Oh My! The French Don't Like Us (Again)
The French sent a fleet to American waters and Washington rushed his army to British-held New York, ready to attack the city with every man he could scrape together, supported by the Gallic ships-of-the-line. But the French admiral decided it was too risky to fight his way through the Narrows against the much smaller British squadron.
Washington asked the admiral to support an attack on British held Newport, Rhode Island. This time the admiral showed up and the Americans ferried an army to Adquidneck Island for the assault. A British fleet appeared offshore and the admiral sailed out to fight them. A storm disrupted the battle and damaged several ships. The admiral decided to retreat to Boston, abandoning the Americans on Aquidneck to fight for their lives with their backs to the water. They managed to beat off the British assaults and extricate their army but it was an inglorious end to a hoped-for victory.
In Boston, enraged Americans beat up French officers on the streets. The admiral sailed off to the West Indies in a huff. Helping the Americans was only a minor flourish in his game plan. France's eyes were on the British "sugar islands" of the Caribbean, worth millions in annual revenue. The American war was a sideshow.
Three years later, another French fleet made a foray from the West Indies to escape the hurricane season and helped trap a British army at Yorktown, Virginia. The victory ended the fighting war. This historic ambuscade was a near miraculous concatenation of good luck. It may have been what Washington was thinking about when he later attributed American independence to divine providence.
Peace negotiations found the American diplomats as suspicious of the French as they were of the British -- with good reason. Paris was aswirl with rumors that the French, who were negotiating separately, were ready to give the British all sorts of footholds in American territory in return for concessions in the West Indies and elsewhere. The Americans negotiated a separate peace, winning total independence, and told the French about it after they signed the treaty. Only soothing syrup from worldly wise Benjamin Franklin straightened the out-of-joint French noses.
When France exploded into revolution a few years later and went to war with England, President Washington declared America neutral. The French were outraged. They insisted the treaty of alliance was still in effect. But Washington reasoned that the French republic was a new and very different country, which had decapitated King Louis XVI, the man who signed the 1778 treaty.
The French sent an ambassador named Edmond Genet to the United States. He was barely ashore before he began creating "Democratic Societies" that talked of attacking the rich and overthrowing George Washington. Even Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, a passionate supporter of the French Revolution, was dismayed. Washington soon demolished Genet but relations between the two republics went into a downward spiral as the French Revolution degenerated into Robespierre's reign of terror, which slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent people.
By the late 1790s, the French were losing the war with England and were in a very ugly mood. They began seizing American merchant ships on the high seas as punishment for being a bad ally -- and to replenish their almost empty exchequer. When the United States sent negotiators to defuse the crisis, the French delegation demanded a huge bribe before they agreed to say a word. "No, not a sixpence," replied the Americans, which was improved to "Millions for defense but not one cent for tribute!" Soon the two nations were fighting an undeclared war on the ocean and America raised an army to oppose a possible French invasion.
Things did not improve when the French Revolution evolved into Napoleon Bonaparte's dictatorship. While battering the weary British into signing a peace treaty, the "Man of Destiny" browbeat the Spanish into ceding to France the vast Louisiana Territory and laid plans to ship an army of 20,000 men to garrison it. The goal was to create "a wall of brass" along the Mississippi that would halt America's westward expansion. At Bonaparte's side was his amazingly corrupt foreign minister, Talleyrand, who exulted when Napoleon gave him the job: "I am going to become very rich!"
Renewed war with England forced Napoleon to sell Louisiana to the United States. There was not a trace of benevolence or friendship in this decision. Napoleon told several insiders that after he defeated England, he would go to work on the trans-Mississippi Americans and bribe them into setting up a French satellite state. Things did not work out that way, but by the time the Corsican-born dictator was exiled to St. Helena, militarism was known around the world as "the French disease."
During the Civil War, France flirted with supporting the Confederacy. In 1864, an expeditionary force of French troops established the Austrian nobleman, Maximillian, as emperor of Mexico, with the backing of ultra conservative Mexicans. As soon as the war ended, the United States let Paris know what it thought of this violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Major General Philip Sheridan and 50,000 battle tried veterans advanced menacingly to the Rio Grande. The French troops hastily went home, Maximillian's papier mache empire collapsed, and he was shot by the disgusted Mexicans.
In 1870, when France went to war with a newly united Germany. The American ambassador to Paris declared the war was begun by French aggression and all but cheered when the Germans smashed the French army flat in a war that lasted only a few months.
Fast forward to 1917. Once more the French were fighting Germany, with the British propaganda machine and the British army on their side -- sort of. Riots between French and British officers in Paris frequently required a squadron of gendarmes to quash. Anglophile Woodrow Wilson, after 32 months of supposed neutrality, during which America sold billions of dollars of weaponry and ammunition to the two quasi-allies, joined the war with the illusion that it was good as won. He assumed the United State would not have to send more than a token force to France.
A month later, a French delegation showed up in Washington D.C. led by Field Marshal Joseph Joffre. The first words out of his mouth were: "We want men, men, men!" (The British were right behind them saying the same thing.) They didn't want an American army. They wanted the Americans to ship them raw draftees that they would train and rush into their armies as prime cannon fodder. At this point, Joffre had killed almost a million Frenchmen. The French army had mutinied and was in a state of "collective indiscipline" -- only two divisions were considered reliable. The British were demoralized by more than a million dead and wounded in their own army.
The Americans demurred at becoming cannon fodder and shipped an independent 2.000,000 man army to France that won the war. Afterward, when the doughboys became part of the army of occupation in Germany, they made a shocking discovery: They liked the Germans far more than the French. The Yanks deplored the way the French (and British) went out of their way to humiliate the Germans. John J. Pershing, the American commander, called it "kicking a man when he was down."
In the 1919 peace negotiations, the French delegation mocked Woodrow Wilson's idealistic Fourteen Points for a just and lasting peace and insisted on a vengeful treaty that sowed the seeds of World War II. How much Wilson grew to loathe them became vividly visible when President Raymond Poincare of France invited him to a farewell banquet to celebrate the signing of the treaty. The president flatly refused to go. In colorful (for him) language, he expressed his intense dislike for the pompous president, who had been the hardest of the French hard liners in the demand for a punitive peace. Wilson told his chief advisor, Colonel Edward Mandell House, he would "choke" if he sat at the table with Poincare. Only frantic efforts on the part of Colonel House and other Americans changed Wilson's mind.
In 1940, while a disillusioned America sat on the sidelines, the Germans won the victory over France that America had denied them in 1918. Only Herculean persuasion by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the unexpected assistance of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor got the Americans into the war.
From the wreckage of the 1940 defeat rose exiled General Charles de Gaulle, who struggled to revive French pride by demanding the Allies treat him as an equal, even though he had no army or navy or air force and millions of Frenchmen were collaborating with Hitler. Churchill and Roosevelt soon grew to detest "Le Grand Charles" but he managed to win France a precarious foothold in the peace settlement. Thereafter he remained a thorn in America's diplomatic side, withdrawing France from NATO, pursuing his own nuclear bomb program and generally struggling to assert the "gloire" that France had irretrievably lost. The current French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, is continuing this grandiose tradition. He has written several books extravagantly praising Napoleon Bonaparte, a sure sign of historical imbalance.
Does this mean we should call French Fries liberty potatoes and stop drinking French wine? That stirs echoes of the sort of idiocy that swept the country during World War I, when superpatriots demanded that hamburgers be renamed "liberty sandwiches" and sauerkraut "liberty cabbage."
No, all we need to do is be clear eyed about the limitations of French politicians when they venture into foreign policy and remember that nations do not behave like individuals. Beneath the posturing on both sides lie bonds forged by tens of thousands of individual Frenchmen and Americans.
On a 1968 visit to the Argonne Forest, where my father had fought in 1918, I lost a ring he had given to me on his deathbed. Thirty years later, a young Frenchman, Gil Malmasson, found it and went to a great deal of trouble to return it to me. When I visited Gil in France, I asked him why he had done it. "Because you saved France from the Germans twice," he said. Beside him, his father and brother nodded agreement.
Together we visited the huge American cemetery in the Argonne, and the immense French cemetery at nearby Verdun. We parted knowing we shared a heritage of sacrifice and courage, no matter what the politicians said.