Back in school, you may have read a bit about the 1779 naval
battle between the Bonhomme Richard and H.M.S.
Serapis. That’s the one where Captain John Paul Jones shouted,
“I have not yet begun to fight!” when the British ordered his
surrender.
But you probably weren’t taught — at least I wasn’t — that one
reason it was such a dogged battle was the “help” Jones got from
his French allies.
At first a French ship called the, ahem, Alliance
refused to aid Jones in the fight. Later, it fired on Jones, not
the Brits — and not by accident. The Alliance’s captain,
Pierre Landais, believed that once he sank Jones’s ship he could
then beat the exhausted Brits himself and claim the sole
victory.
This fascinating historical nugget and many others like it are
re-told in Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America’s
Disastrous Relationship with France (Doubleday, 304 pages,
$24.95). National Review’s John J. Miller and Mark
Molesky, history professor at Seton Hall University, wrote this
simultaneously engaging and infuriating book.
As the subtitle makes clear, this is no trans-Atlantic
love-letter. It’s dyspeptic, revisionist take on Franco-American
relations. According to the authors the current friction between
the two nations is nothing new. Indeed, it’s closer to the
norm.
“The tale of Franco-American harmony is a long-standing and
pernicious myth,” they write. “The French attitude toward the
United States consistently has been one of cultural suspicion and
political dislike, bordering at times on raw hatred….France is
not America’s oldest ally, but it’s oldest enemy.”
That’s quite a charge and the authors have produced an
impressive prosecutor’s brief to back it up. From the colonial days
to the Iraq war, they catalogue one episode after another of
treachery, double-dealing, bullying (at least until France’s
military power faded) and even — well, well, well — unilateralism
perpetrated by the aptly named Gauls.
THE COLONIAL PERIOD provides the toughest stuff. Native Indian
tribes committed blood-curdling atrocities during the French and
Indian Wars, a factor cunningly exploited by the French to
terrorize the Americans.
During the siege of Fort William Henry, for example, a French
officer warned that if the colonists did not surrender, “the
Cruelties of the Savages cou’d not altogether be prevented.”
It was in these struggles, not the American Revolution, that the
colonists first started to come together as Americans, the authors
argue. They do acknowledge that France’s help was key to the
revolution’s eventual success, but they also point out that France
did this mainly to deprive their ancient rivals the British of
their colonies. The French monarchy certainly didn’t care for idea
that “all men were created equal.” And when the colonists did win,
France maneuvered against them during the treaty negotiations with
England to limit the new nation’s power.
Since then, even by the author’s account, France has been less
an enemy to the U.S. than a constant irritation. It is the
geopolitical equivalent of a high-maintenance girlfriend: far more
trouble than it is worth, but we never think to just throw the
phone number away.
TO CITE JUST A FEW examples, it has extorted bribes from U.S.
diplomats (The so-called “X, Y, Z Affair”), supported the South
during the Civil War, violated the Monroe Doctrine by invading
Mexico in 1861, and, in this century, pulled out of NATO and kissed
up to the Soviets.
Miller and Molesky’s list of outrages isn’t even comprehensive,
presumably because they didn’t want to write a Stephen King-length
tome: There’s nothing, for example, on France’s near scuttling
earlier this year of the British-brokered deal with Libya to pay
restitution to the U.S. for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight
103.
What has been the U.S. response to all this? Rescuing France in
two world wars, a situation that seems to have only inspired
further French antagonism thanks to their wounded pride.
Perhaps the most darkly comic moment of this dysfunctional
relationship came when U.S. troops landed in North Africa during
WWII. According to Miller and Molesky, the Americans actually had
to fight their way through Vichy French in Algeria and French
Morocco before they could get to the Nazis.
“France and her honor are at stake,” Vichy’s Marshal
P�tain told President Roosevelt. “We are
attacked. We will defend ourselves.” Never mind that the U.S.
troops were there to liberate them. (I had never realized my
grandfather was lucky to part of the later D-Day invasion.
He only had to be shot at by Nazis.)
The authors mean such stories to be damning stuff regarding the
French — and they are — but it is not exactly flattering to the
U.S. either. Like French foreign legionnaires, we always seem to
want to forget and put these bad memories behind us.
As Miller’s National Review colleague Rob Long put it
last year, “Well, mes amis, that’s France. And it’s our
fault for getting tangled up with them…. The French have nothing
to be sorry for: They’re simply acting French, as is their right.
But what’s our excuse?”
