France Sustaining America: Allegory of the Siege of Yorktown, Louis Edouard Rioult, late 18th C. (?)
Enlightened Fathers? Voltaire, Rousseau and Franklin, late 18th C. French print
Do you remember the acrimony directed at an unsupportive France by segments of the American public during our last invasion of Iraq? "We saved their butts in WWII!" was met with "Yeah- well they saved ours in 1776- so there's not much of a debt." OK- so now I'm going to speak in stereotypes- so take this entry with a grain of salt- no get the whole shaker.
The stereotypes go like this...
The French despise our provincialism and our lack of international imagination, our religiousness and our monoglottism and yet--- they love American culture, cowboys and line-dancing, Hollywood films (Jerry Lewis especially- go figure!) and McDonalds. Americans find the French stuck up, too reliant on beauracracy, too ready to retreat from war and yet--- they fall silent before French cuisine, swoon over images of Paris and feel sophisticated when they can say they own something "made in France". The French and the American resemble family members- locked in a confusing relationship of love and hate, admiration and anger. It's absurd to take this too seriously- but there's some truth hiding in the generalizations.
Our "founding fathers" admired the French philosophes, indeed spent time among them in the last glow of the ancien regime. The French looked to the American experiment as the manifestation of the ideas of republicanism restored. Benjamin Franklin brought his young grandson to be blessed by Voltaire with a laying on of hands. Thomas Jefferson and his family members (both black and white) spent time in Paris. Lafayette came to New England to fight against the British (as Professor Martin said- more or less to stick it to the Anglo-German George III than for anything else) however, he became a major celebrity after the war and toured the US as a hero for years and years.
American-French relations are complicated, but deeply connected through the ideas of their founding mythologies- dense symbolic and philosophical systems forged of neoclassicism and the enlightenment. America and France are the children of that adored, yet nebulous grande dame: LADY LIBERTY! France and America share a symbolic, philosophical ancestry... and there are a lot of powder-wigs involved.
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