst kind of crazy, and won't date the rest of us anyway. Actually, I think that's a good metaphor for the American-French relationship right there. It's like one of those high-school couples that outwardly claim to hate each other 'cause ones a dumb jock and the other's a sensitive, Plath-reading intellectual but you're always catching them coming out of the supply closet together with their clothes all mussed up.

Yeah, that whole Louisiana thing. Big part of our history, but even today many American cities will have an identifiable Chinatown, Little Italy, Polish sector, Germantown, predominantly Latin or African-American areas, or whatever, but if you speak of places where there's a discernable French influence most people can only name New Orleans and that vicinity or north of the border in Canada. Also, American history is largely assumed by many Americans to be the schlep from the east coast to the only other good part, the side way over there in the west, so that middle section is kinda a footnote.

crosspost

why u hate my dad?

Citing Nebraska and South Dakota as part of the "French influence" on the US is a wonderful way of getting us NOT to take an argument seriously, although we do appreciate your history lesson. (Don't forget Russia's important role while you're at it.) Sure, the Louisiana Purchase was from France, but I don't see that having any significant relation -- at least on the US side -- on attitudes toward France. You'd be better off raising what is known in the U.S. as the "French and Indian War."

perhaps YOU are the reason the french dislike americans

crosspost

this is not true (well okay maybe its true for portugal and austria but it is much worse in the case France). again, just thinking musically, Germany = Can, Kraftwerk, all kinds of recent techno stuff, etc.

That has nothing to do with actual French people, or anything -- just saying I think that's the dynamic in really base-level American pop culture. We do the same thing with the English.

crosspost

However, the word "things" is pretty ill-defined. I mean, is being familiar with various pilsners or wines (depending on country), or foods for god's sake, counting as "things"? Because you'd have a better chance arguing average citizens know about those things than this bullshit ILM nonsense about musicians.

America just can't be bothered to look is more like it. What else is new. A small class of Americans prides itself in being 'multi-cultural, or cosmopolitan, or whatever (sometimes to the point of self-parody) and the rest of the country, partly due to an assimilationst rejection of the 'old world' that would warm the cockles of Lou Dobbs' heart, partly due to a cultural arrogance born of a newish and growing sense of cultural and moral superiority (that hides the 19th century's sense of cultural inferiority), and lastly 'cause we have spent the last 17 years being the only 500 lbs. gorilla/lone superpower on the planet. Since the French, in their senseless folly, sometimes conspicuously attempt to avoid following the lead of American culture, that rejection leads Americans to think of them as snooty.

Whatever French disdain there is of the U.S. has two seperate sources that have occasionally converged: ancien régime nostalgist, jingoist, and ultra-Catholic hatred for protestantism, miscegenation, democracy, and English; and a more recent leftist fear of Anglo-American, free-trade, capitalism bent on enslaving mankind in a workler's nightmare and stealing all of the planet's resources. Recent generations in both countries, informed, if the word can be used with a straight face, by the crassest ignorance, the most fuzzy romanticism, and some of the most inexcusable stereotypes have created a tradition in both countries of mutual, more or less cordial disdain for the other that the powers that be have learned to exploit quite well.

xpost France doesn't need someone to name a beer of origin, they have a plethora of wines, that's a silly argument.

and yes, of course "things" is vague but honestly next to nothing French makes it to America! they have no visible presence in popular consumerist culture. they get the foodies with the wine and cheese, but how large a percentage of the population is that...

crosspost

Shakey, you've hit it on the head. The French have shit beer (mostly) 'cause they prefer wine and an American assuming that nothing's going in Frankreich 'cause there's no beer is missing the point. Air is known here 'cause it works at the margins of an esthetic that Americans or Brits or whatever can understand, but what if your pop-music consciously sets out not to move in directions accessible to American teenagers? I mean, honestly, I think France is frankly as Americanized as any non-English speaking country in this day and age, but I don't always like French acts but I don't begrudge them doing something that some self proclaimed arbiter elegantiae for musical taste in London or a music industry exec in L.A. doesn't like or understand.

Part of all of this comes from an expectation, I believe, that unlike, say, Indonesians or Angolans, the French are 'white people' in a western mode that should be following our lead and when they don't, people are all 'who the fuck do they think they are?' when they would never make the same accusation about Algerians making rai or the rich musical panoply of India, for example, 'cause they wouldn' have the same expectations.

les ricains and frogs

It's not that we don't admire or trade across cultures but the geneological connection isn't the same as with other European countries, that is, we don't regard each other as blood relatives so much.

Maybe we should supplement Octoberfest with Wine-uary, Chateau Briapril, or Pinot Noirch celebrations. Drunkeness leads to strange bedfellows and all that.

Also, Lance Armstrong. Americans should stick to snowboarding.

(above: the #1 GIS results for "Frenchman," "German man," and "Spaniard")

Actually, let me try a different way of summarizing the American pop culture take on these three.

In the American mythology, the UK is like a stodgy uncle: donnish, tweedy, stuffy, and learned. Our insecurity is that he will look down on us for being uncouth and uncultured and not knowing which fork to use; we associate being English specifically with having a high class status, with being refined. But we make up for this by pretending that we, in constrast, are youthful and vibrant and know how to have fun -- that we are rebels against that upper-class stodgyness -- and that we have hard-won wisdom the Brit lacks. But one at least takes the stodgy uncle seriously.

Whereas in this mythology France is basically feminized, which means we don't take it as seriously: we take it as being sensualist, "fancy," arty, pretentious. We accept its contributions mainly on "feminine" grounds -- we admire their sophistication and sense of refinement mostly in terms of things like perfume, wine, fancy dresses, and girls' names. But at some point we begin to mock their mimes and ridiculous Gaultier designs, and decline to take them seriously on political issues, because we imagine that we are manly and practical and get things done.

This is compounded by the fact that I am a Midwesterner, and that both my parents actually came off the farm, so not only do I hate the cartoon French, I hate cartoon Hollywood, cartoon California, cartoon NYC, and I even hate cartoon liberals even though I am one. And I like it.

Fuckin' fancy-pants panty-fanciers with their attitude. Fucking panty-waistitude. Fucking fancy-pantitude.

http://joeyy.free.fr/RENO_jean/1.JPG

as far as the "dislike," it's entirely - 100% - a media construct, isn't it? there's something to the fact pointed out upthread that there was never a big french emigration to the US, and maybe there's some injury in the idea that france never "needed" the US the way that irish, italians, polish, russians etc did, at various stages in history, so america displaces it into the particularities of WWII, somehow blaming the french for needing the military might of the US to help dig them out from under the nazis. but even this has to be taught, nobody feels this in their bones, do they?

-- Shakey Mo Collier (audiobo...), May 15th, 2006 11:27 PM. (Shakey Mo Collier) (later) (link)

crossposts

les miserables (the musical)

in any case, the "authority" that i'm talking about here is very ill-defined, so i've left myself 1,000 escape hatches, but i think the basic point holds - the french simply do not like being told what to do, by the police, by the americans, by anybody. americans LOVE to be told what to do.

crosspost - timmy, have you ever been to france?

one thing i noticed is a rather heavyhanded police presence, gendarmes with fairly heavy duty weapons on full display kind of thing, not sure if that reinforces your point, or mine.....

I don't see that appeal to emotion, to the "education sentimentale", the natural goodness of our emotions and passions, in American culture. In the US, a relentless practicality and thrift and ambition seem to be the ultimate selling point. Get organized, better yourself, succeed, relax, you've earned it, cheat nature, look younger than your age, etc etc. But certainly not "give in to your emotions, your passion". To love something too much in America is suspicious, fetishistic. Things are commodities, not to be dwelt on for their own inherent properties. And I think the French fear of Americanization relates to this very directly. This is the world of "les grands surfaces" (hypermarkets, shopping centres) which the French see arriving from the West and supplanting the world of "passion, emotion", the blue-jacketed peasant who loves the land, the butcher who loves meat, and so on.

One thing's for sure, both countries' inhabitants are excessively proud so that clashes for obvious reasons. But what country is humble, really?

xpost

Ok yeah canadians.

tracery - yeah apparently the scolding-only approach fits in with a sort of passive way of asserting control and keeping the child from overreaching its boundaries and breaking away, etc...

France IS the West and yes, as Tracer pointed out they not only invented the department store (Au bonheur des dames is based on the Bon Marché, btw) but the super and hypermarket as well.

See also les voyageurs, the 17th century traders and raiders who canoed up the Missisippi, thus enabling the Louisiana Purchase. Downtown Minneapolis is named after famous ones like Hennepin, Nicollet and Marquette.

I'm a bit French too, but from a Huguenot family. Those nice old C17 houses by Brick Lane in London? We built that shit! Also please remember the US WASP upper class distaste for Catholicism which YES is a part of the Puritan thing because the earliest settlers were persecuted by Catholic kings for 150 years until the 18th century.

There is of course something very pot and kettle about any American who scoves at French beer.

???

America is no longer condemned to the products of the major breweries. We have a staggering plethora of small, quality breweries producing a vast array of different styles.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060520/ts_afp/afplifestylebritainfrance
societyoffbeat;_ylt=Aq6SJV0s2ebKlXonSYWQWSus0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA3ODdxdHBhBHNlYwM5NjQ-

LONDON (AFP) - The French have been voted the world's most unfriendly nation by a landslide in a new British poll published. They were also voted the most boring and most ungenerous.

A decisive 46 percent of the 6,000 people surveyed by travellers' website Where Are You Now (WAYN) said the French were the most unfriendly nation people on the planet, British newspapers reported.

The Germans have no to reason to celebrate the damning verdict. They came second on all three counts.

WAYN's French founder, Jerome Touze, told the papers he had been stunned by the thumping condemnation of his compatriots and sought to blame it on Gallic love-struck sulking.

"I had no idea that the French would emerge as such an unfriendly country," he said.

"I think our romantic 'moodiness' is misunderstood and I will be sure to pass on the message to my family and friends back in France to be a bit more cheerful to tourists in the future."

Italy was voted the world's most cultured nation with the best cuisine, while the United States was named the most unstylish with the worst food.

The British did not feature in the top 10 of any of the categories.

"The British fit in nowhere -- good or bad. It appears that we are so completely average that the voters did not include us in any category," the tabloid Daily Express commented.

"And to our shame, four percent of respondents -- all British of course -- said they would only talk to other Britons when they are abroad."

This unwillingness to talk to the locals appears to go hand in hand with respondents' perceptions of foreigners.

While most said Spain was the foreign country where they would most like to live, they said the Spaniards were nearly as unfriendly and ungenerous as the French.

To add insult to injury, British newspaper The Daily Telegraph put the boot in on Saturday by saying in an editorial that the French stank.

"The French may like to think that Chanel No 5 is their scent but we all know that garlic and stale Gitanes are much more representative."

Italy was voted the world's most cultured nation...

keep it real Sarkozy!

I would just like to point out that, while there have been significant waves of immigration to the USA from England, Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, Italy, Poland, Russia, and Latin America, there has never been a real big wave of French immigration, as with Canada and the Quebecois. Thus, there is no ready-made well of nostalgic post-immigrant feeling for France residing in America, and they are more easily seen as 'foreign' to the american spirit.

there has never been a real big wave of French immigration, as with Canada and the Quebecois. Thus, there is no ready-made well of nostalgic post-immigrant feeling for France residing in America, and they are more easily seen as 'foreign' to the american spirit.

― Aimless, Friday, September 17, 2010 6:22 PM (17 minutes ago)

you need to go to Louisiana sometime, mon ami.

I know there's a big cajun contingent in Louisiana, but it is a creole culture that doesn't look directly to France as its country of origin, despite speaking French.

I think its more like the French have been here so long that their immigrant experience has passed out of modern memory

i thought they came by way of canada too, does anyone really think of them as descended immigrants from france?

yes, and it was a french colony, sort of a different thing

i meant descended from

there has never been a real big wave of French immigration, as with Canada and the Quebecois.

Acadian:Quebecois::USA:Canada