And yet, conventional wisdom aside, relations between the United States and the French republic have never gone smoothly. The Washington Post library is full of yellowed newspaper clippings, beginning in 1898 and resurfacing every fifteen years or so, breathlessly reporting the latest rupture or repair in Franco-American relations. Franco-American relations freeze and thaw and warm right back up like a plate of SpaghettiOs.
We are now facing a time of chill, with repercussions both silly (“freedom fries”) and substantial (tourism and commerce in both directions have taken a hit). There is a great deal of hand-wringing about it on both sides of the Atlantic. No one seems quite certain how to deal with it—least of all the French, who thought it a swell idea to enlist Woody Allen to tell us, as a specialist in ethics, how we are being unfair to France.
As usual, it falls to a journalist to make things right. This has happened before. Back in 1834, during the Jackson administration, the French-American rift was trivial, really—largely a matter of bookkeeping: We sought reparations for damage done to American shipping during the Napoleonic Wars, and France was stiffing us. The whole matter was easily resolvable, but President Jackson was given to gruff, obliquely threatening pronouncements—“bring ’em on” kind of stuff—and before you knew it, France had recalled its Washington ambassador and invited ours to leave Paris. There was muffled talk of war.
At that precise moment, a young French writer named Alexis de Tocqueville published a book about the national character of America, gleaned from a nine-month visit here. Democracy in America proved an instant balm to global tensions, not because it was entirely complimentary—it wasn’t—but because it was entirely honest. It confronted openly the differences between Americans and the French, and found much for the French to like and admire. War reparations were paid and cultural exchanges began again between the two countries, with young Tocqueville himself in the middle of it—an ambassador without portfolio.
Tocqueville had nine months, but he probably dillydallied. You know the French. I figured six days should do it.
In preparation for my trip, I tried to cleanse myself of the many prejudices we Americans hold against the French. Unfortunately, the French kept doing stereotypically French things. When Marseille found itself in the middle of a trash collectors’ strike, with tons of garbage rotting in the streets, the French government leapt into action. It sprayed the garbage with perfume.
This was also the time of the great Parisian fashion shows. The main New York Times photo featured a male model striding purposefully down the runway in a Louis Vuitton ensemble consisting, in its entirety, of a nice sports jacket, a striped shirt, a bow tie, dress shoes, white socks, and what appeared to be underpants.
To purge myself of negativity, I decided to consult experts who liked and admired the French—the authors of two excellent cultural guidebooks: French or Foe? by Polly Platt, and Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow. From them, I concluded that France is a splendid place, though visiting it can be like visiting a beloved but eccentric maiden aunt of sensibilities as fragile as Limoges: One must be careful at all times not to offend, and to adhere to her rules of decorum, however peculiar. And so I learned that one must never ask personal questions, for although the French will opine volubly on any and all subjects of public discourse, they will bridle if asked their name or occupation or anything at all about their personal lives. I learned that, in greeting, one must not say merely, “Bonjour,” but “Bonjour, madame” or “Bonjour, monsieur,” lest one appear impolite. I learned that before addressing strangers, one must apologize profusely for intruding on their time, using a French sentence that must be memorized precisely and may not vary by even a syllable. I learned that the French have no precise word for “friendly.” The authors warned that the locals can be somewhat prideful and protective about their culture, wary of accepting strangers into their fraternity.
How wary, I asked Jean-Benoit Nadeau.
Oh, very, he said.
Well, I speculated, let’s say I went to France, and decided I loved it so much I could not bear to return to the comparatively odious United States. So I quit my job, bought a château in Lyon, adopted a French child, and spent the remainder of my life writing influential articles in prestigious international publications about the splendors of France and its superiority to any other place on Earth. By the time I was eighty and toothless, might the French be willing to accept me as one of them?
Silence. Finally: “They would have reservations.”
The most surprising thing I learned, from Polly Platt, was that when visiting France, one must not smile at strangers. The French do not condone the casual smile, she reported. They think it a sign of untoward familiarity.
I brought this matter up at lunch with Nathalie Loiseau, the capable press officer at the French Embassy in Washington. Loiseau is in the business of bringing people together; she is inclined to regard the current French-American rift in optimistic terms, convinced our two peoples have far more in common than what divides them. But what about the smiling thing? Can this be true?
Not really, she said. The French like to smile.
Whew.
Then the French diplomat paused, diplomatically.
What? What?
“They just don’t like the American smile,” she said. “It is too commercial and…” She searched for the word.
“Insincere?” I suggested.
Yes, she said. Precisely.
It was shortly afterward that I stepped off the plane in Paris, scowling balefully, hoping for acceptance.
DAY ONE
“BONJOUR, MONSIEUR,” I say, careful to remember the “monsieur.” The news dealer looks up from his kiosk. “Excusez-moi de vous déranger,” I say, careful to remember the precise words and syntax of the sentence necessary to assure the French person to whom you are speaking that you are a miserable insect requesting the honor of a moment of his time. Unfortunately, my next words, in English, are, “Do you speak English?” and that gets a shake and a shrug. So I have to wait until I am joined by my photographer and translator, Jérôme De Perlinghi.
The news dealer, Guinot Fabrice, is literally surrounded by anti-American, I-Told-You-So sentiment: headlines reporting the latest squirmy bit of buck-passing by a U.S. government facing the growing likelihood that there are no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, never were, and that the stated purpose of the war may well have been a cynical pretext. I chose this place for my first interview on the theory that if one is to defuse a prejudice, one must first confront it. So I ask Fabrice what he thinks about Americans.
“They are nicer than the French.”
C’est what?
Certainement, he says. But, I protest, Americans malign the French mercilessly. We say the most impolite things, such as that the French are rude.
Fabrice shrugs. “That is probably because the French are rude. We complain about everything. We will get the best room in a hotel, and still complain about this and that.” Americans, he says, are fine. “It is the French who can be…”
… And then he uses a French word that, were it an English word, would rhyme with “glass bowls.”
Jérôme and I decide that Fabrice must not be typical enough. So we walk to the Frenchiest place in all of Paris, Les Deux Magots, a famous Left Bank café that caters to an idle class of clientele the French call boulevardiers. (There is no easy English equivalent for the term, though, in a neat accident of transliteration, the name of the café offers a clue.) It is at Les Deux Magots that we spot our perfect Frenchman. He is a man of middle age and impossibly erect bearing, bald as a thumb, seated alone outside, dressed in midmorning in a jacket and tie, smoking a cigar, reading Le Monde, his mustache waxed just so.
Here is where we could begin to explore the nature of stereotype. This man would dislike America, would be positively eager to explain why, but above all would be fiercely protective of his privacy, reluctant to disclose any personal f
acts. We approach gingerly and ask his opinions of Americans. He answers instantly in English.
“I spend sree years in ze United States, and I cannot find ze woman to put in ze bed! In France I am married four times and have twelve women in ze bed!”
Vincent de Kerempenec, fifty-seven, describes himself as “an aristocrat from an old family, with a pack of hounds for the hunt and a small castle in the Dordogne.” He doesn’t seem to have much problem with privacy. He also doesn’t seem to have much problem with Americans, except for his lamentable difficulty in the boudoir, which he ascribes to the fact that American women suspect a man of his appearance and bearing to be gay. This, he says, is a monstrous injustice, but what can one do? American men cannot bed French women, either, he says with dignity.
And so it goes throughout the day. The French people are open, not suspicious. They are self-deprecating, not arrogant. They are almost gallant in their treatment of a stranger. They are defying stereotype.
They are being contrarian. How damnably French of them.
When I am inwardly troubled, I often consult the dead. And so, toward day’s end I find myself shuffling alone through historic Montparnasse Cemetery, contemplating the puzzlement that is France. How can I explain this in Tocquevillian terms? The whole country seems paradoxical. The French do not spend money on air-conditioning—in mid-July, Paris is a sweatbox, indoors and out—yet their underground parking garages pipe in classical music. They are famously resistant to American cultural influences, yet Charlie’s Angels is their current big movie, and in the subways Hulk Hogan sells Internet service. The French are famously artistic and creative, yet, by indisputable evidence on the radio, they still haven’t figured out how to write a competent rock song.
It is, perhaps, a historical thing. The French have always considered themselves the most sophisticated people on Earth, and yet at the fin de siècle a century ago, the most popular performer in France was a man billed as Le Pétomane, whose entire act consisted of farting.
At this moment, I see before me three elderly women on a cemetery bench, chatting intently. Those eccentric old aunts I am seeking, perhaps, with Limoges sensibilities. Here is a chance to be treated with classic Gallic disdain, particularly because I am without Jérôme and, exactly as I suspect, they speak no English. Pressing one’s English upon a Frenchman is supposed to be like pressing one’s tongue upon a wall socket. But the ladies just listen politely as I ask them about their feelings toward Americans. They chatter to one another in French, hands flying. Clearly, the American wants something, but what?
Finally, one of them stands up and crooks a finger. Follow me.
I start to protest, but she takes my hand. We walk perhaps 100 feet, and finally she points triumphantly at the ground. It is the grave of Jean-Paul Sartre.
I stand there contemplating the tombstone of France’s most famous existentialist, and then contemplating the woman contemplating me contemplating the tombstone of France’s most famous existentialist. She is smiling and nodding.
What is the meaning of this?
Can it be that… it has no meaning?
Sartre’s grave offers nothingness. Dates of birth and death only. But on the footstone are little scraps of paper that mourners have left, weighted with pebbles. They are in French, but some I can decipher. One says simply, “You make us proud. Thank you.”
And suddenly I understand.
“You make us proud”—that simple phrase tells me what I need to know. I have been asking the wrong question. Or rather, I have been asking the right question the wrong way. I now know what I have to do. It won’t be nice, but it is necessary.
DAY TWO
JÉRÔME AND I are at Le Bec Rouge, an excellent Alsatian restaurant in south-central Paris. It is still morning, and the place is not yet open for business. The dapper owner and head chef, Jean-Luc Maurice, graciously comes out from the kitchen to meet us. Maurice is dressed in crisp chef’s whites and carries himself with an air of self-confidence authorized by years of training under the tutelage of the great chef Paul Bocuse.
Yes, yes, Maurice likes Americans. They are like all people, he says—there are good, there are bad…
Right, right, right.
“I was just wondering,” I ask slowly, “why portions in French restaurants are so small.”
Maurice gives a wary answer, something about quality being paramount.
“Well, we like big portions back in the States,” I say, patting my tummy. “I was wondering if you agree that American chefs are better than French chefs because they give you more food.”
Maurice listens to the translation. There is a moment of silence. And then he begins to speak very rapidly.
“He says French chefs make love to their food…” Jérôme translates.
And American chefs? I ask.
Now Maurice is really elocutionizing. His hands are flying. He appears to be pointing to… his derriere. I don’t really have to wait for the translation, but when it arrives, it does not disappoint.
American chefs, he says, make love to the food, too. But in a most unnatural and deviant way.
Voilà.
Here is what I had failed to understand. The French are quite willing to admit that they are quintessentially French, for good or bad. They will cop to being terribly Gallicly rude, or too Gallicly refined and continental to land ze American chick, and they will confess to a prejudice for logic over spirituality—“We French are Cartesians, after all,” explained Anne-Marie Leveque, a woman I had met in the cemetery and with whom I was discussing God.
Sartre makes them proud. Descartes makes them proud. This is the key. If one is in France and one wishes to roil within the French the deepest, muddiest waters of prejudice and stereotype, one must be prepared to belittle their Frenchness.
In short, you have to be prepared to show a little… gall.
I am on a bridge overlooking the Seine. Below me is one of the odder sights available to an American in Paris—a pipsqueak Statue of Liberty. It is identical to the one that illuminates New York Harbor, but 50 feet tall, tops. It’s a prototype model produced by sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi before he tackled the big one. The very subordinate scale of this statue is what gives it power—modestly yielding grandeur to the one France gave to a nation it considered an undying friend. It’s hard to look upon this restrained work and not feel some depth of emotion.
Hard, but not impossible.
“How come yours is so small?”
Sophie Martins is twenty-four, an auditor for a French company. She is taking in the exquisite summer day, comely in a sleeveless black top and white slacks.
Small?
“Yeah, in the States we have a much bigger one. Are you embarrassed this one is so puny, compared to ours?”
Martins remains pleasant. “We do not need a large statue, because we have the Eiffel Tower,” she says—pointing proudly down the Seine to the magnificent filigreed monolith.
“Actually, in the States, we have office buildings bigger than that,” I say. She blinks.
“Also, why is it just brown? Don’t you think you guys should paint it?”
“Yes, it is true, everything is bigger in the United States,” Martins says dryly. “When you go to the supermarket, all the food is sold in very large quantities.” American women, she says, are always buying large volumes of food.
French women do not?
She fixes me with a steely stare. “French women like to be slim.”
Aboard the Métro, heading back to my hotel. The news today is good for the French—a Frenchman has briefly taken the lead over American Lance Armstrong in the revered Tour de France. I observe to the man next to me that the Tour de France is swell and everything, but it could be better. Alain Bequer is a mechanic and, as it happens, a bicycle enthusiast. His English is passable, and he seems most affable. How, he asks, could the Tour be better?
“Motorcycles.”
Motorcycles?
“Sure. That
would get more Americans to come watch it. You could use our business, if you know what I mean. In the States, we like things fast and loud.”
“Yes, you do,” Bequer says. “Guns, zey are fast and loud. And Americans like to shoot people and kill people wees guns, no?”
DAY THREE
DESPITE OUR PROGRESS, Jérôme and I are once again doubting the quality of our science. Are we losing our Tocquevillian objectivity? We have found the classic French rudeness, but only by coercion and sabotage. Plus, by limiting ourselves to Parisians, are we not also creating a geographical bias? One would come away with a decidedly skewed view of Americans if one confined one’s inquiries to, say, New York City, or Provo, Utah. Tocqueville traveled far and wide. So we decide to go on a road trip, to the place most likely to embrace us.
Opera house executive Laurent Bondi lives in the small dairy village of Argueil in the heart of Normandy. It is there we meet Daniel Foucret, Bondi’s next-door neighbor. The retired restorer of fine art is seventy-five, a character, plopping down at Bondi’s picnic table and demanding a whiskey—at noon.
Foucret was a sixteen-year-old in Paris on August 25, 1944. That was the day the American army marched in, the final day of a four-year German occupation under which there had been no liquor, no sports, no jobs, no fun. Foucret’s father, a steel merchant, was permitted only one client: the Nazi army. This client did not pay.
So when the Americans arrived, Foucret went to watch them. He took his girlfriend along. She was sixteen also, Foucret says, wistfully tracing an hourglass in the air with his hands. So, did he run to greet the Americans?
No, he says. But she did.
Ah.
No hard feelings, though. Foucret’s affection for Americans may be laced with a certain Gallic flavor—one example he gives of our worth as a people is that we are intelligent and refined enough to admire French impressionist painters—but it’s surely genuine. Just don’t get him started on our president.
It is impossible to overstate the French antipathy for the current American head of state. A successful Parisian stage play, now in its fifth month, is titled George W. Bush, or God’s Sad Cowboy, a farce about how Dubya wants to create a “United States of the World.” The exterior of the theater is splattered with faux blood.
The Fiddler in the Subway Page 21