LETTER FROM PARIS: Bonjour Tristesse
Harriss, Joseph A.
LETTER FROM PARIS JOSEPH A. HARRISS Bonjour Tristesse ENSITIVE, ARTISTIC, INTELLIGENT, nay, intellectual, souls that they are, the French have never been known for steady nerves and grace...
...The French chattering class and media gnashed their teeth and braced for the worst...
...But Jacques Chirac, who still sees political capital to be garnered both at home and abroad, particularly in the Middle East, with anti-American gesticulation, condescended only to dash off a perfunctory written note...
...Thus the collective depression nerveuse (freely translated as a hissy fit) they have been going through since the American people resoundingly reelected George W. Bush...
...NI Joseph A. Harriss, a Paris-based American journalist, has been covering French affairs since the days of Charles de Gaulle...
...I'm devastated," he told me glumly, launching into a tirade...
...A man who starts a war for no valid reason...
...Despite their well-earned reputation for cynicism, the French usually swallow uncritically whatever line their government/media Establishment feeds them...
...In hock to Christian evangelicals...
...So after months of this drumbeat, accompanied by riffs of visceral anti-Americanismincluding spitefully acclaiming Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 best film of the year at Cannes—it's small wonder that up to 90 percent of all Gauls prayed for a Kerry victory Citing poll figures, Le Figaro gleefully headlined a week before the election, "Kerry Wins French Plebiscite...
...Sadly, I witness French post-election tristesse daily...
...He understood Us...
...The conversation ended there...
...LETTER FROM PARIS JOSEPH A. HARRISS Bonjour Tristesse ENSITIVE, ARTISTIC, INTELLIGENT, nay, intellectual, souls that they are, the French have never been known for steady nerves and grace under pressure...
...But they expect Chirac to say merde to Bush...
...In Germany the bestselling newspaper, Bild, might have good words for Bush, but Le Monde, the thinking Frenchman's newspaper, couldn't resist sticking its nose in America's business with an editorial calling for Kerry's victory...
...Among European leaders, both Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroder made congratulatory telephone calls to Bush, while Italy's Silvio Berlusconi and Russia's Vladimir Putin openly applauded...
...A quick poll showed that Bush's win was "a catastrophe" for 43 percent of the French, "bad news" for another 26 percent...
...He closed with a self-serving exhortation to "a close transatlantic partnership" (read ditto) and the assertion that "France and the United States have an essential role to play" (read "We're just as important as you") in solving the world's problems...
...Chirac used that to make a double carom shot at Bush...
...How could you people have voted for a blatant liar like Bush...
...Although French government officials from President Jacques Chirac on down avoided expressing a preference publicly—calculating that their well-known penchant for Kerry could be counterproductive with the American electorate—opinion leaders across the political spectrum joined in the chorus of Bush bashing...
...His "Cher George" message had the usual trite reference to historic Franco-American ties before doing some serious finger wagging about the need for "mutual respect" (read "Pay more attention to France...
...The deep trauma they have suffered is directly proportional to the high hopes they had for John Kerry As one man, the French media, that good and faithful servant of the Elysee Palace and Quai d'Orsay, painted an adoring portrait of Kerry as Someone Like Us...
...After hearing Kerry lauded to the skies, the French would have had trouble understanding their government's rebuff if he had won the White House and then asked for European cooperation in Iraq...
...One lady reporter for a French channel actually burst into tears on camera as she announced the dreadful news...
...Bush and Bin Laden: two of a kind," said Jack (sic) Lang, a former socialist minister of culture...
...The rest of the world deplores it, but we'd better get used to it...
...Bush the imperialist is worse than Hitler," claimed the right-wing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen...
...In a country where the great cathedrals now echo emptily to the footsteps of a few visiting tourists, where only one person in 10 says religion is of any importance, indeed, a nation that has entered an enlightened, post-Christian millennium, the very idea of moral values is quaint, if not risible...
...What a disaster...
...Actually, Jacques Chirac may be one of the few Gallic citizens secretly happy about the election...
...Chirac then ostentatiously hustled over to Yasser Arafat's bedside at a French military hospital, thereby currying favor with France's volatile five million Muslims and doubtless counting on a TV feed to the al-Jazeera satellite channel...
...Chirac's next stop was an EU summit in Brussels specially attended by Ayad Allawi, Iraq's interim prime minister, there to appeal for European help...
...DECEMBER 2004/JANUARY 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 65...
...But as the actual results started coming across the Atlantic in the early hours of November 3, the disbelief and dismay on the faces of French television reporters and commentators were poignant to behold...
...In hock to Christian evangelicals...
...As Le Monde summed up grimly, "Whether we like it or not, America has become more conservative, more religious and more unilateralist...
...Ever the Friend of the Arab World, he was in a hurry, he explained, to attend the funeral of Sheikh Zayed in Abu Dhabi...
...It might become ultra-conservative and aggressive...
...And my friend Georges, a usually savvy businessman, didn't even wait to ask me my opinion when we met the day after the election...
...The French puzzled particularly over this thing called "moral values...
...Bush's re-election, he said darkly, revealed "a large and lasting incomprehension between the American people and the rest of the world," with little likelihood of improved transatlantic relations...
...How could you people have voted for a blatant liar like Bush...
...Typical was the former foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, who likes to call America a unilateralist hyperpower, implying immense danger for all...
...He spoke French, it was repeatedly pointed out, spent his childhood summers in France, had a French cousin, and, mon dieu!, a wife who could say hello in five languages...
...Politically, they might have understood if Bush had won because of his leadership style, or because his gauche manners appealed to the coarse American heartland...
...It would be a week before Chirac got around to actually calling the White House...
...Helas, it was not to be...
...Some early TV and radio reports, misled by the infamous exit polls, gave brief hope that Kerry had practically won...
...Many concluded that it might just have something to do with a turn to—queue horreurconservatism...
...What a disaster...
...Liberation sounded the alarm: "America at the start of the 21st century is reactionary...
...A man who starts a war for no valid reason...
...Headlined the newsweekly L'Express, "Bush: Uncontrollable Master of the World...
...Their publicized half-hour talk must have been one-sided, Arafat at the time being in a coma...
...But values...
...When my upstairs neighbor, a cosmopolitan lady who worked with an international company 64 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2004/JANUARY 2005 JOSEPH A HARRISS and whose daughter has lived in the U.S., asked me how I felt about the election, her eyes grew large and her lips pursed in suppressed shock when I replied with insensitive American candor that I felt great about it...
...After first loudly promoting his vision of the need, "now more than ever," to strengthen Europe in opposition to America, he then deliberately snubbed Allawi by leaving the conference early to avoid a scheduled meeting...
...So unlike that boorish, cretinous, bellicose religious fanatic (a Texan, of course) who had been elected by accident, or probably fraud...
Vol. 37 • December 2004 • No. 10
