In Defense of America Read Online Free PDF Page A

academic who produced a magisterial analysis of French historical antipathy to the United States shortly before the Iraq invasion.
    It is, as Nicolas Sarkozy, now France’s president, said with understatement in Washington, DC, in 2006, a “complicated” relationship. France’s early alliance with America lasted only until its own revolution of 1789. Walter Mead, of the Council on Foreign Relations, discussing Roger’s arguments, notes, “The short-lived period of Franco-American unity during the American Revolution” was inspired partly by France’s desire for “revenge on Britain for the humiliations of the Seven Years’ War,” a conflict which had drawn in all the great powers of Europe. 19
    There have always been figures in French history who championed American values, beginning with the Marquis de Lafayette, who fought with George Washington and returned home to argue for the American way. (The White House, in a heavy-handed and high-calorie compliment, served President Sarkozy a dessert called Lafayette’s Legacy on his November 2007 visit.) There have been spasms when shared republican ideals have expressed themselves in romantic gestures, most solidly in the presentation of the Statue of Liberty by France to the United States in 1886. But Alexis de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America,
published in 1835 and 1840, was derided in France for the rest of the century for “sugarcoating” the United States. France backed the South in the Civil War (partly for its perceived Latinate rather than “Anglo-Saxon” culture), hoping to see the war put a limit on American power. In 1898, when America declared war on Spain, France became alarmed that it might be next. That was the point, Roger argues, when French anti-Americanism became serious.
    France then resented the late entry (from its point of view) of American troops into the First World War in 1917, and felt the terms of the settlement at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 left it shackled to American moneylenders (a provocation for anti-Semitic French productions, including the notorious
L’Oncle Shylock,
or
Uncle Shylock,
a play, of sorts, on “Uncle Sam”).
    It takes some doing to see the United States as a greater threat than Hitler, but Hubert Beuve-Méry, the founder of
Le Monde,
in May 1944, just weeks before American GIs landed on the Normandy beaches, argued that “The Americans represent a real danger for France, different from the one posed by Germany or the one with which the Russians may, in time, threaten us. The Americans may have preserved a cult of Liberty but they do not feel the need to liberate themselves from the servitude which their capitalism has created.” 20 In withdrawing from the American-led NATO command structure in 1966, President Charles de Gaulle portrayed the United States as a threat on a par with the Soviet Union.
    The New Pro-American Mood Is Shallow
    Many have heralded the arrival of Sarkozy as France’s president and of Angela Merkel as Germany’s new chancellor as the beginning of a new wave of pro-American feeling. Sarkozy, when still interior minister, speaking in the Daughters of the American Revolution hall in Washington, DC, on September 12, 2006, paid the United States all the compliments it could possibly have felt were overdue. “For me,” he said, “the virulence of the commentaries in the press and by the French elites reflects a certain envy, not to say jealousy, of your brilliant success. The United States . . . is the world’s leading economic, monetary, and military power. Your economy is flourishing, your intellectual life is rich, and . . . the world’s best researchers work at your universities, [where] . . . they quickly turn into American patriots.”
    Sarkozy added, “I’ve come to tell you that when a young American soldier dies anywhere else in the world, I can’t help but think that he has the same face as one who came to die for us in 1917 or 1944.” David Martinon, then spokesman