Sunday, July 22, 2007
The blue, white, and red honor the red, white, and blue
Gateway Pundit has links and coverage of a ceremony on Omaha Beach honoring the United States for the liberation of France during World War II. Gateway-P is surprised on at least a tongue-in-cheek basis ("Goodness... what happened to France?", and "unbelievable"), but I am not. France's anti-Americanism is always there, but it is never deep. Yes, French governmental policy often frustrates American presidents, and French intellectuals can be as tedious as Parisian service employees can be snotty (although this last has changed tremendously in the last twenty years). That said, the French are far more aware than Americans of the parallels between the American political experience and their own. Neither we nor the French have much regard for monarchy, both having thrown it overboard in revolution. Our political system was to a great degree built on French political philosophy, and the French revolution was more than a little inspired by the American. Americans like to think they were the first great republic of modern times, but query whether a few million farmers on the edge of nowhere were "great" in anybody's mind but their own. France did revolution the hard way, and then became the first great power to try to export republicanism at the point of a gun. Sometimes, as well, I think that France is the only power on continental Europe -- other than Russia -- with the self-respect, will, and ability, to assert its interests in the world much as the United States does in the ordinary course. That can be damnably inconvenient for America, but it is also something to admire. Everybody else in Europe acts as though action in their national interest is inherently illegitimate. The French frustrate the United States precisely because they regard their own national interest as preciously as we regard our own. I like that about them, even if there have been many occasions when I wished they would leave well enough alone.
It is easy for the British to support the United States. Common language, increasingly shared popular culture, a mutual distrust of a united Europe, and rampant Anglophilia in the United States have sustained that alliance ever since the United States definitively eclipsed the United Kingdom as the more powerful of the two. It is unfair to compare France to Britain and wonder why the former cannot be more like the latter. But France is a smart and proud country with a keen sense of history and legacy. Unlike any other country in continental Europe west of Russia, France has the capacity to help the United States far beyond its own borders. It has done many times, and will do again.
MORE: The video of the event on Omaha Beach is quite good. Must be those superior French semiotics!
9 Comments:
By 
Larry Sheldon, at
Sun Jul 22, 08:08:00 PM:
Please see my comments at Gateway Pundit, and those of others there and at other places that linked to it.
The only new things that I have to add are that it is a shame that the original wording at GP allowed for the extreme negative reaction in some places.
Some people don't seem to "get" that what the people with access to the MSM say and do is not necessarily representative of what people think, say, and do.
And it damn sure is not as easy to elect people who will represent us fairly is not nearly as easy as ti seems or as it should be.
I tried to help elect people that I thought would represent me. Look how badly I failed.
By Purple Avenger, at
Sun Jul 22, 08:39:00 PM:
The US media applies a much heavier filter on what we get to see than some of the international media.
Before the advent of the internet, back in the early 80's I used to subscribe to a mag called World Press Review (or something like that) that pulled from all sorts of international media. I also subscribed to Soldier of Fortune during the same period as it contained some of the best 1st person conflict reporting available anywhere in print (albeit with a right wing slant).
By AmPowerBlog, at
Sun Jul 22, 09:38:00 PM:
That's a good analysis of French realpolitik. Only one thing you might add:
France, along with its historical nemesis, Germany, are the leaders of Europe's shift to supranational institutionalism. The EU is going strong, and a common foreign and security policy is one of the next agenda items. True, France has led efforts in Africa to provide security and end civil wars, but unless the pull they rug on the development of the United States of Europe, those days of French foreign policy independence will be gone for good.
By TigerHawk, at
Sun Jul 22, 09:43:00 PM:
Maybe, Donald, but maybe not. Or, put differently, I think there is some chance that France will basiclaly pull the rug on the United States of Europe. I think that French enthusiasm for the EU was built on the idea that it could dominate the continental policy and thereby magnify its projection of power. If that is no longer true with the increasingly hurried expansion of the Union, will France be less enthusiastic for the common foreign policy? I think so.
By 
, at
Sun Jul 22, 10:03:00 PM:
You can say this about the French: at least they know who they are.
Not so with Britons, and the nanny-state debasement of their culture. Most Britons would not know who they are? PC-multiculturalists? What the heck does that stand for except maybe the safe word?
At least the French just have old-fashioned affairs. Instead of yelling "Palomino! Palimino!"
By Purple Avenger, at
Sun Jul 22, 10:22:00 PM:
a common foreign and security policy is one of the next agenda items.
I seriously doubt the French will submit their foreign policy and security to something as squishy as a bunch of EU bureaucrats in Brussels.
Historically, the French have been notoriously independent about such things.
By , at
Mon Jul 23, 12:09:00 AM:
At least someone remembers what NORMANDY was all about not so for the braindead youths comming out of these leftists collages
By Dawnfire82, at
Mon Jul 23, 07:51:00 AM:
"Neither we nor the French have much regard for monarchy, both having thrown it overboard in revolution."
But they almost immediately reinstated it. See below.
"France... became the first great power to try to export republicanism at the point of a gun."
Would that be under Emperor Napoleon, who appointed his relatives as monarchs over subjugated nations? (Spain)
Be careful not to let your Francophilia slip into revisionism.
By , at
Fri Jul 27, 02:17:00 PM:
Dawnfire,
No, that would be the wars of the Girondists (Apr-Aug 1792), the Provisional Government (Aug-Sep 1792), the National Convention (Aug 1792-95) and the Directory (1795-99). The wars were notable for the destruction of the ancien regime order in the Low Countries, the Rhineland and especially Italy and the ensuing creation of Republics quite literally "at the point of a gun."
Nappy arrived on the scene during this unpleasantness, of course, most famously with his participation in the liberation of Toulon, but did not receive a field command of major note until his 1796 campaign in Italy. Indeed, Napoleon did not become First Consul until the Coup D'etat of Brumaire of 9 Nov 1799, so there were a good many years of Republican wars before the Empire got off the ground.
