whottt
10-31-2004, 04:02 AM
NR (http://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/20041025/full.asp#041838)
The Gauls, de Gaulle, the Gall - The story told of Franco-American friendship is a nice story. But it's just a story.
JOHN J. MILLER & MARK MOLESKY
October 25, 2004
In the first presidential debate, John Kerry repeated an old story. During the Cuban missile crisis, he said, President Kennedy dispatched his secretary of state to France, where his envoy met Charles de Gaulle and offered to show him satellite photos of Soviet missile sites. But the French president wasn't interested in looking at the images. "The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me," said de Gaulle. Then Kerry delivered his punch line: "How many leaders in the world today would respond to us, as a result of what we've done, in that way?"
It was a curious anecdote. For one thing, JFK didn't send his own secretary of state, but Truman's (Dean Acheson). More significantly, de Gaulle wasn't well known for his smooth relations with American presidents and none of the presidents who had dealings with the French leader trusted him, either. "He is a very dangerous threat to us," FDR wrote to Churchill in 1943. "He has proven to be unreliable, uncooperative, and disloyal to both our governments." Dwight Eisenhower considered him a major irritant, and Lyndon Johnson clashed with him constantly over everything from France's role in NATO (which de Gaulle quit) to U.S. involvement in Vietnam (which de Gaulle condemned). Perhaps Harry Truman captured the American point of view best when he simply referred to de Gaulle as an "SOB." (And despite Kerry's yarn, Acheson said publicly that de Gaulle was not "a dependable or effective ally.")
The notion that the United States has ruptured relations with its allies in general and with France in particular is an unrelenting theme in Kerry's campaign rhetoric. "There was a time, not so long ago, when the might of our alliances was a driving force in the survival and success of freedom," said Kerry in May. And then a cowboy president came along and ruined everything. On this line of attack, the Democratic nominee has done no flip-flopping. He has been a model of consistency. But he has also been consistently wrong.
A NICE STORY
Kerry's critique of America's place in the world relies heavily on one of the most pernicious myths about U.S. history: that France is our oldest and staunchest ally, a true friend since the days of the American Revolution. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. France is, in fact, America's oldest enemy.
There is a storybook version of Franco-American relations. It begins with the valor of Lafayette and French naval support at Yorktown, continues through the Louisiana Purchase (usually interpreted as a benign real-estate transaction), and makes sure to mention the Statue of Liberty. Then it describes American doughboys fighting in the trenches beside their French comrades during the First World War and, a generation afterward, GIs storming the beaches of Normandy to liberate freedom-loving France from the Nazis. Later, during the Cold War, it has France standing with us shoulder to shoulder as we confront the Soviet threat. Isn't that our history?
Au contraire. The true story of Franco-American relations begins many years before the American Revolution, during the French and Indian Wars. Lasting nearly a century, those conflicts pitted the French and their Indian allies against American colonists and British troops. French officers used massacres as weapons of terror against the hardy men, women, and children who settled on the frontier. "For Englanders and New Yorkers," wrote Crane Brinton, the great 20th-century Harvard historian, "the existence of a French menace on the northern borders was for years a very real thing, more real than any acute danger from a foreign power was to seem to Americans until the Russians acquired their own atomic bomb." Amid this tumult, the first articulations of a recognizably American national consciousness developed. America's sense of itself was born not in a revolt against England but in a struggle with France.
Although Paris provided American rebels with crucial assistance during their bid for independence, direct French military intervention came only after the Americans had achieved a decisive triumph at Saratoga a victory that practically guaranteed home rule, if not more. The French crown, of course, regarded the ideals of the Declaration of Independence as abhorrent and frightening. King Louis XVI even put a picture of Benjamin Franklin in his chamber pot. French aristocrats viewed Lafayette's idealism with contempt and branded him a criminal for traveling to America against the king's explicit command. Louis and his government overcame their revulsion toward the young republic only because they sniffed an opportunity to weaken Britain, their ancient rival.
To be sure, France did become an ally for a few years in the late 1770s and early 1780s, but that was because American sovereignty served French geopolitical aims. Even so, it was a tense relationship, one compromised by French blunders and even betrayal. In 1779, when John Paul Jones was battling H.M.S. Serapis during which engagement he shouted the immortal words, "I have not yet begun to fight" a French warship actually fired broadsides into the Bonhomme Richard. The French captain seems to have wanted to claim Jones's victory for himself.
This was hardly the only instance of French treachery. After Yorktown, during the peace talks, France sought to limit American gains because it feared the new nation might become too powerful. If the French had achieved all of their objectives at the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the United States today might be confined to a slender band of territory along the eastern seaboard, like a North American version of Chile.
In 1998, French defense minister Alain Richard declared that "France and the United States never fought each other." This is manifestly untrue. Within a generation of Yorktown, French and American forces were exchanging deadly fire during the little-known Quasi War of 1798-1800 during which France became the first military enemy of the United States following the ratification of the Constitution. Shortly before these hostilities, France even supplied the United States with its first foreign subversive: French ambassador Edmond Charles Genet, better known as "Citizen Genet." In 1796, a Genet successor, Pierre Adet, meddled in the presidential election in a failed attempt to prevent John Adams from becoming commander-in-chief. It was the first time a foreign power tried to influence the outcome of an American election.
During the Napoleonic era, French ambitions endangered the United States and its westward expansion. Napoleon himself longed to invade North America with a powerful army. He agreed to sell the Louisiana territory only after suffering military disaster in Europe and the Caribbean and hearing threats of war from Thomas Jefferson. (Far from being a worshipful admirer of all things French, Jefferson despised Napoleon, whom he variously called "a great scoundrel," "a moral monster," and "the ruthless destroyer of ten millions of the human race.") The War of 1812 was nearly fought against France rather than Britain, and the Monroe Doctrine was written with France clearly in mind. In the 1830s, Andrew Jackson came close to declaring war on France for its persistent refusal to make good on promised reparations for French naval crimes during Napoleon's reign.
When French politicians want to generate feelings of goodwill among Americans, they almost always appeal to the memories of Lafayette and Yorktown. They neglect to mention their role in the Civil War, when Napoleon's imperial nephew supported the South and incited disunion, carried out the first major transgression of the Monroe Doctrine, and engaged in behavior that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant called "a direct act of war against the United States."
THE FRENCH AND THE WEATHER
In the 20th century, France welcomed American help to end the First World War. During the subsequent peace negotiations, however, the French fought the United States over how to treat the vanquished Germans. By rejecting the advice of Woodrow Wilson and insisting on crippling and humiliating reparations, France fatally undermined the fledgling German democracy and planted many of the seeds of the Second World War a conflict in which the French required another American rescue. Before that liberation could occur, however, American troops landing in North Africa in 1942 encountered stiff resistance from the soldiers of Vichy France. The Greatest Generation literally had to fight its way through the French to get to the Nazis. "Next to the weather," said General Eisenhower, "[the French] have caused me more trouble in this war than any single factor."
More than 60,000 Americans who gave their lives in these two wars lie buried in French soil. Yet it was not long after the Second World War that many in France forgot this sacrifice. Anti-Americanism metastasized as a whole generation of French intellectuals embraced the West's totalitarian enemy, the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, French misrule in its Southeast Asian colonies made Ho Chi Minh's Communist movement possible and set the stage for an American debacle. If the French had followed the advice of Franklin Roosevelt and granted Vietnam its independence after 1945, the Vietnam War might not have been necessary and today that troubled country might be a prospering democracy like South Korea.
During de Gaulle's presidency and despite Kerry's storytelling France became a source of strife within the Western alliance as it undermined NATO, downplayed the Soviet menace, and even refused to rule out aiming its own nuclear missiles at the United States. In 1986, when the United States obtained positive proof that Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi was behind a fatal terrorist bombing in Berlin, the French refused Ronald Reagan's request to let U.S. warplanes fly through their airspace to retaliate against him.
At times, Americans have reacted with passionate indignation at French hostility and intransigence. In the 1790s, during the infamous XYZ Affair, the public was outraged when French officials demanded huge bribes from American diplomats. In the 1960s, de Gaulle's anti-American harangues and his dramatic decision to pull French troops from NATO resulted in boycotts of French products across the United States. Yet the myth of Franco-American friendship remains so tenacious that when each new generation of Americans encounters French enmity, it reacts with shock and disbelief.
The French see things differently. Their leaders condemn the United States as a "hyperpower" whose influence on the world stage must be balanced "balanced" being a euphemism for "opposed." According to polls, a quarter of the French public actually hoped Saddam Hussein would defeat the U.S.-led coalition last year. "We are at war with America," declared Franηois Mitterrand, shortly before his death in 1996. "A permanent war . . . a war without death. They are very hard, the Americans they are voracious. They want undivided power over the world."
Indeed, anti-Americanism has deep roots in France, especially among its political and intellectual elites. Fueled by an abiding belief in French superiority, this attitude at times has assumed odd shapes: As a diplomat in Paris in the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson toiled to disabuse French thinkers of their strange insistence that North American animals were smaller and weaker than those native to Europe. More often, however, the French have sought to contrast their Old World refinements with what they have regarded as New World vulgarities. As French prime minister Georges Clemenceau put it, "America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization."
'DELUSION' IS A FRENCH WORD
Yet the French have been victims of their own illusion: a mirage of grandeur and entitlement based on the belief that because France was once a powerful nation, it should always be a powerful nation. This has produced a national character dominated by nostalgia for a glorious past that simply cannot be recovered. French national decline began in the middle of the 18th century and has since progressed almost without interruption. The single exception came during the reign of Napoleon, when the French made an audacious and bloody bid for European dominance. Their failure has haunted them ever since. Time and again in the last two centuries, France has refused to come to grips with its diminished status as a country whose greatest general was a foreigner, whose greatest warrior was a teenage girl, and whose last great military victory came on the plains of Wagram in 1809. Instead, it projects a politics of chauvinism and resentment with much of its animus aimed at the United States, a nation whose rise to prominence in global affairs presents almost a mirror image of French erosion.
Throughout the recent unpleasantness over Iraq, the French have continued the increasingly ludicrous charade that they are in reality America's best friend "its ally forever," as President Jacques Chirac said in the wake of September 11. But true allies of the United States do not behave the way France has. Despite the British public's misgivings about the wisdom of invading Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Blair acted with a solid appreciation of America's positive role in the world and a firm understanding of common values and mutual interests. Where Britain has transformed itself from an old enemy into a true ally, France has failed to do the same. Perhaps this is simply a reflection of French political experience. Historically dominated by the extreme Right and the extreme Left, France simply has not developed a sufficiently deep foundation in liberal democracy that would lead it to believe, along with the United States and Britain, that a successful foreign policy can be based on shared ideals. The hypernationalist French continue to jockey for global supremacy much as they did 300 years ago. And while it is no sin for a government to pursue a foreign policy of national interest all nations owe this to their citizens the French have failed to realize that the United States does not now pose, and never has posed, a threat to their country.
John Kerry may claim that he will improve relations with France, but the main problem has more to do with French attitudes about America than with President Bush's diplomacy. Deep down, Kerry seems to understand this fundamental fact. A year ago, at a Democratic presidential debate in Iowa, moderator Tom Brokaw asked a question of Kerry: "What about the French? Are they friends? Are they enemies? Or something in between at this point?"
"The French are the French," Kerry responded, in a line that drew knowing laughter from the audience. "Very profound, Senator," said Brokaw to more chuckles. "Well, trust me," explained Kerry, "it has a meaning and I think most people know exactly what I mean."
Following the imbroglio over Iraq, perhaps most Americans really do understand, at long last. In the words of the French novelist and critic Alphonse Karr, Plus ηa change, plus c'est la mκme chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
-Mr. Miller is NR's national political reporter, and Mr. Molesky is an assistant professor of history at Seton Hall University. Their new book, Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France, has just been published.
The Gauls, de Gaulle, the Gall - The story told of Franco-American friendship is a nice story. But it's just a story.
JOHN J. MILLER & MARK MOLESKY
October 25, 2004
In the first presidential debate, John Kerry repeated an old story. During the Cuban missile crisis, he said, President Kennedy dispatched his secretary of state to France, where his envoy met Charles de Gaulle and offered to show him satellite photos of Soviet missile sites. But the French president wasn't interested in looking at the images. "The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me," said de Gaulle. Then Kerry delivered his punch line: "How many leaders in the world today would respond to us, as a result of what we've done, in that way?"
It was a curious anecdote. For one thing, JFK didn't send his own secretary of state, but Truman's (Dean Acheson). More significantly, de Gaulle wasn't well known for his smooth relations with American presidents and none of the presidents who had dealings with the French leader trusted him, either. "He is a very dangerous threat to us," FDR wrote to Churchill in 1943. "He has proven to be unreliable, uncooperative, and disloyal to both our governments." Dwight Eisenhower considered him a major irritant, and Lyndon Johnson clashed with him constantly over everything from France's role in NATO (which de Gaulle quit) to U.S. involvement in Vietnam (which de Gaulle condemned). Perhaps Harry Truman captured the American point of view best when he simply referred to de Gaulle as an "SOB." (And despite Kerry's yarn, Acheson said publicly that de Gaulle was not "a dependable or effective ally.")
The notion that the United States has ruptured relations with its allies in general and with France in particular is an unrelenting theme in Kerry's campaign rhetoric. "There was a time, not so long ago, when the might of our alliances was a driving force in the survival and success of freedom," said Kerry in May. And then a cowboy president came along and ruined everything. On this line of attack, the Democratic nominee has done no flip-flopping. He has been a model of consistency. But he has also been consistently wrong.
A NICE STORY
Kerry's critique of America's place in the world relies heavily on one of the most pernicious myths about U.S. history: that France is our oldest and staunchest ally, a true friend since the days of the American Revolution. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. France is, in fact, America's oldest enemy.
There is a storybook version of Franco-American relations. It begins with the valor of Lafayette and French naval support at Yorktown, continues through the Louisiana Purchase (usually interpreted as a benign real-estate transaction), and makes sure to mention the Statue of Liberty. Then it describes American doughboys fighting in the trenches beside their French comrades during the First World War and, a generation afterward, GIs storming the beaches of Normandy to liberate freedom-loving France from the Nazis. Later, during the Cold War, it has France standing with us shoulder to shoulder as we confront the Soviet threat. Isn't that our history?
Au contraire. The true story of Franco-American relations begins many years before the American Revolution, during the French and Indian Wars. Lasting nearly a century, those conflicts pitted the French and their Indian allies against American colonists and British troops. French officers used massacres as weapons of terror against the hardy men, women, and children who settled on the frontier. "For Englanders and New Yorkers," wrote Crane Brinton, the great 20th-century Harvard historian, "the existence of a French menace on the northern borders was for years a very real thing, more real than any acute danger from a foreign power was to seem to Americans until the Russians acquired their own atomic bomb." Amid this tumult, the first articulations of a recognizably American national consciousness developed. America's sense of itself was born not in a revolt against England but in a struggle with France.
Although Paris provided American rebels with crucial assistance during their bid for independence, direct French military intervention came only after the Americans had achieved a decisive triumph at Saratoga a victory that practically guaranteed home rule, if not more. The French crown, of course, regarded the ideals of the Declaration of Independence as abhorrent and frightening. King Louis XVI even put a picture of Benjamin Franklin in his chamber pot. French aristocrats viewed Lafayette's idealism with contempt and branded him a criminal for traveling to America against the king's explicit command. Louis and his government overcame their revulsion toward the young republic only because they sniffed an opportunity to weaken Britain, their ancient rival.
To be sure, France did become an ally for a few years in the late 1770s and early 1780s, but that was because American sovereignty served French geopolitical aims. Even so, it was a tense relationship, one compromised by French blunders and even betrayal. In 1779, when John Paul Jones was battling H.M.S. Serapis during which engagement he shouted the immortal words, "I have not yet begun to fight" a French warship actually fired broadsides into the Bonhomme Richard. The French captain seems to have wanted to claim Jones's victory for himself.
This was hardly the only instance of French treachery. After Yorktown, during the peace talks, France sought to limit American gains because it feared the new nation might become too powerful. If the French had achieved all of their objectives at the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the United States today might be confined to a slender band of territory along the eastern seaboard, like a North American version of Chile.
In 1998, French defense minister Alain Richard declared that "France and the United States never fought each other." This is manifestly untrue. Within a generation of Yorktown, French and American forces were exchanging deadly fire during the little-known Quasi War of 1798-1800 during which France became the first military enemy of the United States following the ratification of the Constitution. Shortly before these hostilities, France even supplied the United States with its first foreign subversive: French ambassador Edmond Charles Genet, better known as "Citizen Genet." In 1796, a Genet successor, Pierre Adet, meddled in the presidential election in a failed attempt to prevent John Adams from becoming commander-in-chief. It was the first time a foreign power tried to influence the outcome of an American election.
During the Napoleonic era, French ambitions endangered the United States and its westward expansion. Napoleon himself longed to invade North America with a powerful army. He agreed to sell the Louisiana territory only after suffering military disaster in Europe and the Caribbean and hearing threats of war from Thomas Jefferson. (Far from being a worshipful admirer of all things French, Jefferson despised Napoleon, whom he variously called "a great scoundrel," "a moral monster," and "the ruthless destroyer of ten millions of the human race.") The War of 1812 was nearly fought against France rather than Britain, and the Monroe Doctrine was written with France clearly in mind. In the 1830s, Andrew Jackson came close to declaring war on France for its persistent refusal to make good on promised reparations for French naval crimes during Napoleon's reign.
When French politicians want to generate feelings of goodwill among Americans, they almost always appeal to the memories of Lafayette and Yorktown. They neglect to mention their role in the Civil War, when Napoleon's imperial nephew supported the South and incited disunion, carried out the first major transgression of the Monroe Doctrine, and engaged in behavior that Gen. Ulysses S. Grant called "a direct act of war against the United States."
THE FRENCH AND THE WEATHER
In the 20th century, France welcomed American help to end the First World War. During the subsequent peace negotiations, however, the French fought the United States over how to treat the vanquished Germans. By rejecting the advice of Woodrow Wilson and insisting on crippling and humiliating reparations, France fatally undermined the fledgling German democracy and planted many of the seeds of the Second World War a conflict in which the French required another American rescue. Before that liberation could occur, however, American troops landing in North Africa in 1942 encountered stiff resistance from the soldiers of Vichy France. The Greatest Generation literally had to fight its way through the French to get to the Nazis. "Next to the weather," said General Eisenhower, "[the French] have caused me more trouble in this war than any single factor."
More than 60,000 Americans who gave their lives in these two wars lie buried in French soil. Yet it was not long after the Second World War that many in France forgot this sacrifice. Anti-Americanism metastasized as a whole generation of French intellectuals embraced the West's totalitarian enemy, the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, French misrule in its Southeast Asian colonies made Ho Chi Minh's Communist movement possible and set the stage for an American debacle. If the French had followed the advice of Franklin Roosevelt and granted Vietnam its independence after 1945, the Vietnam War might not have been necessary and today that troubled country might be a prospering democracy like South Korea.
During de Gaulle's presidency and despite Kerry's storytelling France became a source of strife within the Western alliance as it undermined NATO, downplayed the Soviet menace, and even refused to rule out aiming its own nuclear missiles at the United States. In 1986, when the United States obtained positive proof that Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi was behind a fatal terrorist bombing in Berlin, the French refused Ronald Reagan's request to let U.S. warplanes fly through their airspace to retaliate against him.
At times, Americans have reacted with passionate indignation at French hostility and intransigence. In the 1790s, during the infamous XYZ Affair, the public was outraged when French officials demanded huge bribes from American diplomats. In the 1960s, de Gaulle's anti-American harangues and his dramatic decision to pull French troops from NATO resulted in boycotts of French products across the United States. Yet the myth of Franco-American friendship remains so tenacious that when each new generation of Americans encounters French enmity, it reacts with shock and disbelief.
The French see things differently. Their leaders condemn the United States as a "hyperpower" whose influence on the world stage must be balanced "balanced" being a euphemism for "opposed." According to polls, a quarter of the French public actually hoped Saddam Hussein would defeat the U.S.-led coalition last year. "We are at war with America," declared Franηois Mitterrand, shortly before his death in 1996. "A permanent war . . . a war without death. They are very hard, the Americans they are voracious. They want undivided power over the world."
Indeed, anti-Americanism has deep roots in France, especially among its political and intellectual elites. Fueled by an abiding belief in French superiority, this attitude at times has assumed odd shapes: As a diplomat in Paris in the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson toiled to disabuse French thinkers of their strange insistence that North American animals were smaller and weaker than those native to Europe. More often, however, the French have sought to contrast their Old World refinements with what they have regarded as New World vulgarities. As French prime minister Georges Clemenceau put it, "America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization."
'DELUSION' IS A FRENCH WORD
Yet the French have been victims of their own illusion: a mirage of grandeur and entitlement based on the belief that because France was once a powerful nation, it should always be a powerful nation. This has produced a national character dominated by nostalgia for a glorious past that simply cannot be recovered. French national decline began in the middle of the 18th century and has since progressed almost without interruption. The single exception came during the reign of Napoleon, when the French made an audacious and bloody bid for European dominance. Their failure has haunted them ever since. Time and again in the last two centuries, France has refused to come to grips with its diminished status as a country whose greatest general was a foreigner, whose greatest warrior was a teenage girl, and whose last great military victory came on the plains of Wagram in 1809. Instead, it projects a politics of chauvinism and resentment with much of its animus aimed at the United States, a nation whose rise to prominence in global affairs presents almost a mirror image of French erosion.
Throughout the recent unpleasantness over Iraq, the French have continued the increasingly ludicrous charade that they are in reality America's best friend "its ally forever," as President Jacques Chirac said in the wake of September 11. But true allies of the United States do not behave the way France has. Despite the British public's misgivings about the wisdom of invading Iraq, Prime Minister Tony Blair acted with a solid appreciation of America's positive role in the world and a firm understanding of common values and mutual interests. Where Britain has transformed itself from an old enemy into a true ally, France has failed to do the same. Perhaps this is simply a reflection of French political experience. Historically dominated by the extreme Right and the extreme Left, France simply has not developed a sufficiently deep foundation in liberal democracy that would lead it to believe, along with the United States and Britain, that a successful foreign policy can be based on shared ideals. The hypernationalist French continue to jockey for global supremacy much as they did 300 years ago. And while it is no sin for a government to pursue a foreign policy of national interest all nations owe this to their citizens the French have failed to realize that the United States does not now pose, and never has posed, a threat to their country.
John Kerry may claim that he will improve relations with France, but the main problem has more to do with French attitudes about America than with President Bush's diplomacy. Deep down, Kerry seems to understand this fundamental fact. A year ago, at a Democratic presidential debate in Iowa, moderator Tom Brokaw asked a question of Kerry: "What about the French? Are they friends? Are they enemies? Or something in between at this point?"
"The French are the French," Kerry responded, in a line that drew knowing laughter from the audience. "Very profound, Senator," said Brokaw to more chuckles. "Well, trust me," explained Kerry, "it has a meaning and I think most people know exactly what I mean."
Following the imbroglio over Iraq, perhaps most Americans really do understand, at long last. In the words of the French novelist and critic Alphonse Karr, Plus ηa change, plus c'est la mκme chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
-Mr. Miller is NR's national political reporter, and Mr. Molesky is an assistant professor of history at Seton Hall University. Their new book, Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France, has just been published.