Storms across the Atlantic
June 8, 2003 - The Chicago Tribune
Place de la Concorde was choked with war protesters the day the bombs started falling on Iraq. Once things began to unravel at the United Nations Security Council, posters around town cropped up with the standing order to convene on the U.S. Embassy and Consulate at 6 p.m. on the day war broke out. Much earlier on the afternoon of March 20, however, people all over Paris had already taken to the streets.
In the middle of the route where Charles de Gaulle, flanked by jubilant U.S. troops and freshly liberated Gauls, symbolically retook France on Aug. 26, 1944, 80,000 French joined millions around the world in a protest against a U.S.-led war seen as unjust.
Was this just the typical French whine?
Rather than creating anything truly new, the imbroglio rekindled long-standing stereotypes that both sides seemed to do their best to live up to.
When French President Jacques Chirac and Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin blindsided Secretary of State Colin Powell with the threat of a Security Council veto, pro-Bush America became decidedly anti-French. Some U.S. news media interpreted this as an anti-American stance, encouraged boycotts and breathed new life into Willie the Groundskeeper’s phrase “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” on “The Simpsons.”
French-bashing became decidedly in again.
Then again, there were some other provocative behaviors from the Americans. They called those who had a profound influence on its Founding Fathers “old Europe.” They held a prewar hawks-only peacekeeping summit in the Azores. They didn’t refute claims that the U.S. National Security Agency spied on the five UN Security Council swing vote countries. All of that helped inflame anti-Americanism in Europe.
While the French do smirk at the self-immolating geniuses who converted to “freedom fries,” boycott Au Bon Pain cafes and flush French’s mustard down the toilet in protest (which is all ridiculous because none of the three has French connections), it’s beneath this layer of things happening on the surface where things get tricky.
While the American contingent appears happy bashing all things with a French aura (someone should tell GWB he’s been spotted wearing French cuffs), the French reserve the lion’s share of their anti-American sentiment for George W. Bush and his foreign policy team.
“French opinion has huge problems with George W. Bush and his political vocabulary. He comes from something totally opposite of what the French know. We were much closer in values with the way Bill Clinton presented himself,” said Jerome Sainte-Marie, polling director at the French group BVA.
At the UN, France saw Bush and Powell’s performance akin to a cowboy-driven steamroller.
“Powell and Bush seemed to act as if the world needed to be governed, as if saying, `If we are firm, the world will follow us,’” said Pierre Hassner, international relations professor emeritus at Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris.
“France feels the biggest power in the world [the U.S.] like an illness,” said professor Bertrand Badie, Hassner’s colleague.
Along with what is seen as a black and white worldview, Bush scares the French off by incorporating religious references and prayer into his presidential duties and speeches. Before the war, he appeared on several French magazine covers praying, which was seen as dangerous in a country that takes the separation of church and state to the letter.
“He’s pushing the worst values forward: messianism, arrogance, and U.S. economy and foreign policy over everything. He gives the impression like he’s the only person in the world,” said Parisian political science student Anne Bory. “When you come from such a great and prosperous country like the U.S., it’s hard to understand how you project yourself because your horizon is so large.”
Many of the French also are disgusted by what they see as Americans having lost some of their ability to keep a critical eye on their government.
“You now have to say and think patriotic things in the U.S.,” said French photo editor Julien Jourdes, who has lived and worked in the U.S. “The critical side has gone out the window—Bush has kidnapped public opinion.”
Jourdes, along with being married to an American, says he feels torn as a Frenchman. “Millions demonstrated around the world against the war, and it didn’t change a thing. The U.S. did it because nobody could stop them.”
France is also wary of how U.S. news media coverage contributes to blind patriotism.
“CNN and Fox News made a show out of the war that dehumanizes it to the point where it becomes like a cartoon,” said Bory, citing backdrops of waving American flags and feature stories on “cool” gadgetry.
“When you’ve been big and now you’re smaller,” she concedes, “you don’t necessarily like the new No. 1.”
Returning to the U.S. for the first time in several months, I got to see how France looked from the U.S., to see whether Fox News was as lopsided as it was reputed to be, for example. I wasn’t prepared, however, for the feeling that having lived in France would reflect badly on me.
Before I left France, some American friends told me I had no idea how bad the anti-French sentiment would be, even though others related better to the French stance than they did to the American one.
Due to what I hope was some misguided American anger, there were moments when I ended up feeling less comfortable in my hometown than the French one I live in.
Old friends gave the impression that I had been doing the McCarthy-era equivalent of sleeping with communists. Defending (or not defending) U.S. policy to Frenchmen is an everyday occurrence for an American in Paris, but in the U.S., before we even got to what I thought about the conflict, I was judged for simply living in the country that could say “non.”
By Joe Ray. Joe Ray is a freelance writer and U.S. citizen who lives in Paris
