Thursday, February 20, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Local View: French fries or humble pie?

By Gregory S. Brown

"I'm not buying french fries, I'm so mad at the French."

--Steve Barrar,

Pennsylvania state representative

This past week, the conservative American media, led by Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, insisted that "France has forgotten" what it owes to the United States. Why does this claim of a French preference for wine and whining, while shunning the hard work of winning wars, touch such a deep chord among some Americans?

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Pentagon adviser Richard Perle tactlessly dismissed France as "no longer" an American ally. In Congress, moderate Republican Peter King of New York decried France's "abandonment" of the U.S. in "a time of survival," while Speaker Dennis Hastert called for a boycott of French wines and cheeses. And Mr. Barrar, by all appearances, is sincerely refusing to eat "French fries."

Whatever one's views of imported ch�vre or Idaho-grown 'taters, the claim that "we" saved France in two world wars, while the French surrendered, is based on a willful forgetting of the history of the first half of the 20th century.

From 1914 to 1918, France suffered more than 1.4 million casualties (civilian and military combined) from four years of fighting on its home soil, compared with 100,000 American soldiers lost. The "Great War" cost France one-third of its annual national economic output and one-fifth of its arable farmland and factories. After the war, France suffered 10 years of unemployment and a nearly bankrupt economy, while America roared through the 1920s. Many in France blamed this disparity on America's Dawes Plan, which facilitated German repayment of war debt. The French widely perceived this plan as a refusal by America to contribute to European reconstruction and an attempt to weaken Europe economically to the benefit of U.S. industry.

The hardship of those years led French political leaders of all parties, and nearly all citizens, to favor policies intended to avoid war. This pacifism arose not from fear or weakness, but from a desire to increase employment and the standard of living to preserve liberty and democracy from revolutionary right-wing fascism and left-wing Bolshevism. The United States shared this pacifism, joining with France to sponsor in 1928 the Kellogg-Briand Pact, an agreement to pursue diplomatic solutions to all conflicts.

Diplomacy, however, failed to stem Nazi aggression, and in June 1940, France confronted a very real "time of survival." Only in the rhetoric of the collaborationist Vichy government could the French surrender of June 1940 and its military-dictatorship government's agreement one month later to "collaborate" with Nazi Germany be seen as a strategy to "shield" the French from the horrors of war while leaving Britain and the Unites States to suffer. Sadly, those now attacking France for its pursuit of peace today adopt this same rhetoric. Many French are appalled to see this pro-Vichy version of their history reappear so prominently in America.

In reality, the French citizenry suffered horribly in this period. From 1940 to 1945, more than 1 million French citizens died, well over half civilians. Nearly 2 million were prisoners of war, half of whom were assigned to forced labor. Another 700,000 civilians were forced to work in German factories, and roughly 200,000 more were sent to concentration camps as either "racial" prisoners (primarily Jews) or "political" prisoners (including communists, socialists, moderates and libertarian conservatives). There they faced forced labor, starvation, torture and, in several thousand cases, execution. Those at home suffered from shortages of food, heat and medicine. Rationing forced the average adult to subsist on fewer than 1,200 calories a day, and fewer than 900 in Paris--the equivalent of a super-sized fries and a medium coke. Tuberculosis ran rampant. And heavy taxes were imposed to pay the costs of a violently repressive German occupation.

These hardships, and the heroism of the Free French forces and internal Resistance units, gave the French in 1944 good reason to see themselves as active agents of their own liberation, while remaining grateful to the British, American and Soviet armies. While American popular culture has idealized our own World War II soldiers as the "greatest generation," the French likewise came to remember the liberation, in General De Gaulle's words, as a victory achieved "by its own people." Sharing happily in this view in 1944 were American GIs, who called out, as they had in 1918, "Lafayette, we are here" to describe themselves as repaying France for its aid in the American Revolution.

After the war, Americans fell in love with France as a travel bargain. As the French suffered from continued food rationing and recession (well into the 1950s), tourism represented one of the few economic opportunities for ordinary French people. Many converted their homes to restaurants or inns for visiting Americans drawn by a weak French franc. From this period, then, wines, cheeses and luxury goods such as perfumes and clothing became Americans' shorthand for French goods, and these symbols remain potent today. (Significantly, no conservatives are now calling for a boycott of France's largest overseas export today, high-tech munitions.)

The current French government, indeed, is reproachable on many counts. It has passed a raft of controversial laws: cutting taxes especially on businesses, enhancing police powers, restricting judicial procedures that protect the accused, suppressing even legal immigration and this week altering regional elections to keep coalitions (the standard strategy of the moderate-left) off the final ballot in regional elections. This is an agenda that should make American conservatives celebrate.

Chirac knows far more about the United States than any other leader in French history. In the 1950s, he spent a year in the U.S., and he speaks frequently of his admiration for America. He also has close ties to the Republican Party; for his 1988 and 1995 presidential campaigns, he hired consultant Roger Ailes, an adviser to George H.W. Bush and currently chairman of the same Fox News that denounces Chirac as a collaborationist.

To stop the dangerous erosion of our international credibility resulting from such ill-conceived ideas as boycotts of french fries, we would do well to fill up instead on some good old American humble pie. In the words of President Bush himself: "If we are arrogant, they will resent us. If we're humble, but strong, they'll welcome us."

Gregory Brown is an assistant professor of history at UNLV and specializes in modern French and European history.