I was just one more Lambert Strether, the dutiful and humorless Yankee of Henry James’s “The Ambassadors,” coming to France to rescue a wayward young man from the corruptions of the Continent, only to end up having his own Hot Chocolate Moment. No other country has ever bewitched Americans quite like France. American painters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries loved the Paris of skylights and louche women. The Lost Generation of the 1920s came, essentially, for the cheap eats and red wine. In the 1950s, the glamour of Cap Ferrat and the swagger of Yves Saint Laurent drew us, while in the 1960s and 1970s, bearded, shaggy American students played guitar along the Pont des Arts and stopped by the American Express office, near the Opera, to see if Mom had persuaded Dad to send money because, really, France was Educational and Broadening and An Experience.
Which it still is, actually, though it’s hard to keep that in mind as many Americans, simmering with Iraq-induced rage, refuse to drink French wine, eat French cheese or even visit the place. And like many longtime love affairs, this one is fading not because either party has changed, but because each now knows the other so well that the magic is gone.
Where France once saw our brash energy and vital optimism, they now see bullying arrogance. Where we were once in the thrall of their cultural subtlety and worldly wisdom–waddling around Parisian streets in sneakers and Sansabelt shorts, grimly trying to “do” the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay in a day–we now see only cowardice and decadence. Our cowboy movies, once the subject of late-night existentialist discourses on French television, now seem like violent, racist fantasies about unilateralism and domination. The fields of lavender that carpet Provence punctuate for us France’s precious, smug self-satisfaction and its drift into irrelevance. Put it this way: when a slice of French cheese makes you think about unfair French agricultural subsidies and EU dairy regulations, rather than the sophisticated and gentle French art de vivre, we’re both in trouble.
It’s a mistake for Americans to dismiss the French so quickly. Their Gallic pride, so irritating and inflexible, is also the reason their beleaguered and orphaned culture has stayed so prominent and influential. The French, unlike the Americans, have a deeply shared core understanding of what it means to be French, to speak French, to think as a French person. The old lions of the French financial and government establishment met at the Brasserie Lipp. Across the street, at the Cafe de Flore, the young communists and student revolutionaries discussed Sartre and argued into the night. They shared, in other words, their essential Frenchness.
Compare this with contemporary America, with our fractured and balkanized universities, with a political culture that seems to deny any central idea of what it means to be American. We can’t even agree on what to teach our schoolchildren about American history or which dates are meaningful or whether, ultimately, the American story has a happy ending. Among certain quarters, these days, anyone who opposes American policy in Iraq is “unpatriotic,” a misfit. You can’t really be a misfit in France, because they’ve cleared a place at the table for misfits already. “Misfit, party of one? Right thees way. Here is your vin rouge.”
