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The Problem With the French ...
... is that they have no word for rapprochement
By
Gene Weingarten
The Washington Post Magazine - September 7, 2003
The French minister of agriculture politely awaited my question. We were seated in the study of his ministry in the heart of Paris, overlooking a garden with ancient statuary. At 43, Herve Gaymard is already a member of the national cabinet, custodian of nothing less formidable than the French wine industry. Sandy-haired, lithe, urbanely handsome like Paul Henreid in "Casablanca," the minister was in shirtsleeves, slacks and -- as became apparent when he crossed his legs -- loafers sans socks. He looked effortlessly fabulous, of course. He is French.
This interview almost didn't happen. I had requested an audience with the highest French official available, on the subject of the strained relations between our two nations over the war in Iraq. The French Embassy initially seemed reluctant, at which point I observed that it would be a pity if, to secure an official audience with a French dignitary, I had to seek out Jean-Marie Le Pen. That would be the race-baiting crypto-fascist whose stunning showing in the last presidential elections threatened to create an international embarrassment for the French of a magnitude unseen since a swastika flapped beneath the Arc de Triomphe.
Soon afterward, Monsieur Gaymard was made available.
This was a delicate situation. If I was not representing all of America, I was surely representing the American media, blamed by many for taking an awkward situation and, in search of spicy headlines, gleefully making it worse.
I began by assuring M. Gaymard that confrontation and controversy were the last things on my mind; that my role was conciliatory; that my questions were designed to elicit an open and frank exchange of views, so vital to the healing process. The minister inclined his head graciously, and I began.
"I think we can both agree that the diplomatic situation between our two nations is both regrettable and unnecessary . . . Perhaps the worst part is that it has resurrected in the United States some ugly, unfair, inaccurate and totally unsupportable stereotypes about the French. You know: that you are elitist, that you are rude, that you are cowards, that you have an insufferable air of superiority, that your fashion shows are nothing more than elaborate parades of clown costumes . . ."
The minister waited for translation.
". . . that your movies are long and boring and unbearably pretentious, that you lack personal hygiene and let your dogs poop all over the streets, and indeed, that your national pet, the poodle, is a ridiculous life form better never to have survived the evolutionary process."
The minister shifted slightly in his chair.
"I will not insult you, or dignify these preposterous, obviously untrue stereotypes by asking you to respond to them. But I was just wondering if the French have any equally preposterous and obviously untrue stereotypes about Americans that you might enumerate here for the purpose of my not dignifying them with a response."
As I awaited his answer, it occurred to me that, yes, diplomacy is a difficult and subtle art. But one must try to do one's part.
In France, the president of the United States is widely perceived to be a squinty-eyed bully, a cowboy given to shooting first and asking questions later. Worse, he is seen by the sophisticated French as something of a yokel -- uncultured, unschooled, inarticulate, anti-intellectual, dangerously shallow -- elected and supported by a populace too fearful of terrorist attacks, an electorate that values too much the blunt, common touch and too little the more complex virtues of the Renaissance man.
For his part, the prez isn't so crazy about the French, either. Small wonder, then, that a relatively minor dispute would lead to intemperate words and a serious crisis in diplomacy.
We are talking, of course, about . . . 1834. The man in the White House was Andrew Jackson, hero of the Indian campaigns, our first cowboy president. Sorry, you have been hoodwinked by the oldest journalistic trick in the book, the ironic time-frame switcheroo. You stupid, gullible, non-European, linear-thinking, literal-minded American.
Yes, that is a stereotype. But this is all about stereotypes, and journalism, and the rhythms of history.
It is often said that the French republic is our oldest continuous ally, and this is inarguable. The American Revolution might never have succeeded without the support of the French; it is immaterial that their real goal was sticking it to their superpower rival, England. It is likewise immaterial if that initial alliance was a hypocritical marriage of convenience between our fledgling democracy and a country that was at the time a despotic state more suffocating than the one against which we'd just rebelled. The fact is, the French were there for us when we needed them the most.
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 15 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 chateau 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 80 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.
D
ay 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, Jerome 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."
Jerome 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 cafe 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 cafe 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 facts. 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 12 women in ze bed!"
Vincent de Kerempenec, 57, 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 Petomane, 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 Jerome 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
Jerome 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 . . ." Jerome 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 Frederic 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 24, 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 Metro, 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, Jerome 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 75, a character, plopping down at Bondi's picnic table and demanding a whiskey -- at noon.
Foucret was a 16-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 16 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, 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.
Back at Les Deux Magots, the fox-hunting Victor de Kerempenec had called Bush "a very large liar." This theme has been repeated and repackaged by people of all ages and backgrounds: America, good. American leadership, bad. Americans, nice. President Bush, glass bowl.
"Doubleyou Boosh," Foucret calls him in a sort of curse. The socially liberal French detest Bush on almost every level, from the predictable -- his adventurism in Iraq, his enthusiasm for the death penalty and handgun ownership, his aggressive malapropisms and other perceived lack of refinement -- to the more surprising. Though predominantly Roman Catholic, the French demand secularism in government and find Bush's very public trumpeting of his Christian faith to be naked sanctimony.
Interestingly, the French prefer our previous president. His zipper weakness not only doesn't bother them, it seems to be a humanizing point in his favor. They like Hillary, too. Foucret begins to tell of a time that the first couple was out driving, and it is only when he is halfway through that you realize it is a joke. Bill and Hill stop at a gas station, and Hillary gets out to hug the attendant. When she gets back in the car, Bill asks her who that was, and she answers that it was an old high school boyfriend. "Interesting," Bill says. "Imagine, if things had gone differently, you would have been married to a gas station attendant instead of the president of the United States."
"No," Hillary says. "If things had gone differently, he would have been president of the United States."
We are all laughing and having a great time, and toasting the friendship of our two countries. At precisely that moment, Laurent Bondi's beautiful 10-year-old daughter, Analia, arrives, bounds up to each American in turn, and greets us with innocent European abandon.
Both cheeks still wet from Analia Bondi's kisses, I head off confidently for the Normandy beaches themselves.
Marie Lebourg and David Chesnel are enjoying a day in Dieppe, a resort town on the English Channel. She is as lovely as any woman you or I are ever likely to see in person; he is all man. They look like Aniston and Pitt would look if Aniston and Pitt were French -- which is to say, more self-possessed than Aniston and Pitt, and more intelligent and more sophisticated. They are not movie stars, though. They are just ordinary people. Ordinary French people.
(I am feeling good and loved and magnanimous, and thus able to confront some stereotypes with openness and candor. Frank observation No. 1: The French are slimmer and sexier than we are. No, this is not a matter of different cultural norms and attitudes toward body type yadda yadda yadda. Americans are "consumers." By and large, we buy, and are large.)
I have chosen Dieppe for a reason. It is here, in this town, on August 19, 1942, that a dry run took place for the great Allied invasion that would eventually liberate France. Operation Jubilee, as it was grotesquely named, was a massacre. The picturesque white cliffs overlooking the harbor held Germans in machine gun bunkers, and they picked off Canadian and American soldiers like wharf rats as they stumbled up the rocky beach as slick as wet marbles.
The old German bunkers are still there, and so are the slippery and treacherous rocks. But Marie and David seem to be negotiating these imperturbably. It is as though, when one reaches a certain level of beauty and grace, one need not remain obedient to the laws of physics.
(Frank observation No. 2: It is possible to become envious and resentful of the French. One must resist this.)
Jerome approaches to ask a question on my behalf, but Marie and David wave him off. How friendly of them to take a crack at it in English! I frame my question simply, and speak slowly, as if to children: What do they think of America and Americans?
They whisper together a moment. Was the question too complicated? Finally, Marie speaks in perfect English.
"I am afraid we do not approve of your commercial and ideological imperialism."
(Frank observation No. 3: While envy and resentfulness of the French is unbecoming, a small amount of indignation is, at times, unavoidable.)
She is a student, he works for Renault. They are well traveled, of course, though they are only 24. They are genuinely distressed at having to tell an American of their disappointment in his country, but he has asked, and they are being honest. David explains that hungry French people used to get a baguette and some cheese; now they are likely to visit a McDonald's. From his expression, he may as well be describing a visit to an abattoir.
Marie shakes out her chestnut hair over the top of her sundress. "We perceive this situation," she says, "almost as . . ."
Don't say it.
" . . . an invasion."
(Frank observation No. 4: The French are completely intolerable.)
Where is the gratitude? Surely they can find something good to say about America, in this of all places. I actually ask this: What's good about America? They are consulting each other in fevered whispers. They want to throw the American a bone, they really do. There must be something, I hear Marie say. David shrugs massively. She pouts, then looks at me helplessly. She holds up a finger for more time.
Finally, Jerome intercedes. He needs a picture. So the three of them begin walking off toward a picturesque floral backdrop, which will seem wan and wilted beside Marie's beauty. When they are 50 feet away, I see her suddenly stop, and turn to Jerome. She looks triumphant, and says something to him. He turns and shouts back to me:
"Pancakes!"
I think this is the appropriate moment to address, and dispense with once and for all, an oft-repeated and particularly noxious American calumny about the French. Do the French stink?
After many days in France, I have a solid answer to this question. And it
reminds me of the old joke about the billionaire who hired a famous architect to build him a new bathroom. Cost was no object. Space was no object. All that mattered to the billionaire was that he had a bathroom designed so it would not stink.
No problem, said the architect, and
after six months, for a cool million dollars, he produced the stateliest bathroom anyone had ever seen. It had a library, a lounge and gold-plated fixtures. The billionaire was delighted, but that night, he telephoned the architect in a fury, demanding that he rush right over, which the architect did.
"I said I wanted a bathroom that didn't stink! Well, the first time I used it," the billionaire bellowed, "the smell was terrible."
And the architect said, "You used it?"
No, the French do not stink. It is only when they fail to bathe regularly -- a circumstance occurring with slightly greater frequency than with Americans -- that they stink.
Day Four
We are back in Paris, at the abattoir. If it so offends the French, I figure it must be truly terrible, but near as I can tell, it is simply a McDonald's. Well, not simply a McDonald's. It doesn't offer super-sizing, for some reason. But everything else is pretty much what we know and love, and what's not to like?
As I leave the premises, I can't get over how silly the French are. If they don't want a Quarter-Pounder ® with Cheese ™ they can always walk right across the street to the restaurant at the ancient, five-star Hotel Concorde Saint-Lazare, and order from the menu, which today features terrine de poule confite et foie gras de canard à la sarriette. From the Saint-Lazare, you get a nice view of the McDonald's. It's been installed in an old building with an 18th-century Strasbourg feel. Iron Parisian balconies and a mammoth bas-relief monarch adorn the facade. Atop the building is a statue of pelican and a handsome ancient coat of arms that is still mostly visible behind the enormous plastic Golden Arches ™ that dangle above it on a chain from the roof, like a big cartoon tushie. No other object insults the majesty of the building, other than the 30-foot-high tomato-red and banana-yellow McDonald's banner that hangs from top to bottom.
Jerome and I continue discussing the oversensitivity of the French, their sometimes-comical resistance to what they see as cultural rape. You've heard of these things: The custodians of the French dictionary are thin-lipped despots, banning certain English-influenced expressions. The term "e-mail" is forbidden in French government correspondence, replaced by the French "courriel." French laws require that 40 percent of all playlists on the radio be French songs. Don't they understand how preposterous this makes them look to the rest of the world? Can't they see that times have changed? There is a new global economy, an exchange of ideas and cultures.
It's not all bad. Is it?
I lose track of Jerome for a minute, but then find him. He is bent over a car, taking a photograph of the rear windshield. I crane my neck to see. It is a yellow plastic sign that reads: "Bébé à Bord!" Jerome looks at me, and I look at him, and we keep walking in silence.
We are almost done for the day. All that is left is a photo opportunity. We decide that because this story is about slurs and stereotype, we will seek a visual pun for the cover of this magazine. Jerome will shoot me with the Eiffel Tower in the background, contemplating a . . . frog.
We simply need to find a live frog. Two hours later, we are still looking. No frog is to be found. In Paris, France.
Finally, we are in a market district, talking to a dealer in reptiles and amphibians. Alain Debouve shrugs. There are strict import laws. It's been some time since you could easily get a frog in France. Even the ones in restaurants don't come from France.
Where do they come from?
"Many come from the United States," he says.
Day Five
It has been quite a while since I left you dangling, my insolent question to French Agriculture Minister Herve Gaymard as yet unanswered. Your wait is over, because he is now seated in front of me, composing his response.
I did not spring that question out of the blue. I had first asked him about his primary ambit of responsibility, the French wine industry. Would France, I asked, be willing to reach out to the American consumer by converting its cabernets and merlots to twist-top caps?
Gaymard's English is pretty good, but he needed the scroogie concept explained.
It was. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. A flicker of a smile.
"In a word," he said placidly, "no."
Excellent! He is defying stereotype. To the French politician, stereotypically, nothing is monosyllabic, and nothing is simple: Whereas American politicians are said to be ignorant of history and inclined to regard all situations as having been birthed fully formed the day before, the French are said to be chained to a thousand-year past, turning every issue into a complex geopolitical morass, nursing grudges and flogging old causes.
Now we are ready for the big question: The one about the French being insufferable, elitist, silly, effeminate, filthydirty pretentious snots. The one inviting the minister to reciprocate with his own stereotypes of Americans. Will he take the bait?
He listens. "Well," he offers at last with a smile, "it is said you eat tasteless food."
Good, good! And . . .
He steeples his fingers. "Now, this is not really a stereotype because stereotypes are what the ordinary person believes. But what the European elite holds against Americans . . ."
Remember, he is responding to a question about whether the French are pompous.
". . . is that your country will vacillate between virtuous hegemony and contemptuous retreat." The minister follows with a lengthy historical dissertation about how American foreign policy has waffled inconsistently between isolationism and humanitarian activism. He nimbly plucks historical antecedents involving Woodrow Wilson, the League of Nations, William Howard Taft and Charles de Gaulle, moving forward through the abandonment and fall of Dienbienphu in French Indochina in 1954. I stop taking notes midway through the 12th minute.
It is all very instructive, and I have no doubt the minister is correct on all points. I depart chastened and deflated, pretty sure my own country has behaved disgracefully, particularly during the first Eisenhower administration.
Bastille Day on the Champs-Elysees, Paris's grand boulevard. I've been told what to expect, but it still comes as a surprise. The French celebration of their day of independence is a hyper-military display, featuring a parade of tanks and other massive armored hardware one would more expect to see in Beijing or at the central square of a consonant-oriented country with a name like Tkczjrkistan.
Before the festivities, Jerome and I mingle with the marchers, companies of cadets in their dress finery -- with cutlasses in scabbards and swagger sticks and splendiferous, ornate multicolored uniforms of a sort that would not be worn by the American military outside of some cruel hazing ritual. Some wear aprons and carry axes. One man wears a hat featuring a dangly, red feather-tufted ball. I want to tell the guy I have seen this precise fashion accessory in a book by the distinguished American author Dr. Seuss, but there are too many cutlasses around.
There are waves of flyovers by Mirage jets, and long columns of treaded vehicles rumbling on the cobblestones, giant amphibious tanks with rear-mounted howitzers, an endless march of businesslike war machines in camouflage green, missile launchers and troop transports. For a while it is truly impressive. Then the vehicles begin looking more and more ordinary until we are watching what seem to be military garbage trucks.
The crowd is demonstrating an odd solemnity, at least by our standards. There are no balloons dancing or Frisbees flying -- just polite, almost awed, applause. In the ensuing sweltering summer weeks, thousands of elderly French will die alone of heatstroke, victims of an inadequate public health safety net. But at the moment, surrounded by symbols of power, people just seem . . . reassured.
You don't see this sort of display in the United States, a country that in three minutes could -- not to put too fine point on it -- flatten France like a crepe suzette. We do not flaunt our might in this way. We do not need to. We do not whistle in the dark.
Well, except perhaps for our continued dispatches from the War on Terrorism, which we are, needless to say, winning.
Day Six
Did I mention that when I am troubled I often consult the dead?
I am negotiating once again the walkways of Montparnasse Cemetery, this time with Jerome. Here is the grave of another great writer beloved by the French. Samuel Beckett, of course, wrote "Waiting for Godot," but also a lesser-known work called "Happy Days."
No, it is not about the Fonz. You stupid American. Beckett's "Happy Days" is about a woman who is trapped in a mound of sand up to her waist, but who is perfectly content and finds her life a paradise. By the end of the play, she remains equally optimistic and satisfied, even though she is now buried to her neck. "Happy Days" is said to be about the power of denial.
There's nothing wrong with denial, of course. It's how we get through life without being consumed by the inevitability of our own death. You know, whistling in the dark. It explains a lot of human behavior, things big and small, including the elaborate, xenophobic dance we do to hold on to our pride and self-confidence -- denying our own weaknesses by ridiculing others not like us. You know what I mean?
Yesterday I was in a close-packed, un-air-conditioned Parisian bar. It was at the end of a long day, and I couldn't help noticing that stereotypical, telltale body odor of the French. Then I realized it was coming from me.
What's real? What's slander? I am telling Jerome how confused I am by all this, how the only thing I can count on is that there is not a person walking the streets of France who likes George W. Bush.
"I like George W. Bush," a woman calls out to us, in English.
"I love George W. Bush," says her husband.
I pull out my notebook. Why? Tell us why!
"Well, we live only 30 miles from his ranch." Allan and Arminda Lane of Whitney, Tex., are in Paris on vacation with the kids, Amy, Aaron and Rachel. Allan is a Baptist minister. He counts himself one of George W. Bush's most ardent supporters. Arminda, too. Their support knows few reservations.
But what about those missing WMDs? Allan says he thinks they might still be there, hidden, waiting to be found. I shoot him a skeptical look.
"Well, either that," he says, "or we had to delay so long in dealing with those U.N. resolutions that they snuck them out of the country."
It's France's fault!
Maybe it all comes down to this: We're going to believe what we want to believe, if it keeps us feeling good about ourselves. French people love to repeat the well-known idiocy by George W. Bush, a Bushism now famous in France: "The main problem with the French is that they have no word for 'entrepreneur.'" It's a wonderful quote, very revealing, if only he had actually said it. He also never said that "gruyere cheese is stupid because it has holes." I have heard that one in France, too.
As we all know in the United States, the French are soft on terrorism because they haven't felt its sting the way we have. But here in the cemetery -- as well as all over the streets of Paris -- you can't help but notice the absence of garbage cans. Instead, there are translucent green plastic bags hanging from metal rings. That's because you can see a terrorist bomb in those. The French were there, long before us.
National prejudices aren't attractive, but there's one thing about them that's hard to deny: They're inextricable from national pride.
You don't have to take my word for it. That was the conclusion of an expert in human and international relations who studied democracy and aristocracy and discovered an essential difference between them:
"Men living in democracies love their country just as they love themselves, and they transfer the habits of their private vanity to their vanity as a nation . . . Moralists are constantly complaining that the ruling vice of the present time is pride . . . I would willingly exchange several of our small virtues for this one vice."
That was Tocqueville, writing in Democracy in America.
I would like to end this story here, but I can't do it in good conscience. Tocqueville confronted everything, however distasteful.
Jerome and I are still standing in the cemetery, and something happens that must be reported.
Jerome has taken the Lane family of Whitney, Tex., away to be photographed against the cemetery wall. As they are shooting, Allan Lane mentions how much his whole family likes Paris. Really, he says, they have only one complaint. They've had to wait too long for their meal at McDonald's. What's wrong with Paris, he says, is that it needs more McDonaldses, so the lines will be shorter. Also, he says, some Burger Kings would be nice.
Gene Weingarten writes the Below the Beltway column for the Magazine. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article at 1 p.m. Monday on www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
