Last week I drove to Williamsburg, Va., and visited the nearby battlefield of Yorktown. At the tour's outset, our guide stressed that George Washington's troops would never have won this battle without the help and strong support of French soldiers, ships and weapons. The Marquis de Lafayette and Comte de Rochambeau, in particular, helped the American revolutionaries succeed. It was an important lesson, not only in American but also in French history -- and is even more so now, as the two countries remain divided over the war with Iraq.
Strolling through Yorktown's narrow and peaceful streets, I thought about the close relationship and cooperation that existed between France and America during the Revolutionary War and throughout the last two centuries. I thought about the common values, such as liberty and justice, that they've shared. Unfortunately, some groups and individuals have used the diplomatic rift at the United Nations over the question of Iraq's disarmament to try to drive a wedge between the two countries and question their shared historical legacy. The French government's opposition to a rush to war in Iraq and its support for the inspections process has led to a full-blown verbal assault by some Americans on the French people and their government -- a political system modeled very closely on our own.
This assault, by most standards, has been unprecedented, and it's been fostered in some cases by the mainstream media and a certain segment of the political establishment. Their tone of deliberate confrontation fails to recognize that France is still one of America's most important allies. On the other side of the Atlantic, such French-bashing has been widely perceived as the obvious sign of a collective regression. Here at home, too, though a majority of Americans may have a negative view of France, they still consider the renaming of French fries as "freedom fries" and French toast as "freedom toast" to be rather childish initiatives. Nevertheless, the damage that has been done is disturbing. Not only is there political fallout but social and cultural damage as well: Several American universities have canceled their summer programs in France because of a drop-off in applications. It's sad to see such attitudes develop at a time when the world is increasingly interconnected. The main idea of globalization is precisely that all people, nations and cultures are part of the same whole, and that none of them should be dismissed as irrelevant. With recent French-bashing, we've seen the latest incarnation of America's tendency to look inward at the expense of its relationships with others -- a concept incompatible with the so-called "universalist spirit" of the post-Cold War world. It is also incompatible with the spirit expressed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Americans should be disappointed in their politicians and pundits for appealing to Francophobia as a substitute for real political discourse.
I remember as a child visiting the beaches of Normandy, where the D-Day invasion took place, and thinking about the active role my uncle and grandparents played in the resistance movement against the Nazis during World War II. So I was particularly shocked when recently I saw a sign saying "Remember Normandy" being used by some pro-war and anti-French demonstrators. The majority of the French population isn't opposed to war in Iraq because of a collective amnesia. Rather, its opposition is motivated by World War II, a memory undoubtedly at the core of contemporary French identity. The war's unforgettable images and its senseless human loss are the source of France's resistance to this conflict.
When the French fought alongside the armies of George Washington at Yorktown and Franklin D. Roosevelt at Normandy, they were willing to give their lives for a common cause that enjoyed a tremendous moral legitimacy. They sided with Americans because they were driven by a shared political idealism that unfortunately has eroded today in a more cynical international environment. Downtown Baghdad is no Omaha Beach in the eyes of the French. The heroism displayed by the soldiers on June 6, 1944, was a fight for universal democracy and against international totalitarianism. In France's view, the war against Iraq doesn't represent that universal struggle but rather a fight between one form of democracy and a local dictatorship. In this case, history isn't repeating itself.
The lesson of Yorktown was that allies do matter, for no nation by itself holds a monopoly on the legitimacy of history. That legitimacy is always better served and enhanced when men and women rise above national interests and turn their differences into a fertile ground for dialogue and communication. That's what used to happen between France and the United States -- until the threat of falling bombs and invading armies cut the dialogue off.
Pierre Taminiaux is an associate professor of French at Georgetown University.
