Wikipedia

Anti-French sentiment

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Marskell (talk | contribs) at 12:19, 22 August 2005. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

Anti-French sentiment in the United States is characterized by disapproval of many or all things French. It often takes the form of moral censure corresponding with tensions in Franco-U.S. relations.

Before the Second World War

The United States of America was formed in a revolution by colonies of the British Crown. Relations between the colonies and France prior to this revolution were therefore shaped by British-French relations. The colonials fought for Britain against France in what's sometimes termed the French and Indian War. Furthermore the Puritan colonies and Scottish Presbyterians of the inland regions tended toward Anti-Catholicism so hated all Catholic nations. By the same token a few Catholics in the colonies felt uncomfortable with the anti-clerical thought of many French philosophers.

How widespread all that is remains uncertain, but during the Revolutionary War and immediately after Americans tended more toward "Francophilia." Many of the French philosophers proved inspirational to the Founding Fathers. Further Thomas Paine would later feel admirations for the spirit of Revolutionary France. In patriotic American contexts of the time, France was characterized as the first ally of the American revolutionaries. When the Marquis de Lafayette toured the United States in (1824-1825), he was accorded a hero's welcome as the first American celebrity, and numerous new settlements were named Lafayette, Fayette and Fayetteville.

Harvard University professor and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury A. Piatt Andrew summed up this Francophile tradition, when he wrote:

"Few in number and limited in their activities, this little band of American ambulance drivers in France is of course insignificant when compared with the tens of thousands of young Frenchmen who crossed the ocean as soldiers and sailors to help America in 1777. To the valor and devotion of these Frenchmen we owe our very existence as an independent nation, and nothing that Americans have done for France during these last hard years of trial can be thought of — without embarrassment — in relation with what Frenchmen did for us in those unforgettable years of our peril from 1777 to 1781."

Anti-French feelings remained mostly dormant in that climate.

Despite the positive view some Americans had of The French Revolution it awakened or created Anti-French feelings among many Federalists. An ideological split was already emerging between Francophobe and Francophile sentiment, with John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and their fellow Federalists taking a skeptical view of France, even as Thomas Jefferson and other Democratic-Republicans urged closer ties. As for the Revolution many or most Federalists denounced it as far too radical and violent. Those on the Democratic-Republican side disliked its excesses, but remained hopeful it would make France a progressive and liberal nation. Hence the division between conservative and liberal on France perhaps began that early.

Adding to the mix in the 1790s, the French, under a new post-revolutionary government, accused the United States of collaborating with the English and proceeded to impound UK-bound US merchant ships. Attempts at diplomacy lead to the 1797 XYZ Affair in which three French agents approached American delegates requesting a tribute of $250,000. This lead to a state of Quasi-War, an undeclared war fought entirely at sea between the United States and France from 1798 to 1801. Relations improved after the rise of Napoleon and the election of Thomas Jefferson culminating with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

With the influx of Irish immigrants in the 1840s and the rise of a populist sub-culture hostile to Britain, France became a rallying-point, though an ambivalent one, for its republicanism was tarnished. American cultured classes embraced French styles and luxuries after the Civil War: Americans trained as architects in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, French haute cuisine reigned at elite American tables, and upper class women in the U.S. followed Parisian clothing fashions. Following World War I, a generation of rich American expatriates and bohemians settled in Paris. The stock-market crash and the Great Depression put a damper on international lifestyles, and a change in temper of internal French politics during the interbellum sent many politically fastidious Americans home.

The First World War had also brought the British and the Americans closer together; and a millennium old British reservation against the French was easily revived in a nation descended from British colonies. Reservations against the function of the French parliamentarism, against Catholicism, against real or perceived French arrogance in negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, etc. weakened the emotional ties between American Francophiles and the French. Additionally, French attitudes against Weimar Germany, combining fear and a wish for dominance, were by many seen as the major obstacle for a lasting European peace, as it mobilized the Germans into revanchism and militarism.

Post World War II

The collapse of France in 1940 under German forces came as a profound shock to Francophilic Americans, who remembered a quite different Paris through the rosy tints of popular culture. For less Fracophilic Americans this collapse seemed rapid enough to start the idea the French are weak or quick to surrender. This is in some respects curious as another imperialist power, the Netherlands, had perhaps a more thorough and rapid conquest by the Nazis. Although at times deemed to be weak or proned to surrender by certain Americans, The Netherlands rarely receives such stereotypes in the US.

Soon after the end of World War II, relations between the United States and France began to sour. The French actions in Algerian War of Independence inspired condemnation and horror by many around the world. It contributed to anti-French sentiments in the Islamic world up to the 1990s. In the Suez Crisis of (1956) the French angered even idealistic Americans by being seen as an excuse to make an opportunistic grab at a financial resource of a poor nation. That resource being the Suez Canal. The French in the 1950s also suffered a humilating defeat at Dien Bien Phu at the hands of the Vietnamese. These events led the United States to push for France to end its colonial empire.

Franco-U.S. relations worsened further under Charles de Gaulle, who rejected the position of France as a weaker partner of the US and attempted to position France as a counterweight to U.S. power in Europe and certain parts of the Third World. This included demanding equal status in NATO, and then pulling out of NATO's integrated military command when this was refused. France also distanced itself from Israel, with which it used to have a very close relationship, and began to be more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause in the Middle East. Israel then sought closer ties with the United States. France's troubled history in ruling Vietnam helped make the Vietnam War generally unpopular there. Hence De Gaulle's government began to criticize the US for intervening in a nation they learned to leave. A small percentage of Americans blamed France's earlier role in the region for the entire war or they felt French history in the region meant they had no right to criticize. France also tried to develop less hostile relations with the communist world, including the Soviet Union, while it established military forces meant to oppose a Soviet invasion. In particular, French pursuit of nuclear weapons and an independent military capability were also designed to move France away from dependency upon the US. During de Gaulle's time in office, Franco-U.S. relations reached a great low, and there were accusations from American commentators that France was "no longer a Western power."

De Gaulle's support for Quebec independence was partly seen in the U.S. as an unwelcome intrusion of a European power into the affairs of a sovereign country in the Americas, as exemplified by his Vive le Québec libre speech in 1967, and flying in the face of the Monroe Doctrine, whereby the U.S. vowed never to allow the reestablishment of direct European influence in the Western Hemisphere. This call for the independence of a province of a close ally sharing land borders with the U.S. was seen as a hostile intrusion by a nation that the U.S. saw as a historic friend. De Gaulle's words managed not only to anger the United States, but also Canada and the United Kingdom who saw it as arrogance on the part of De Gaulle.

Relations improved somewhat under de Gaulle's successors, but tensions reappeared intermittently. In 1969 a French documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié, English translation The Sorrow and the Pity, brought back an earlier issue. Ever since the Dreyfus Affair accusations of popular French Anti-Semitism had been intermittently newsworthy. This documentary indicated that the French may not have resisted the Nazi-puppet Vichy government as much as many Americans had believed or hoped. The director was the German born Marcel Ophüls, but he had lived in France since childhood. He shared writing credits with Frenchman André Harris. The film proved controversial in France, but it primarily aimed at simply encouraging honesty about anti-Semitism in France's history rather than inspiring any anti-French hostility. It is likely that the amount of US viewers of the film was minimal. Still many of the Americans who saw it tended toward the intellectual end of the spectrum so it may have inspired renewed intellectual interest in Anti-Semitism in French history. In time this spread down the academic ladder to encourage a more widespread misperception that the French to this day are unusually Anti-Semitic or that any sympathy they have for Palestine is related to Anti-Semitism. In reality polls indicate that although modern France has a higher rate of "unfavorable views of Jews" than the US, Canada, or UK it's not much different than the rest of Continental Europe. Pew Poll on international views of religious groups In fact their view of Judaism may even be more positive than the US Favorable views of Jews by nation Both these work as more Americans might be neutral on the subject or refuse to answer.

Added to that France, more strongly than any other nation, sees the European Union as a method of counter-balancing American power, and thus works towards such ends as having the Euro challenge the preeminent position of the United States dollar in global trade. France also still has many small colonies in the South Pacific, the Caribbean, and South America, all of which enjoy full political representation at the national level, as well as varying degrees of legislative autonomy. The American government remained lukewarm towards France, and pursued much closer relationships with other states such as the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain and Italy.

Many Americans, especially conservatives, have a negative view of France. Left-wingers tend to have a better opinion of France. This is seen when conservative talk hosts and magazines regularly decry the French whereas Michael Moore went to accept an award for his movie Fahrenheit 9/11 at the Cannes Film Festival in France — though the award was granted by an international jury with a minority of French people.

2003 Iraq War

See also Popular opposition to the 2003 Iraq War

Anti-French sentiment in the United States returned to the fore in the wake of France's refusal to endorse the 2003 US plan to invade Iraq in the UN Security Council. While other nations were also openly opposed to the plan (notably Germany, Russia, Belgium and the People's Republic of China), France was accused of particularly ferocious criticism, because it was seen by invasion proponents as opposing not because of a disagreement over what to do about the situation, but as a way of opposing the United States for the sake of decreasing the diplomatic power of the United States and building an opposing power movement.

France was accused, mainly in the US, of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, of hypocritically acting out of economic interests in Iraq's oil (a similar charge was leveled at Russia and Germany, but with far less ferocity), and of hypocritically sending a military presence to Côte d'Ivoire (formerly known as the Ivory Coast in English) during the Iraq crisis. It had been known that France had been doing business with Iraq in violation of the terms of the Gulf War embargo which may have enabled Iraq president Saddam Hussein to consolidate his power after the disastrous 1991 conflict.

France and Russia, both permanent members of the Security Council with veto power, warned that they would oppose the proposed new U.N. resolution authorizing the invasion of Iraq on March 11, 2003. Since it appears unlikely that the plan would have received the 60% support of the Security Council (which it needed see The UN Security Council and the Iraq war for further details), the proposition was cancelled. This caused some to wonder why France was singled out. One major difference, however, between the French and Russian opposition was that France was vowing to use veto power whereas Russia was going to merely vote against the resolution. The veto is controversial when used by anyone and curiously this seems more true of nations that rarely use it. In the case of France the last time they used the veto without US agreement was in 1976 over an issue with the Comoros. Veto history Many people (including some French people) felt hostilty to France came from the idea it acted in open competition against the U.S. to convince other members [1]. Others blame the U.S. media or media manipulation of using France as a scapegoat to avoid discussion of the many other countries opposed to the plan. France was also viewed as using French political power to unduly influence countries that the US also wished to unduly influence. French President Jacques Chirac was quoted as telling eastern European nations that expressed support for the US that they "missed an opportunity to keep quiet" and were "not very well-mannered and a little careless of the dangers which come with a too-rapid alignment with the American position."

It was also argued that accusations of knee-jerk anti-Americanism from France were made so as to avoid discussing the actual reasons that France (and more generally global protests against war on Iraq) said it had to oppose the war - namely that France did not believe there was a clear and imminent danger from Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, that it was not consistent with the War on Terrorism, and that a war would only destabilize the Middle East while not providing long-term solutions.

Two years after the end of the war in Iraq, nothing significant concerning Weapons of Mass Destruction has been found, and the political situation in Iraq is widely seen as one of political turmoil and terrorism. Among many patriotic papers this has had little or no affect on anti-french sentiments.

China and Taiwan

During a state visit to China on April 21, 2005 Chirac's Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin lent support to a new "anti-secession" law on Taiwan, allowing China to use "non-peaceful" means to to bring Taiwan back into the fold, and continued to push for a lifting of the EU arms embargo against China. France's position was seen as attempting to aid China in altering the balance of power against the US in the East Asia region as China is the most plausible military power to be able to do that. The French support of ending the EU arms embargo drew the most ire from the US and from supporters of Taiwanese indendence. The push to end the embargo also inspired disapproval among many critical of Human rights in the People's Republic of China. Hence the US threatened sanctions against the EU unless the embargo was continued. Interestingly France's current eagerness to sell arms to China comes after it had previously sold high-tech fighter jets to Taiwan in the early 1990s.

Diplomatic friction

Donald Rumsfeld famously referred to France and Germany as "Old Europe" while referring to the many Central European countries which pledged diplomatic backing of the US war as "New Europe," raising long-existent fears that expansion of the European Union would be used by the US to keep Europe politically divided.

Chirac became the subject of harsh criticism in U.S. media [2] [3] and French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin emerged as a prominent critic of U.S. action in Iraq.

Cultural friction

The cultures and governments of the US and France have some significant differences which cause friction or misunderstanding. What Americans know of French culture is primarily avant-garde cinema, high fashion, and gourmet food. The French also have some cultural tendency to believe smiling should be reserved for when you actually feel happiness rather than simply being part of a normal greeting as in the US. These elements add up to give many Americans the impression the French are pretentious, moody, elitist, and unfriendly. These elements had a role in anti-French sentiments even before recent wars.

More recently the French Republic's Secularism has become something of an issue in the more devout Christian and Islamic segments of American society. There are some similarities there to The Federalists reaction to French anti-clericalism. That said modern hostility to French secularism is mostly caused by recent events in France. Most significantly the French restrictions or bans on religious apparel deemed ostentatious. American religious and libertarian types deem this to be a sign the French are elitist or even bigoted.

As always the perceived debt and failures France is deemed to have because of the World Wars also has some traction in the US. From the public's perspective the derogatory phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys began as a joke on The Simpsons television program in 1995. It was used first used by the Scottish born Groundskeeper Willy character to disparage the French. The jibe likely was intended ironically or satirically by The Simpsons and not initially seen as being in any way sincere. However around 2002-3 it became popular in a few Washington, DC circles. National Review contributor Jonah Goldberg claimed credit for making the term known. Many US commentators and politicians, including Andy Rooney on the television program 60 Minutes, characterized the French as being ungrateful for opposing U.S. foreign policy after U.S. soldiers fought to liberate France from Nazi Germany during World War II. Bumper stickers were produced in the United States which jokingly called for the United States to invade: "Iraq first, France next!", and "First Iraq, then Chirac!". Although sentiments like this could not be said to begin or end with the current administration as in the 1990s an unscientific poll by Michael Moore's TV Nation showed France as the nation American's would most wish to invade. Then and now this view is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but does represent anti-French hostility.

A well known incident occurred in March 11, 2003 when the cafeteria menus in the three United States House of Representatives office buildings changed the name of french fries to freedom fries. French toast was also changed to freedom toast. (During World War I, in a similar move, attempts were made to replace the word sauerkraut with the term liberty cabbage, hamburger replaced with Liberty Sandwich, and frankfurter with hot dog, in menus and in popular speech; only the latter was successful.) Most Europeans, and a sizable number of Americans, dismissed these name changes as "gimmickry". Besides, the rebuke went amiss, since the term "French Fries" is not used in French -- in France, "French" fries are credited to Belgium.

Congressman Billy Tauzin from Louisiana, the only Cajun in the House of Representatives, removed the French language section of his official website because of anti-French sentiment. Congressman Roy Blunt began using jokes which alleged that the French were cowards.

Certain Americans claimed they purchased great quantities of French wine and poured it out on the streets instead of drinking it. Many, even other protesters, have noted that no matter what one does with the wine, buying it still provides money for those who produced it. In that regard it could be called an anti-protest, despite being an unintentional one.

Boycott

Many voices on the right in America (especially Bill O'Reilly) called for a boycott of French products, but its effect was negligible. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in February 2004, the United States imported $2.26 billion in French goods and services, up from $2.18 billion in February 2002.[4] However, the president of IC&A Inc, a business that imports only French products, reported demand fell in the vicinity of 40% to 50% from February 2003 levels.

Calls for boycott largely focused on products deemed typically French – wines, bottled water (Evian and others), lingerie and luxury items. These constitute a small minority of French trade, whereas lesser-profile products such as aircraft (for example, Airbus), machinery, and chemicals account for a larger share. This may explain the above discrepancy.

There was no large scale boycott of French products. But some wine manufacturers in France apparently suffered some loss of sales in the US as it was reported in the media. It is unclear whether it was due to downturn in economy as French wine tends to be expensive or due to anti-French sentiment.

One area of continuing controversy is the dispute over Airbus goverment subsidies which has helped the European aircraft manufacturer stay competitive with Boeing. Although Airbus is a consortium of four nations, it is viewed as a French-controlled venture since it is headquarted in Toulouse, France. Many US business conservatives have regarded Airbus as "cheats" for the generous loans that they have recieved (although Boeing also recieves beneficial military contracts that some see as equivalent to loans).

Anti-French sentiment reactions

Reaction to anti-French sentiment in the US was a tenor of the anti-war protest in Montreal, Quebec on 15 March 2003, and may have been partially responsible for that city's 200,000-strong turn-out, being one of the largest of that day's worldwide protests. Montreal's various protests against the Iraq war were some of the largest in North America.

Because of the sometimes-strained relationship between the two countries, some Americans, including editorialists and congressmen, relish anti-French jokes. Some of these allude to events of the Second World War, alleged French military weakness and cooperation with the Third Reich. Such characterizations have been used by conservative editorialists to dismiss the French opposition to the War in Iraq as fear and appeasement with respect to radical Islamism. The French were also accused of ingratitude for the US intervention in World War I and the allied forces liberation of France in World War II. Many feel that the French government should express its gratitude to the American government by maintaining a foreign policy similar to that of the United States. Such arguments were especially intense during the lead-up to the War in Iraq [5]. There was also criticism of French domestic policy, some claiming that French criticism of Israeli actions was motivated by anti-semitism, and some claimed that France is a "socialist" country, although France currently has a conservative government under Jacques Chirac.

See also Offensive terms per nationality.

Books & References

  • Richard Z. Chesnoff, The Arrogance of the French : Why They Can't Stand Us--and Why the Feeling Is Mutual, Sentinel, April, 2005 ISBN 1595230106
  • Edward C.Knox, The New York Times Looks at France, The French Review, N°6, Vol.75, May 2002
  • No other national or ethnic group appears to get the same continually negative treatment in print media reserved for France and the French, with the possible exception of Arabs or Palestinians, and even there, the treatment is not so much cultural as political, linked to a specific context or event.If one were to substitute, for example, "Mexican" or "Japanese" or "Indian" for "French", what would reader reaction be?".
  • Martin A. Schain : "Transatlantic Tensions. From Conflicts of Interests to Conflict of Values?" Colloquium, CERI/GMF, 2 FEBRUARY 2-3, 2004 POLITICS,IMMIGRATION AND MULTICULTURALISM IN FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES Department of Politics and Center for European Studies New York University PDF document
  • Pierre-André Taguieff : The force of prejudice : on racism and its doubles ( Minneapolis, Minn. : University of Minnesota Press, ©2001. ISBN 0816623724 0816623732 )
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anti-French_sentiment&oldid=21567841"
  NODES
admin 1
Idea 3
idea 3
inspiration 1
INTERN 4
Note 1