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Our Oldest Enemy, The French In their lively history of Franco-American relations, authors John J. Miller and Mark Molesky may be overstating the case against France. For the French are neither our enemy or our ally. They are, simply, "the French." |
On September 12, 2001, one day after the worst terrorist attack in American history, France's leading newspaper, Le Monde,
declared, "We Are All Americans." When the United States targeted Afghanistan,
which was harboring the al Qaeda terrorist network, France supported
the war and contributed soldiers to Operation Enduring Freedom. And as late
as January 2003, French President Jacques Chirac considered supporting
the American invasion of Iraq with up to 15,000 troops, if United Nations
weapon inspectors were allowed to continue their work. But when
the United States attempted to enforce UN Security Resolution 1441 -- which
found that Iraq was in material breach of prior U.N. Resolutions, offered
Iraq a "final opportunity" to bring itself into compliance, and promised
"serious consequences" if it failed to do so -- France opposed the US every
step of the way. Asked whether he wanted the Coalition forces to win against
Iraq, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin refused to answer the
question. And Villepin's successor, Michael Barnier, stated that France
will not send troops to Iraq, "either now or later." Are the French our friend or ally? Or, in the words of John Kerry, are the French simply "the French." In their new book, Our Oldest Enemy, A History of America's Disastrous Relationship with France, National Review
reporter John J. Miller and Seton Hall University History Professor Mark Molesky convincingly
make the case that French foreign policy has historically been firmly grounded
in the French national interest. To the authors, this narrow focus comes
at the expense of other laudable foreign policy considerations, such as the
promotion of democracy and liberty abroad. But
the authors also make clear that the French pursuit of its national interest
is not the primary problem; rather, France's problem is its contorted, inflated
self-image, which makes it unable to discern its true national interest and
its rightful place in the international system: Time and again in the last two centuries, France has refused to come to grips with its diminished status as a country whose greatest general was a foreigner, whose greatest warrior was a teenage girl, and whose last great military victory came on the plains of Wagram in 1809. Clearly, Miller and Molesky pull no punches when it comes to describing France's self-image. As their
lively sketch of Franco-American relations makes clear, the French have always
placed the national interest first, as all nations must, even at the expense
of any special relationship -- real or imagined -- it has with the United States.
In this regard, Our Oldest Enemy helps to destroy the myth that
the US has since its founding enjoyed a "special relationship" with the French in foreign
policy. However, the authors fail to undermine the special cultural
relationship between the French and American people, which persists to this
day, even in spite of the French duplicity in foreign affairs that Miller
and Molesky describe so well in Our Oldest Enemy. The Creation of the Myth As almost every schoolchild knows, French intervention in the American Revolution
helped tilt the scales in favor of the colonies in their war against the
British, and French naval assistance at Yorktown was the deciding factor
in the last major war for American independence. But according
to Miller and Molesky, the French intervention had little to do with helping
a fledgling democracy obtain self-determination against an oppressive English
King. In fact, French King Louis XVI initially opposed the revolution,
because it would tend to undermine his own authority as a monarch. The
French agreed to help the colonists only after the American victory at Saratoga
indicated they had a substantial chance of defeating the British. French Foreign Minister Charles Gravier de Vergennes explained the rationale for the French intervention: First, it will diminish the power of England, and increase in proportion that of France. Second, it will cause irreparable loss to English trade, while it will considerably extend ours. Third, it presents to us as very probably the recovery of a part of possessions which the English have taken from us in America.
But
the "myth" of the special relationship came into being in Vergennes' communiqué
to his deputy in Philadelphia, in which he outlined his plan to curry favor
with the American public: You will show them that we are making war only for them, that it is only because of them that we are in it, that consequently the engagements we have undertaken with them are absolute and permanent, that our causes are now common causes never to be separated. When the war started going badly for the Americans in early 1781, Vergennes proposed a peace treaty
that would would have left the British in control of New York City as well
as most of the Carolinas and Georgia. And if that isn't enough, Miller and Molesky denigrate the French contributions
to the American war effort, citing the botched invasion of Newport, Rhode
Island, as well as the joint attack on Savannah, Georgia. While French aid was a tremendous help to the rebellious colonists, especially at Yorktown, much of it was also grudging, sporadic, and undercut by the incompetence and vanity of French commanders. Early French Chicanery During
the French and Indian Wars, French Commanders allied themselves with Indian
tribes, allowing the Indians to do their dirty work for them. For example,
in 1757, the Marquis de Montcalm, about to lay siege to Fort William Henry,
issued this warning: "I have it yet in my power to restrain the Indians...which
will not be in my power...if you insist on defending your fort." After
several days, Lieutenant Colonel George Munro, running out of supplies, surrendered
to the French. By terms of the surrender agreement, Munro and his soldiers
were to be allowed to march to nearby Fort Edward under French escort, and
the seventy sick and wounded would stay behind under French care until they
were able to travel. But the French proved unable to restrain their
Indian allies, who attacked the wounded soldiers, killing an unknown number,
and then attacked the able-bodied, killing as many as 185 and capturing an
additional 500. After the Revolution, the French attempted to draw the United States into its conflict with the British. Edmond-Charles
Genet, the French minister to the United States, commissioned numerous privateers
-- vessels which captured British merchant ships on behalf of the French
government -- which operated out of US ports, threatening the United States'
status as a neutral and prompting Thomas Jefferson to send an official letter
of complaint to Paris: When the government forbids their citizens to arm and engage in war [Genet] undertakes to arm and engage them. When they forbid vessels to be fitted in their ports for cruising with the nations with whom they are at peace, he commissions them to fight and cruise. When they forbid an unceded jurisdiction to be exercised with their territory by foreign agents, he undertakes to uphold their exercise, and to avow it openly. In 1796, French Foreign Minister Charles Delacroix, upset with the Jay Treaty between the United States and Britain, ordered Pierre Adet, the French Minister to the US, to "use all means necessary to bring about a successful revolution and Washington's replacement." When Washington announced that he would not seek a third term in 1796, the French focused their attention on defeating Washington's Vice President, John Adams. Adet wrote
a formal letter to the American Ambassador to France, Charles Cotesworth
Pinckney, stating that France and the United States were headed to war, the
only thing that could prevent it being the election of Jefferson. Adet
then leaked the letter to the press. As relations
soured between the United States and France, the new President John Adams
sent Pinckney, John Marshall, and Elbridge Gerry to restore relations between
the two countries. But the new French foreign minister, Charles-Maurice
de Talleyrand-Perigord, demanded a bribe and an American loan before the
French would even enter into negotiations.
Shortly thereafter, the US and France fought a naval war, known as
the Quasi War, during which the fledgling U.S. Navy captured eighty-six French
vessels. During the American Civil War, Napoleon III supported the Confederate States of America,
knowing that a divided America would strengthen France and allow France an
opportunity to seize Mexico. France granted Confederate ships "belligerent
rights," allowing them safe harbor in French ports, and the French along
with the English issued a proclamation of neutrality. After the North captured the British-flagged Trent
carrying two Confederate diplomats to London and Paris, Paris informed London
that it would recognize the Confederacy if Britain would do the same.
In 1863, Napoleon attempted to enlist the British in a plan to break the
North's naval blockade, and allowed the attempted construction of six Confederate
vessels of war in Bordeaux.
More French Chicanery Miller
and Molesky hold the French responsible for the harsh terms of the Treaty
of Versailles, imposed on Germany after World War I. Specifically, French
insistence on French control of the Rhineland and the creation of Poland,
home to three million ethnic Germans, was in direct opposition to Woodrow
Wilson's goal of ethnic self-determination. According to the authors,
"France created the conditions for and unleashed many of the raw passions
that would lead to an even more destructive war, one that would require another
American rescue effort." Next to the weather...[the French] have caused me more trouble in this war than any single factor.
Naturally,
Miller and Molesky cover the World War II Vichy government in France, along
with the French resistance that was active in the German-occupied section of
France. According to the authors, rather than surrender to the invading
Germans, the French should have retreated to its North African colonies.
The U.S. Ambassador
to France, William Bullitt, said the French leaders: ...have accepted completely for France the fate of becoming a province of Nazi Germany...Their hope is that France will become Germany's favorite province -- a new Gau [German for province] -- which will develop into a new Gaul.
The authors argue that France's collaboration with the Germans went far beyond what was required
by the 1940 armistice agreement. The French manufactured planes and shipped
raw materials for the German war machine, and Marshal Petain sent 10,000 troops to fight for the Germans on the eastern front. The Vichy government adopted a fascist sounding
slogan: Work, Family, Fatherland. The Statute of the Jews banned Jews from certain
professions, Jews were required to wear yellow armbands, and eventually Vichy France
deported 76,000 Jews to concentration camps in the east. After World War II,
France engaged in what the authors term a "Cold War" against the United States,
and made a series of costly foreign policy miscalculations. For example,
France decided to maintain Vietnam as a colony after World War II, a
decision that cost France dearly and would eventually lead to American defeat
during the Vietnam War. France irritated the US with its support for
Israel's attack to regain control of the Suez Canal in October 1956, and
then again by developing an atomic bomb in 1960. In 1966, Charles de Gaulle led France out of NATO's military apparatus, stating it
was an "American protectorate," and 60,000 American soldiers in France were
told to leave. In 1979, France refused to impose sanctions on the Soviet
Union following its invasion of Afghanistan. In response to Muammar
al-Qaddafi's terrorist attack on a West Berlin discotheque, French President Francois Mitterrand denied permission
for American planes to fly over French territory on their way to attack Libya.
In the book's penultimate
chapter, Miller and Molesky question France's commitment to fighting the
global war on terror. After France lost Algeria, it realigned its foreign
policy against Israel and on the side of the Arab nations. In 1977, after
the French had captured the mastermind of the 1972 attack on Israeli athletes
at the Munich Olympics, the French sent him to Algeria, where he promptly
disappeared. Over
the years France has exchanged military equipment and assisted Iraq in building
a nuclear reactor, in exchange for Iraqi oil. When Saddam Hussein invaded
Kuwait, almost one-quarter of Iraq's military arsenal was French-made. After
the first Gulf War, France was an early advocate of lifting the UN-imposed
oil embargo, and opposed President Clinton's extension of the no-fly zone
over Southern Iraq from the 32nd parallel to the 33rd. Franco-American Cultural Ties While
Miller and Molesky do an excellent job documenting French mischief in foreign
policy, they do not succeed in undermining the substantial cultural ties
that bond the French and the Americans to one another. The chapter "Decadence
and Democracy" is designed to show that Franco-American cultural ties in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were shallow at best, and
that the French remained largely ignorant of the unique culture
that was developing across the Atlantic. The authors note that while many American writers traveled to Pais for inspiration, many of them remained apart from French culture, or, like Mark Twain, found very little to like in French civilization. But the authors go much too far in their characterization of French-American cultural relations as "trivial:" On May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris to thunderous applause (on both sides of the Atlantic), the Franco-American cultural exchange had arguably reached a new low of triviality. Where the French had historically paid scant attention to American culture, the rise of American economic, political, and cultural power would eventually force them to take notice. For while
certain aspects of both American and French culture can be deemed trivial,
the relationship between the Americans and French, while at times strained,
has very deep roots, encompassing fundamental religious, ethnic, philosophical,
and economic similarities and experiences. ***** Miller
and Molesky have very few positive things to say about French politicians.
Dominique de Villepin is "an amateur poet and historian with oily good
looks and a condescending manner," while George Clemenceau was "an extreme
chauvinist convinced of French superiority" and "the very embodiment of wounded
French pride and egotism." Marshal Petain is "little more than a well-groomed thug and bigot with
a glamorous pedigree," while Charles de Gaulle is an ardent chauvinist and a "study in Gallic pomposity." We stand completely corrected of the error that either the government or the nation of France has any remains of friendship for us. On the contrary, it appears evident, that an unfriendly spirit prevails in the most important individuals of the government, toward us. And
Miller and Molesky point out that contrary to popular belief, it is Jefferson,
not George Washington, who is responsible for the term "entangling alliances,"
in his 1801 inaugural address: It is proper that you should understand what I deem the essential principles of our government. [Among these] peace, commerce, and honest friendship, with all nations -- entangling alliances with none. In Our Oldest Enemy,
Miller and Molesky have crafted a pleasant trek through the colorful history
of Franco-American relations. The sections on French involvement in
the American Revolution and French meddling in the 1796 Presidential election
are particularly interesting reads. And while the cultural ties between
the two countries will remain firm even after the War in Iraq, Our Oldest Enemy
clearly establishes what French foreign policy has been and always will be:
unapologetically stubborn pursuit of the French national interest. |
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