Wow…let’s see…
A whole bunch of posts in this thread about the pretentiousness of the France, but nobody has yet mentioned …(drum roll, please)…French films!
A typical scene (or even an entire film) shows a group of oh-so-serious students, in black berets, black sweaters, and black moods, filmed in black and white, sitting in a Left Bank cafe and quoting Sartre…
Who wants to watch that?
Geez,…go to a John Wayne movie and let us Americans show you how to be a real man!
(and notice I used the word “film”. There is no such thing as a French movie. See what I mean about pretentiousness.?
Lukeinva, seriously, there is a lot of irony going over your head. The people who are saying that “Americans hate French people because they don’t suck up to Americans” are laughing at the haters in America, not the French. And wrt the smell thing - do you know what the phrase “Devil’s Advocate” means?
They got some coffee,
Eatin’ right through the cup,
An’ when they go ka-ka
They make you stand up
In France
Way down in France
Way on down
Way on down
In France
If you’re not careful,
It’ll stick to your cheeks
You’ll smell like a native
For a couple of weeks
In France
Way down in France
Way on down
Way on down
In France
Pretty much *all *of south Louisiana is proud of its French heritage, even non-Cajuns. Hell, Lafayette, LA has its street signs in both English and French, and sending your kids to French immersion schools is all the rage. I’m not real sure how the average Louisianian feels about France itself, though.
Link to a French page with photos of the Monument to the American Volunteers. The bronze figure at the top is Alan “I have a rendezvous with death” Seeger, uncle of the late Pete Seeger.
Odd that 100 years ago, when we liked each other, we were both really shitty societies. French colonialism was incredibly brutal and racist. The US was just finishing it’s own bloody colonial war in the Philippines. Both countries weren’t above using its army to suppress domestic labor strikes. Jews thought they were accepted in our modern, cosmopolitan societies, but the anti-Semitism that came seemingly out of nowhere during the Dreyfus Affair, and the murder of Mary Phagan in Atlanta was amazing.
Today we’re both world-class has-beens who really need to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables instead of the artery-clogging crap we’re so proud of.
If you believe the United States culture started from English culture, and you understand that France and England once fought a war for a hundred fucking years … maybe you’ll get a sense of a certain animosity between the two.
More recently, the American troops in World War I were supposedly treated very poorly by the French, whereas the Germans treated the Americans with deep respect. It was sort of a common thought in the US that we supported the wrong side during that war, which lead to the prevailing isolationist attitudes at the beginning of World War II.
I don’t hate the French, but they are fun to pick on … smelly, short and a BIG chip on their shoulders.
The idea of French hate sounds utterly foreign to me. In any case, the French are in my good graces; the assistance they provided to us in our days as an upstart nation were vital, granted it wasn’t out of charity so much as just trying to screw over the English. Still, help is help.
Yeah, me either. Individual Americans might ‘hate’ the French, but overall? :dubious: Let’s see some cites since this is GQ and all, and mostly all I’m seeing in here is opinion. You could just as easily turn the question around and ask why the French hate Americans/America, to which the answer would be 'individual French might ‘hate Americans, but overall? :dubious:’.
I don’t find this anecdote believable. It’s unlikely that Frenchmen would pretend not to understand someone speaking fluent French. Why would they do that? It’s unlikely they would claim not to understand English if they did. Why would they do that? German isn’t commonly spoken in France. Of course it’s even more unlikely that this would happen several times.
Even though it’s not exactly the first time I read a similar anecdote. Your friend is just telling a story he read somewhere or heard from a friend who heard it from a friend, in all likelihood.
It’s just the perfect anecdote for people who don’t like French people. It depicts us in a bad light and the American protagonist get to put them in their place with his final witty retort. That’s just the kind of made up stuff that fuels the negative perception of French people in the USA.
There was never any good reason why “a shared language, legal system and culture” should have made any realpolitik reason for post-war similarities. The British were no longer a world power and needed to concentrate entirely on their relationships with Europe, something the U.S. couldn’t care less about. Instead, the British fought the Cold War alongside the Americans, wasted untold billions on atomic bombs and the military, and were horrified every time France stepped out of line. Whatever the public proclamations, the inside opinion of Washington was that Britain should know its place and it did, especially after slap-downs like Suez.
France also wasted billions on atomic bombs and the military, but did it purely to spite the U.S. Washington has spent decades trying to teach France to know its place and France keeps refusing even when it hurts them. There’s always a sense of official coolness to France and it’s not surprising that such an attitude would leak into the wider culture. Hate? No, except for the loons on the fringe. Lack of closeness, certainly.
Yes, I smell a whiff there too. I have never, in my life, encountered anyone being snooty about my appalling French. Sure, they often have switched to English pronto because they speak it better, but that’s hardly an insult. That’s being polite to your guests.
And that whole ‘you’d be speaking German if it wasn’t for us’ makes me want to burn the Stars and Stripes.
I only have one data point. There is a French man who works on my floor. He is condescending and smugly superior,and at least part of this attitude is connected with his attitude towards Americans vs French people. Him I don’t like very much.
Other than that, I know nothing. I’ve not yet been to France, although I would like to go someday.
Roddy
There’s probably a little bit of lingering resentment among the older set about France pulling out of NATO in 1966, and not coming back in fully until 2009.
In a sense, the entirety of Western Europe was united against the Soviet threat, with the exception of the Swiss, who were historically neutral, and the French, who were just being dicks about the whole thing.
That said, I really do think the “snooty, rude Frenchman” thing is really Parisians and in particular, Parisians who deal with tourists all the time. I used to work for a mostly French owned company, and the Parisians were definitely different in attitude and behavior than the guys from Marignane/Marseilles and elsewhere in France, who were down to earth, fun, polite, and all the things you’d hope for in anyone.
I know older relations of mine have a fairly poor opinion of the French as a result of that.
Eisenhower once said “the heaviest cross I have to bear is the cross of Lorraine.” I suspect that was a lot to do with de Gaulle.
And since WWII, the French have made a point of being non-aligned, so there is something to what Exapno Mapcase mentions. A fair amount of their foreign policy consisted of not being the US. Case in point is the French refusal to let the US use French airspace when Reagan sent the bombers over to teach the Libyans not to blow up cafes.
I don’t know if that amounts to hating them, but they are subject to the same failings as every other country on earth. People resent that, just as they do for everyone else.
I have only been there once, but the lady in the bakery made a point of laughing at my school boy French.
I think a lot of American attitudes toward the French, historically, weren’t much different than British. The British and French were at one another’s throats for a very long time and anti-French feeling therefore has deep roots in Anglo-Saxon culture. Britain and France since the 20th century and especially more recently both recognized the need to seek strength in cooperation, with one another and within Europe, as both were eclipsed as individual powers and empires. But that hasn’t been true of the US. And negative attitudes on the French side, to this day, are often about the ‘imposition’ as they see it of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ values (cultural, economic etc) on the world, rather than purely American ones.
Also France is perhaps the most underrepresented major country/culture among American immigrants and has long been. Most Americans with French last names are descendants of people from French Canada rather than France; that isn’t just true of Louisiana but Quebecois who migrated later on. In the short run immigration can cause resentment of the country of origin of the immigrants, but in the longer run it tends to bind those countries to the US. That’s surely one reason, though not the only one, for the relative affinity between say the US and Poland or Italy as compared to France.
