The French Myth

The French Myth is as Old as France's great civilization, as indestructible as the beautiful French landscape, as enticing as the lovely women of Paris. The myth has been cherished by generations of tough, strong Americans who become soft and sentimental at the mere mention of France.

Briefly, the myth goes like this: France is the country that invented the meaning of charm and chic, elegance and sophistication, the brilliance of Gallic logic and the virtuosity of savoir-vivre, a land of noble châteaux and history-steeped battlefields, of poets and painters, wines and perfumes, grande cuisine and haute couture, where lovemaking and enjoyment have become abstract sciences: a paradise where everybody would like to live if he didn't live elsewhere.

Like most myths, the French myth is part truth and part fancy. Age has mellowed it like a great claret and made it part of an international folklore of the good things in life. Jefferson called France everybody's "second choice." Even the Germans, traditionally not the best friends of the French (who still remember les Boches), have a proverb that to live well is to live "wie Gott in Frank-reich"--like God in France.

The good Lord must have been in a particularly happy mood when he created la belle France, a rich, beautiful, blessed country. It has conquered all who went there, peaceful travelers and armed warriors, friends and foes, Orientals and Occidentals, Puritan Anglo-Saxons and melancholy Slavs. When I studied in Paris 38 years ago, the Latin Quarter was truly international--there were students from Indochina and Japan, Eastern Europe and America, from Africa and Tahiti. Some came to the Sorbonne for education and others went to the Folies-Bergère for a different sort of enlightenment. In the gay Nineties Maxim's was the rendezvous of the cancan crowd, and in the really good old (pre-World War I) days when people paid their bills with gold coins and taxes were a favorite joke, France was the hub of the civilized world. Where did Russian grand dukes, English lords, American millionaires go when they were bored and had money to burn? To Paris, Cannes, Biarritz, Deauville, bien sÛr. And when they talked of the arts, they thought less of Renoir and more of the posters of Toulouse-Lautrec.

The posters may be slightly passé now, but the wistful image hasn't changed. Paris is still the great dream and number-one sight-seeing spot for American schoolteachers, German Sozialtouristen, and British bus passengers--the new traveling classes. People in the far corners of the world dream of an afternoon at a French sidewalk café, a meal at that small bistro. If Toulouse-Lautrec were still with us he would probably be painting in St.-Tropez and Megève, but his theme would be the same, because it is French and eternal.

But behind the France everybody knows--either from personal experience or from the posters of Air France--the beaches and bikinis, Bardot and boudoirs, Louvre and Notre Dame, the cellars of the Champagne and the sun-drenched villages of the Beaujolais, Auteail and Cannes, Maurice Chevalier and Yves Montand--behind this France there is another France which is less known but just as real. The France of grimy coal-mining towns in Lorraine, of gray industrial towns in the north, of silent villages with empty streets and dark houses whose shutters are down all day long, of suspicious petty bureaucrats and dissatisfied people, of people complaining about the high cost of living and farmers revolting against their government. The little people of France who say "un petit vin," "un petit café," "une petite amie." It's always un petit this and un petit that. Many Frenchmen who travel and know the world are getting annoyed by this petit-bourgeois tendency toward petit-ness.

A nation's mentality doesn't change overnight or even over a century. For every Frenchman who is the embodiment of elegance and poise there are ten people who are narrow-minded and suspicious. As to the famous Gallic charm, I know it mostly (continued on page 142)French Myth(continued from page 138) from books, paintings and the performances of French artists, but it is relatively rare among the populace, and I say this after spending some good years between the two World Wars in France. Nowadays visitors will find the famous charm a very thin veneer that scratches off easily, even in expensive hotels, restaurants, stores where you might expect to see smiling faces. Don't.

The other France is the France of Flaubert's novels and Fernandel's movies, of gossipy old women dressed in forbidding black, of distrustful villagers. It is a land of strict morals and ironclad conventions. Foreigners rarely see this France though they may drive through it. The automobile acts as a powerful isolating agent. In the other France there is more gold per capita than in any other country on earth. Frenchmen don't trust their governments or their bankers. They haven't forgotten the Stavisky scandal. In a village in Alsace I once talked to an old woman whose citizenship was changed five times since 1871 though she had never gone farther away than ten miles. She'd been, in turn, French and German and French and German, and when I saw her, she was 85 and French, and she hoped she would die a Frenchwoman. She had confidence only in two things--the good French earth and the good gold coins which she kept buried in the earth behind her house. I'm sure even Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d'Estaing couldn't tell the exact amount of France's "hidden" gold reserves.

Unlike the United States and Great Britain, masculine countries represented by Uncle Sam and John Bull, la belle France is an extremely feminine country whose symbol is Marianne, who has a woman's privilege of being capricious and unpredictable, exciting and annoying, and always a little sphinxlike. Marianne is a very complex woman, and her special representative before God and the world is a very complex man. Charles de Gaulle represents both the Elysée, the elegant residence of French presidents, and the tiny village of Colombey-les-deux-Églises, where he lives in feudal isolation, revered and remote, an anachronism that could exist only in France, where the future is always mingled with the past.

Colombey-les-deux-Églises consists of two principal streets crossing each other at the typical, acacia-shaded French village square. In front of the village church stands a small obelisk with the names of the dead of two wars. That, too, is typical. In Colombey one out of every fifteen inhabitants lost his life in la Grande Guerre which is, naturally, the First World War. To the logical French there was nothing grande about the last war which brought them defeat, demoralization and humiliation. They have only in the past few years emerged from its aftermath--thanks to Colombey's first citizen.

The windows of the cheerless, gray stone houses are closed, but from behind the dark curtains people peer at you. The ancien combattants--in every village the old veterans are a powerful pressure group--call De Gaulle "mon général" when they see him Sunday at Mass. Colombey had some 60 automobiles two years ago when I was there, but no sewers, lots of cattle but few street lights, a tiny bistro with bad food, and a branch of a savings bank that opened only Sundays from 9 to 11. After Mass people go to the bank to deposit their savings. Everybody is very secretive about his savings but knows exactly how much the neighbors have. There are the curé and the postman and the notaire and the baker and the épicier who is proud because Madame la Générale sometimes comes to order some stuff. The General never descends into the village. Even in the dark years when he was the forgotten man of France he would stay in his big house at the outskirts of Colombey, brooding and dreaming about la gloire and la patrie, while the governments in Paris toppled and France's prestige declined.

De Gaulle has singlehandedly changed this picture. France is a great power again. He gave his countrymen prosperity, self-respect, an atomic force-de-frappe, and he may even give them a sense of self-identification. In France one always heard that the Algerians were not French, the Corsicans were not French ("Corsica ... forms an integral part of France," claims The World Almanac), and certainly the members of the French community were not French. The Marseillais are above all Marseillais, the Lyonese are Lyonese, and do the Parisians consider themselves French? Certainly not, they are Parisians. Even the people in the small villages are first of all citizens of their village, and the fellow from the next village doesn't belong; he certainly isn't "a Frenchman."

In Switzerland I once heard the story of the people of Ernen, an old village in the Valée de Conches, who refused to permit their gallows to be used for the execution of an outsider because "the gallows are for us and our children." Not surprisingly, I heard a similar story in a small village in the Auvergne.

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The French myth is backed by solid facts. Western civilization owes an enormous debt to French culture. Gastronomy, elegance, haute couture and diplomacy are French arts. Brillat-Sa-varin calls cooking "the most indispensable art." France is the only country on earth that has institutes devoted to the serious study of food and wine, with no commercial strings attached, such as the Académie des Gastronomes and the Académie du Vin de France. France produces a different cheese for every day of the year, and at least ten different wines to go with each cheese, and both the cheese and the wines are better than in any other country on earth. Frenchmen, civilized people, have always considered their great chefs more important than their politicians and millionaires, and of course they are right. Today French cooking has become synonymous all over the world with good cooking.

The French are coolheaded realists: Instead of trying to make friends among other nations, they influence them. English may be the language of world commerce, but French is still the language of diplomacy. Today the blessings of French culture have a more far-reaching effect than the efforts of British traders and American do-gooders. In terms of gross national product, the French now spend twice as much on foreign aid as the Americans. The influence of French schools and institutes is strong in the Near and Middle East. "The Americans send us Cadillacs," a man in Beirut told me a while ago, "the French send us culture." The French have lost military and political control over their former possessions in North Africa and elsewhere on the continent, but they keep intellectual and cultural control there. They have good relations with Ben Bella's "socialist" Algeria, and Sékou Touré's "socialist" Guinea. When the national interest is concerned, the French don't bother much about sentiments or ideologies. De Gaulle's goal is the creation of the "third force" in the world and he has gone systematically after his goal since he came to power.

On the European Continent the French now play first fiddle and skillfully keep the powerful, prosperous West Germans at the second stand. It's interesting to see the Americans and the French operating in a neutral country. In Vienna (where I write this) the Americans have a large "Amerika Haus" which is popular with students from the Middle East. "It's warm and pleasant and, besides, you always meet someone there who shares your dislike of the U. S.," one of these young cynics told me not long ago. The French operate differently. Their lycée is the best school in town, spreading the tenets of French education.

A law was passed in Paris two years after the Revolution that made public instruction "common and free for all citizens." The 1946 Constitution made "free, secular public education on all levels" a state responsibility. The smart French spend ten percent of their national budget on education. At the Sorbonne I learned that the mere acquisition (continued on page 238)French Myth(continued from page 142) of facts is less important than healthy intellectual curiosity. The French treat civilization like a valuable commodity. When Mme. Vaudable of Maxim's set up L'Académie, a school for extremely well-heeled foreign young ladies, the Foreign Ministry's Directeur Général des Affaires Culturelles et Techniques arranged for the girls to attend the Sorbonne's famous course in French civilization.

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America's stormy love affair with France will soon be 200 years old. It probably began in 1778 when France was the first great power to recognize the independence of the 13 Colonies. The names of French heroes involved in the early stages of the affair have been immortalized in the names of some unforgotten French Line ships--Lafayette, De Grasse, Rochambeau. (If the French Line should ever run out of popular heroes, it can always fall back on captivating words such as Champagne or Liberté.)

The love affair was always one-sided, unrequited, even after the First World War when the Americans had high hopes in the wake of the common victory. Even then Marianne remained cool and detached and very desirable, graciously accepting the admirer's gifts, never returning favors. "Gloire gives herself only to those who always dreamed of her," wrote De Gaulle, and to him gloire has always been synonymous with France. During and after the last War the French accepted the American gifts of liberation and post-War aid as a girl accepts gifts from an old friend whom she doesn't take too seriously. "On revient toujours à ses premiers amours." "In spite of occasional disenchantments, the Americans will never stop being in love with us," a French girl told me not long ago, and laughed. Her name was not Marianne, but she certainly acted like her.

Marianne herself never forgets a slight. Charles de Gaulle, who was often snubbed during his painful years as an exile in wartime London, has never forgiven the English and Americans. He wrote that he would make life "unendurable" to those who slighted France, and he's done it and is still doing it. Yet the French realists were supremely unconcerned by the outcry that went up after De Gaulle refused Britain admission to the Common Market. They knew that their partners in the Common Market who didn't agree would never give up such a profitable partnership. The French may be great friends of the West Germans, but they have recognized the Oder-Neisse Line because "c'est une réalité." The French know that international politics is a science, not a popularity contest. "We don't sell good will like the Americans," a French diplomat says. "We offer mutual interests. You gave away billions of dollars and now you complain because nobody loves you. We never expected to be loved. We want to be respected."

The French don't care whether they hurt the feelings of old admirers. De Gaulle recognized Red China because he sensed the time had come for France to step into a political vacuum in Asia that neither the Americans nor the Russians could fill. It is a logical step toward his aim of building "the third force," and if some of the old admirers are angry, tant pis!; after all, they made him angry when they interfered in Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Lebanon and Cambodia, which De Gaulle with some justification considers his own back yard. "De Gaulle cares more about France's interests than about political ideology," wrote Raymond Aron, the well-known French publicist, and he wondered about all the fuss; after all, Britain had recognized the Mao regime as early as 1950.

During the past two years, Americans living in France were shocked by government-run French television programs that seemed clearly directed against the U. S. During the worst months of the Algerian crisis, French TV and radio programs played down violence in Algeria and at the same time played up race riots in the United States. In popular programs Americans are often depicted as uncivilized, loudmouthed boors. Anti-American propaganda is especially active among workers and intellectuals, two groups particularly responsive to Communist propaganda, and lately also among the middle-class people who are made envious of American wealth.

"There is a deep-rooted belief that Americans are culturally inferior and don't deserve their leading position in the modern world," a European-born American tells me. He lives in the Bordeaux region and speaks French like a Frenchman. "This belief is skillfully exploited by the Communist propaganda that 'Americans always take advantage of the French.' "

At the end of the war I heard widespread rumors in Morocco that the Americans had come there "to steal the oil." Everybody knew about it except the new American commander, who didn't even know there was any oil. The oil myth has proved as durable as the myth of "Wall Street, the root of all evil," in other parts of the world. French businessmen who should know better tell you that the Americans tried to interfere in North Africa because they wanted the oil. But after all, certain American businessmen who should know better once claimed that President Eisenhower was a "Communist."

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A little myth is a dangerous thing. The time has come for a reappraisal. Americans should stop seeing the French through rose-colored glasses and accept them for what they are--an immensely gifted, totally unsentimental people, intelligent and proud. Tough American businessmen who took a condescending attitude toward French business in the early post-War years have learned that French businessmen can be much tougher than Americans. Americans should stop thinking of the French as a nation of maîtres d'hotel, chefs and complaisant ladies, who do nothing all day long and work mostly at night. Most French are hard-working, modest, thrifty.

Above all, Americans should try to get beneath the surface in France. It's not easy, because the French are reticent, suspicious and xenophobic. Unlike Americans, who take an optimistic point of view, the French have gone through so much hell that they have become a nation of skeptics. They don't open their doors to foreigners. They make a sharp distinction between family life, with its anniversaries, weddings, burials, that takes place at home; and life with their friends, that takes place at the neighborhood bistro. I have good friends in France who have never invited me into their homes. Frenchmen who come to America are always amazed at people's hospitality. "I talked to a man on the plane and he asked me to come to his home for dinner," a Frenchman told me. "And he meant it." He shook his head in pleased wonderment. He said 30 years ago his sister married an Italian who lives in France and became a Frenchman but is still called "l'Italien" by the family.

France is a nation of individualists and contrasts. No one in France speaks for France except De Gaulle, and he speaks mostly of himself. In France, old-fashioned farming methods contrast dramatically with the latest technical advances in factories. The country has an archaic food-distribution system--all foodstuffs are sent from the producing region to the Halles in Paris and sometimes sent right back to the very place they came from, after lots of people earned their commissions--but no other country is so well organized in getting fine foodstuffs to the hungry customer. France is a great eating country not because of its three-star restaurants, but because every girl has learned to make a good omelet--which is difficult. "Toute Française sait faire un pen de cuisine," wrote Voltaire, who criticized the French mercilessly.

Americans must learn that the French are no longer overwhelmed by the American image of wealth and power. The Americanization of France is superficial, despite the twist and Coca-Cola, and hasn't penetrated the French soul. During a recent bull session with French and American students, I noticed that the French students used a great many American slang expressions, but inside they remained completely French--more mature and at the same time more naïve than their American colleagues, more independent, more skeptical, more interested in the arts, music, politics. And much less afraid of life than the Americans.

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Marianne, in turn, will have to give up the silly idea that there was an American conspiracy at the bottom of every disaster that befell France in past years; that France has exclusive rights to civilization and that Americans have no culture. Frenchmen will have to admit the efforts of the great American foundations, the enormous interest of Americans in the arts, the development of symphony orchestras, the evolution of that great art form, the American musical. A Paris art expert complained to me that "Americans bought up our Impressionists at low prices." He was certainly right, but I made him admit that American collectors appreciated the French Impressionists long before French collectors did.

Frenchmen should unlearn their own "American myth," which is as widespread in France as the French myth is in America. The American myth pretends that America is populated by moneygrabbing millionaires living in skyscrapers on a diet of popcorn, and by underprivileged people living in slums. French book readers (and France is a nation of book readers) are amused by the often silly treatment of what goes for "sex" in popular American novels. The fact is that the French may not be the supreme arbiters in such matters, as they like to pretend, but their attitude toward sex is relaxed and natural; to them it is an important part in the eternal cycle of life and death.

Free love is tolerated but not encouraged, and the percentage of once-complaisant ladies who settled down and are now happily and respectably married is high. Two attractive ladies who were gainfully employed in two establishments I used to work as a nightclub fiddler in the carefree Twenties, are now happy matrons and grandmothers in the French provinces. In one instance the husband bought a painting of his wife in a state of complete undress. Years ago I met her, and she told me proudly that the painting hangs in the connubial bedroom. The French, as I indicated before, are a civilized people.

It's useless to debate whether the Americans need the French more than the French need the Americans. They need each other, and they know it. They may disagree about some minor things, but they are in complete agreement about the truly important ones. The time has come to stop spreading the myths.