EN FRANCE, APRES 9/11

De NRO:

EN FRANCE, APRES 9/11

COLMAR, France. Here on the other side of the water for a defense policy conference, I spent 30 minutes on a Sunday evening watching a French television program called, Ripostes, a kind of French Crossfire with three on a side. The night’s question was, “Is the United States a superpower with feet of clay?” The program was dominated by Emmanuel Todd, a French intellectual who has made a large national reputation for himself by his lip-smacking predictions of the imminent collapse of American power.

The effect was spoiled a little by the commercials. One minute there is a handsomely coiffed French writer in a splendidly tailored shirt urging the nations of the world to join together to reject American hegemony--the next minute, a big glass of orange juice is being poured as Louis Armstrong sings “It’s a Wonderful world.”

Immediately after that, five young people are chanting “one, two, three, four, five” in English as they pile into a new Honda. Now it’s back to regularly scheduled programming and the decline and fall of the American empire. And if you want something less high-minded, Rocky IV is available on the very next channel.

One of the very best books I read this summer, The American Enemy : The History of French Anti-Americanism by Philippe Roger, makes the point that the French have never been very interested in the United States. When they talk about America, they are always talking about themselves--and it is precisely when they are most uneasy about themselves that they are most inclined to lash out at the United States.

And right now, the French are uneasy indeed. Adam Gopnik had a piece in The New Yorker about three weeks ago about the all-pervasiveness of the sense of crisis in France. Any doubts I had as to the accuracy of his perceptions have been dispelled today. I have been on French soil now for less than 12 hours, stumbling along in my miserable high-school French--and in that short space of time, three different French people--one a defense intellectual, one a teacher and translator, and one a café owner who brought me a glass of wine and plate of cheese on my way to look at the town museum--initiated conversations about the utter hopelessness of France’s condition.

The only available consolation seems to be the hope that maybe things are even worse somewhere else--and it is on that hope that French television pundits make their careers. It’s irritating at first. But on second thought, it’s rather sad.

France is a country that wants to be great. I wonder whether it would profit a French politician to describe France (as Gerhard Schroeder defiantly described Germany in last week’s face-to-face election debate) as a “middle-sized power.” And look: much about France truly is great, and I don’t mean the cheese, or anyway, not just the cheese. Certainly it is true that France stands with Britain as the only western European country that does not treat its own national defense with careless frivolity. It makes me wonder: Maybe there should be some kind of American program to cheer the French up, help them regain their self-confidence, develop their self-esteem. For if Philippe Roger is correct, while the French may be difficult when they feel successful, it is their sense of failure and disappointment that renders them hostile and aggressive.