Close encounter of the third kind

 

We, French, are often told that Americans don’t really think of us and I strongly believe that. Why on earth would they? Don’t they have their own fish to fry?

Yet, hardly a week passes by without an article in any given American media about France or the French. In fact, there are many more articles about France than about any other European country or even Asian country. How the French do this or that, how they tackle such and such problems, their failure, their success, they way of living, their habits, what they like and dislike, etc…

The latest examples to date are to be found in Time and Newsweek. Americans by and large may not be much interested with France and the French but the American press, certainly is.

And here we have something rather exceptional: the apparently bemusement of “certain” Americans towards the French who, it seems, they consider as the very paradigm of strangeness. Doesn’t France appear like the ultimate foreign country, the one which didn’t deign to pay much attention to the exceptional opportunity America presented to all peoples of the world? Ain’t such attitude the very confirmation of France’s arrogance? Hence the “reasoning”: “If they’re not interested in our country it can only mean they hate us.”

The reason is simple: France being the wealthiest country in Europe during the XIXth century, very few people felt the need to immigrate to the U.S. at that time. It seems like many Americans consider this lack of French presence in the original melting pot as some sort of evidence of French aloofness and desire to set themselves apart.

To top it all, the founding value on which the American society was built, “get rich”, seems to have fairly little importance in France. 

Now, you can’t deny these differences are more than enough to feed the cliché of the French as being the people who represent the “Stranger” per se in the eyes of many, many Americans.

When you add to this a possible underlying feeling of debt vis-à-vis the country that sent Lafayette, Tocqueville and Miss Liberty to America, you begin to understand the uneasiness of the relation as experienced from the American side of the Atlantic. 

Now, to add insult to injury, the French were right about Iraq, seemingly teaching another lesson to Americans.

How not to feel there’s something uncannily special with the French which, among all their shortcomings, seem to be reluctant to any integration into the Anglo-American vision of the world. Not to mention the French’s notorious incapacity to speak English and even their apparent refusal to do so.

Going to meet them is a definitive experience, something not totally unrelated to an encounter of the third kind, really.

Note: the painting is «The meeting. Bonjour Monsieur Courbet» by Gustave Courbet (1854), Montpellier, Musée Fabre.