America on Their Minds

America on Their Minds

Mini Teaser: The subject of Franco-American relations is "vast," in the Gaullian usage of the word, and for most Americans vastly boring.

by Author(s): H.J. Kaplan

Thus it was that during the months and years after V-E Day, when I served for some time in our Paris embassy before formally submitting to tonsure and taking my vows to the Foreign Service, we spent a good deal of worry and thought on anti-Americanism, then le dernier cri in Paris, a multi-faceted phenomenon that seems to have sprung up as soon as the huzzahs had died down.  We were not always of one mind about the immediate or eventual importance of this unpleasantness, our group being composed of distinguished Old French Hands as well as some newly hatched ones like myself; but we were bound to take it seriously because the State Department, with the press already nipping at its heels, had acknowledged that it was endemic in Western Europe, and especially virulent in France.  So the so-called Psychological Services which had been dismantled as hastily as our infantry divisions in 1946 were whacked together again--a year or so later, if memory serves--as Information and Cultural Services, not to mention the unmentionable, the CIA.  Never mind that their function was far from clearly defined.  As a nation, we were on record as having "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind," as Jefferson had unforgettably put it in the Declaration, and as a people, we were notoriously sensitive to hostility.  We liked to be liked.

Or did we really?

Let me bracket that question for the moment and say merely this: in the Paris embassy and in the Foreign Service generally, we were sensitive to hostility and aspired to be liked.  So much so, in fact, that our French friends were constantly advising us to keep cool and take a leaf from the English, who couldn't care less what others thought of them, and for whom in any case, as a local journalist reminded me, "the wogs begin in Calais."  This was none other than Pierre Daninos, who had lived through much of the war in London.  He was amused by the fact that his compatriots, when they did not irrationally hate the English, irrationally admired them, racism and all, whereas our (i.e., American) racism was merely barbaric, devoid of eccentricity and charm.  Pierre Daninos was soon thereafter to write a humorous and immensely successful book about a mythical Major Thompson, and became too rich and busy to waste his time hanging around our press attache's office, but his real subject, of course, was the French, and it was from him, quite early on, and from some of his colleagues in the local press--highly over-qualified people by our standards--that I learned that French anti-Americanism was sui generis and quite unlike the normally phobic relations of the Europeans to each other.  It was of a different nature, deeper, more integral to their intimate self-image, as opposed to what they merely thought, at this moment or that, about this or that; and in this respect, if in no other, it was comparable to anti-Semitism, a phenomenon unto itself.

But this was not the phenomenon that showed up in the opinion polls and interested the State Department, because it gave them no figures to brandish on Capitol Hill.  That was the stuff of politics, born of the Cold War and bound to die with it.  The other, the deeper, the more lasting phenomenon was neither "anti" nor "pro" nor anything so simple.  It had to do, although we did not know it then, with something like what the French now refer to as their identity problem.

This is nothing more--nor less--than the old French meditation on what it means, or should mean, to be French.  It has gone on and will go on, God willing, for a very long time.  And the fact that it currently takes the form, so brilliantly adumbrated by this little volume of essays, of a meditation on what America means to the French should give us pause--even if, as the French put it, our own heads are somewhere else.  Sooner or later, it seems to me, we are going to have to sit down and do our own meditating on what France (and Europe) means to us.

Since his retirement from the Foreign Service, H.J. Kaplan has worked in Europe and the United States as a business executive, writer, and editor.

(1) Author of a famous best-selling journey through America called Sce[gra]nes de la Vie Future.  Published in 1929-30, it horrified French readers with lurid visions of what lay in store for them when they adopted vulgar and efficient American ways.

(2) New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.  258 pp., $39.95.

Essay Types: Essay