Perspective section
November 14, 2004 - Chicago Tribune
PARIS—The headlines in France ranged from the depressingly funny to the unprintably dire.
“L’Empire empire”—the Empire worsens—sighed the left-leaning daily Liberation. Courrier International put a Charlie Brown-style fine point on French sentiment with what can very loosely be translated as: “Good grief, four more years!”
To the delight of many in America who were pouring their Bordeaux out on the street in 2003, the U.S. presidential election didn’t go the way many of the French wanted. If we are to believe the campaign speeches of President Bush, it will be at least four more years until French President Jacques Chirac is making decisions for America.
This leaves Francophiles and Francophobes alike wondering what is to come and what the sentiment is between the two countries right now.
There was an overt desire in France to see Sen. John Kerry beat Bush. Mock election polls overwhelmingly chose Kerry, displaying what Stephane Rozes, opinion director at French polling group CSA, refers to as “systematic and massive support” for the Democrat.
Indeed, to find Bush supporters in France, you have to look to politicians like Alain Madelin, who is seen as something of a playground bully on the French political circuit, or to the supporters of extreme right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen.
As part of a monthlong look at the U.S., the French-German channel Arte showed Sydney Pollack’s rugged western “Jeremiah Johnson” the night before the election. After the Bush victory had been declared, rugged versions of the American dream gave way to Pat Benatar’s “Love is a Battlefield” on French airwaves, reminding listeners that it was back to the status quo.
According to a post-election poll conducted by CSA for the daily Le Parisien, 65 percent of people polled believed that the re-election was a “bad thing,” with only 12 percent who believe things are going to get better between the two countries.
“Everything depends on what Bush does,” Rozes said.
Before the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, the balance of power between the U.S. and Europe was a hot subject, but once the bombs began to fall, catchwords like “bipolar” or “multilateral” gave way to “unilateral” and “imperial.”
Now the Bush re-election has caused many politicians in “old Europe” to redouble their efforts to create a European constitution, which they see as part of a larger plan to level the playing field.
In France, it was a movement that was losing steam before the election, but it’s now back on the map with a big, red X.
“Chirac might now actually be able to use the Bush re-election to push this agenda,” said Pierre Hassner, a specialist in Franco-American relations, author and professor emeritus at the prestigious international relations school the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques.
“The French would have had to cooperate and make gestures to a Kerry government,” Hassner said, “but now Chirac might actually use the Bush re-election to push his agenda, and it gives France a role and worldwide prestige having opposed the U.S.”
Richard Labeviere, editor in chief at Radio France Internationale, believes the future between the two countries is a dark landscape. “But there are a few bright points,” said Labeviere, author of “Dollars for Terror: The United States and Islam,” a near-prescient book that came out in English in 2000 and became a reference work after 9/11.
“They say we’re allies, and it’s true,” he said, citing the war on terrorism, secret service initiatives, and Ivory Coast and Haiti as places where the two countries have worked together.
“But the misunderstanding comes in the Middle East, over Iraq and Israel and Palestine,” he said.
France is far more sympathetic to the Palestinians and less supportive of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon than the U.S., but the real rupture came when France placed itself at the forefront of the drive against the war in Iraq. After France threatened a veto at the UN Security Council in early 2003, Franco-American relations quickly soured, reflected in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s famous reference to France and Germany as “old Europe.”
Curiously, though, it’s in the Middle East that Hassner sees potential for a rapprochement. “Each side could push where it helps the most,” he said. “France could use its influence on Palestine and the U.S. on Sharon.” He’s cautious, though: “I’m not sure Bush wants to budge, and I’m not sure Chirac does either.”
Labeviere isn’t so optimistic. “The misunderstanding is total and doesn’t look like it’s getting any better,” he said.
Francois Bayrou, the head of the centrist UDF party, summed up the flummoxed feeling of the French along with a sense of the distance that’s been created between the two countries in the past few years. “U.S. society is in the process of making choices we no longer understand,” Bayrou said.
Nowhere is this distance more evident than around the issue of Bush’s public piety. For the French, the nail in the coffin is Bush’s open references to his faith, which, in a country that takes the separation of church and state to the letter, no one here can understand.
“Bush drives us crazy with his religion, and I don’t think its going to get better,” Labeviere said.
Indeed, the nationally televised funeral last week for the nine French peacekeepers killed in the Ivory Coast was the first time in a long time that Chirac publicly occupied the same space as a religious leader at a religious service.
“`In God We Trust’ is written on your money, and you don’t find that in Europe,” Labeviere said. “That’s the whole problem.”
Even with all of the anti-Bush sentiment that has built up here during his time in office, French fascination for America has remained curiously untarnished for the time being, but feelings of anti-Americanism may be swayed by how Bush acts in his second term.
“We used to be able to chalk this up as a fluke,” Hassner said of the Bush election in 2000, “but I’m worried about an entrenchment of anti-Americanism. I think it’s Bush who’s got to take the first step.”
