When a young American first deplanes at Charles de Gaulle, it is the land of Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite she or he is lugging that backpack to. The nation of the Marquis de Lafayette, who helped rid us of the heavy hand of the same British monarchy other Americans unaccountably still kowtow to.
The French took their royalty and said “Off with their Bourbon heads” just as we were whipping the Redcoats, and our nations have been allies ever since.
Politically. Culturally, while there has been much admiration on both sides, it’s always been an uneasy match. They loved our rock ‘n’ roll and big-screen Westerns; we fell for their existentialists and New Wave films. But even though Americans know the Frenchies think our Stetsons and Hobies are to die for, we have always suffered under the suspicion that we are shallow and they are deep; that a Jean Seberg may have been a fine American actress, but that only being directed by a Jean-Luc Godard could make her “Breathless.”
We imagine our cowboy-hatted heads can’t be a lid on the same kind of sophisticated cerebrums as are covered by a beret.
In terms of governance, with a few lamentable exceptions, America has stayed safely in the middle of the road, while those daredevil French experiment in very recent years with everything from socialist presidents to the very real prospect of the deeply reactionary Marine Le Pen in the Elysee Palace.
And ooh la la the sexual cool of les Francais. At the funeral of former President Francois Mitterand, his mistress (and their daughter) stood alongside his wife and their sons. The only thing controversial about former President Francois Hollande being photographed in Parisian traffic on the way to spend the night at his lover’s apartment was that his scooter was Italian, not French. Current President Emmanuel Macron began dating his wife when he was her 16-year-old drama student — she was 40, and married.
So sophisticated, what?
Not really. I mean, yes, hats off to the cool savoir-faire of the French. These things happen. But in the age of #MeToo, the movement through which American women in particular are properly calling out the appalling sexual coercion and violence that practically define centuries of male societal domination, the French have been shown to be woefully retrograde. Rather than support the bravery of young French women who had come forward with evidence of heinous treatment, Catherine Deneuve and dozens of other women in entertainment and media wrote a letter to the editor saying: “Rape is a crime. But insistent or clumsy flirting is not a crime, nor is gallantry a chauvinist aggression.” The letter encouraged women “not to feel forever traumatized” by sexual harassment. Guys rubbing up against you on the bus? They said women could “consider it as the expression of a great sexual misery, or even as a nonevent.”
Sorry, supposedly sophisticated French people. I’ll take woke over such weird excuses.
For years, until his recent arrest, French literary high society protected Gabriel Matzneff, a writer who talked openly for decades about engaging in pedophilia.
Only this month did French lawmakers grudgingly make both incest and adult sexual relations with a 14-year-old against the law — moves they rejected just three years ago.
But also this month, Macron decried “Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States” — American intellectuals’ embrace of deep questions about race, gender and colonialism.
Those are important questions to ask, Monsieur le President. A society that can’t answer them is not a confident one — nor one that is truly deep.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
March 21, 2021 at 10:01PM
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On French kisses and a question of culture - The Pasadena Star-News
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