PARIS, 16 September 2003 — Even before Jacques Chirac’s unwillingness to countenance war in Iraq, the Americans dreamed of blowing France off the map. In a 1996 episode of The Simpsons, for instance, the evil megalomaniac Hank Scorpio, his blackmailer’s finger poised over a button that will destroy a major European country, consults Homer Simpson. “Homer, what’s your least favorite country: Italy or France?” Homer shrugs: “France.” Scorpio chuckles, and then adds: “Nobody ever says Italy.”
The Simpsons codifies US Francophobia better than anything else. The French are unhygienic — when Marge throws Homer out, he protests that he is incapable of looking after himself and that after only a day he’s become “as dirty as a Frenchman”. The French are mean and cruel — two repulsive Frenchmen who put antifreeze in their wine force Bart into slave labor. The French are cowardly — groundskeeper Willie (a Scotsman, but no matter) describes them as cheese-eating surrender monkeys. And this is a far from comprehensive list.
Simpsonite Francophobia suggests a great deal about what France represents for Americans. The Simpsons has always had its dubious targets (the British royal family and their terrible teeth; the duplicitous Italian chef; the grasping Indian storekeeper) but the sustained contempt for the French is symptomatic of deeper American feeling. Arguably, it is the mark of an intense attachment, one which shows that if there’s a thin line between love and hate, there’s a thinner one between Francophobia and Francophilia.
The French get under Americans’ skin. The US can’t bear the exasperating insistence on l’exception Francaise and the cultural swagger from a country that’s barely the size of Texas. At a political level, of course, this irritationality stems from a sense that the French are insufficiently grateful for having saved from Nazi domination. Hence groundskeeper Willie’s oft-repeated jibe, and hence the thinking that the French should have backed Bush over Iraq because they owe America big time.
But the irritation goes beyond mere politics. What France represents to the US is dramatized in a mess of a film called Le Divorce, out in Britain this week. It’s a Merchant-Ivory adaptation of a US novel about contrary French and American standards over marriage and adultery.
The divorce of the title is demanded by a Frenchman because he has found the love of his life, and his American wife must understand his romantic appetites and release him from his bonds. To be French in this film is to be appetite-driven, since duty and marital commitment are not issues that trouble you unduly. The film only works through exaggerating the two countries’ characteristics into absurdity.
But, oddly enough, that kind of absurdity governs the national rhetoric between the two. Americans can only see the French through absurd stereotypes; and often see themselves as absurd vulgarians who fail to measure up to the French norm. The French, for their part, often see themselves as the incarnation of everything that Americans dream of being but fear they are not. Hence, no doubt, the unbearably treacly tenor of American books about France, in such works as Mort Rosenblum’s A Goose in Toulouse, Edmund White’s Le Flneur and Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon. Hence, too, the often intolerably smug nature of French anti-Americanism.
Like these books, Le Divorce implicitly accepts the ideology that it is only the French who truly know how to love, eat, drink; and more, that le monde Anglo-Saxon (the presumptuous moniker that the French foist on nations as ethnically various as the US and the UK) is unaccomplished when it comes to savoir vivre — a notion that is always assumed, hardly ever argued for. It’s an ideology which effectively means that, in aesthetic matters, the French wield a kind of dictatorship of pleasure — that the French way of living is the only worthwhile one. No matter that one might want to revolt against such a dictatorship, and suggest that there are other aesthetic norms, other attractive ways to live.
The ideology is particularly potent because it gnaws at the insecurities of Americans, who are vulnerable to hostile judgments about their putatively repressed sexual mores, about la malbouffe Americaine (rubbish Yank food), about their consummate lack of taste. It’s one that is less potent for Britons because we don’t care as much about the French as Americans do, perhaps because their proximity makes them less exotic. For Americans, though, France is the Other, a boudoir of pleasures to which they dream of being admitted.
It’s a dictatorship to which, for all the Simpsons’ jibes and US anti-French rhetoric this year, the Americans are still bending the knee. It’s one, what’s more, which suggests that — while the Franco-American relationship may have been soured by war in Iraq and its consequences — a divorce isn’t really on the cards, and that France will be seducing and tormenting the US for many years to come.
