Franco-American Understanding

...We think of France as essentially a luxury-producing country...

...Or if you take it the other way round, 14,-000,000 pounds of French walnuts, 4,500,000 pairs of French gloves, 11,500,000 pounds of French cigarette paper, and the $40,000,000 worth of silk wearing apparel, perfumery, furs, jewelry, cosmetics and works of art which we bought from France in 1928...

...France is the spokesman for the European system of economics, a system based upon human labor, fine workmanship and an astute appreciation of values, both human and economic...

...We learn more about France in one whiff of Coty's latest essence, more in one glimpse of Worth's latest style, than France can learn of us from all the prunes in Christendom...

...Nevertheless, the two countries must fundamentally remain on the best of terms...

...Frenchmen have come to regard the Americans as a race of moneyed boors, without a proper sense of values, wasteful of their substance, despicable fools to be gulled by the first comer...

...This has seemed at times to be a positive discrimination against French commerce, whereas it has been merely an attempt to raise revenue from the traditional source of revenue...

...At a time when domestic crises have made the foreign market of greater importance than ever before, we can scarcely afford to ignore the French customers who account for one-twentieth of all our export trade...

...Farming is a typical American enterprise and our farmers consider themselves about as efficient as any in the world...

...The adverb "apparently" is the saving grace of the situation, for actually the two nations are bound together by a large and increasing body of common interests which have composed most of the squabbles characterizing recent Franco-American business relations...

...Such are the differences, some solved, some in process of solution, some as insoluble as ever...

...the United States, on the contrary, still predicated its tariff on reciprocity, mutual favors, mutual bargains...

...Only the few Frenchmen, like Premier Tardieu, who knew and appreciated America have stood between the two peoples and this Franco-American money complex, and have prevented it from precipitating a really major crisis in their political relationships...

...This, far more than any matter of war debts, has accounted for the bitterness of France toward financial America...

...Our tourists, our students, our rich and cultured citizens, will continue to find in France a foster-mother of the soul...

...Accordingly, a review of the economic relations between the two countries since the armistice has been apparently a series of head-on collisions between two diametrically opposed schools of thought and two absolutely diverse codes of practice...

...In France is concentrated the entire nexus of reparations and debt payments on which the stability of occidental finance depends...

...for the French business man, America has appeared as a ruthless and greedy competitor, without an atom of sympathy for French civilization or an ounce of economic logic in his make-up...

...Therefore, in spite of all irritations and exasperations and gesticulations, we shall come to agreement with the French, sooner or later, on every point at issue, because we need French civilization fully as badly as France needs American goods...

...The American, for all his alleged materialism, is apt to regard money as he regards the chips in a game of poker...

...How any race could be so benighted as to scorn one of God's greatest and most genial gifts to man has exceeded the imagination of the race which produced Montaigne and Descartes...

...to the French it was a degrading insult, a belittling of the soul of France, a barbarous indelicacy...

...Carter is writing for The Commonweal on the general topic of American foreign policy.-The Editors...

...Americans come to France, drink and make merry...

...France hears of bootleggers, synthetic gin and whisky, poisoned alcohol, and shudders at our hypocrisy...

...Money is there the symbol of human labor, of self-denial, of skill, of integrity...

...The French commercial treaty with Germany, which gave France's former enemy more generous tariff treatment than that received by France's wartime associate, irritated the Americans...

...In other matters, such as freedom of air navigation, the French have maintained the strict spirit of reciprocity: nothing for nothing...

...And our economists, if they are wise, will study France and study the French...

...On the other hand, the French have had many complaints to make of America...

...France knows that practically speaking, there are limits to reason as there are to faith, and venerates the indispensable scepticism which distinguishes homo sapiens from the pagan or the mechanical child...

...Irrespective of the 300,000-odd tourists a year from the United States who have watered France with American exchange and have redressed the balance of trade, the two countries do a mutual trade of $400,000,000 a year...

...This has proved extremely annoying to American business enterprises which have grown fat on the doctrine of mutual give and take, combined with intensive competition along strictly business lines...

...France has the largest gold reserve of the continent...

...French methods of taxation, particularly the peculiar quirk in the French law which authorizes the French Treasury to tax foreign corporations in France twice, once on their own dividends and once more on their probable share of dividends declared by parent corporations, have distinctly cramped the style of the American subsidiary in France...

...To paraphrase Wellington, the economic battle of the future, so far as America is concerned, will be won on the cafe terraces of Paris...

...Where Americans have gained the impression that the Frenchman is a money-grubber who can squeeze a sou until it cries "Papa...

...It is not enough to rely upon Great Britain and Germany, as being essentially similar in method to America...

...There has seemed to be a vital inconsistency between a government which insisted on its financial rights and a people who were careless of their money, unless indeed the debts were being deliberately employed to humiliate and enfeeble France...

...French art, French taste, French literature, hold America and France in a warm and close embrace...

...France, moreover, is the keystone to the plan of European economic union...

...in 1922, the United States adopted the rigid unconditional tariff, treating all nations alike, asking favors of none...

...The French farmer can get nearly 50 percent more wheat to the acre than his American competitor, 10 percent more rye, 40 percent more oats, 50 percent more potatoes, and more barley and sugar beets and other produce...

...Only Voltaire could have imagined such a law and he would merely have done so in playful irony...

...French efforts to combat American motion-picture films, to limit them by numbers, and to enforce the establishment of a great French cinema industry, had provoked an acute crisis in the foreign operations of the American picture companies, until the talkies came along to change the entire picture, as it were, and to give the controversy a paradoxical quietus...

...Latins to north of us in eastern Canada...

...it has done much to alienate French sympathy from the United States...

...To begin with, there is the matter of the tariff...

...What holds us together...

...France, in addition to this, is the key to the whole system of European finance...

...The key to the understanding of France" we are reminded, "is French civilization...

...Our fields and our mines will continue to pour out the commodities to keep the French clothed and fed...

...Nearly 18,000,000 pounds of lard, over 52,000,000 pounds of prunes, 21,000,000 pounds of tobacco, over 2,000,000 bushels of wheat, more than 800,000 bales of cotton, 7,726,000 barrels of gasoline, 172,000,000 pounds of copper, 60,000 dozen safety razor blades, 7,093 adding machines, 36,-990 typewriters-according to the Department of Commerce...

...ONE of the major tragedies of the postwar era has been the failure of France and America to understand each other, economically speaking...

...Since the war, each nation has reversed itself...

...Luxuries are the natural prey of the tax-collector...

...Before the war, France maintained a rigid tariff system, treating all nations alike, asking favors of none...

...The political sympathy between the two nations has survived undiminished, but in the business world the French and the Americans have been separated by a gulf which neither the memory of Lafayette nor the name of Pershing has been able to bridge...

...The American attitude toward money has been as offensive to the French as the French attitude to the Americans...

...Then there is prohibition...

...The thing which we can learn of France, and are constantly learning of France, is the art which is the mother of all arts, the art of taking pains, of working thoroughly, long and well...

...The greatest post-war luxury market has been the United States, and French products-gloves, silk stockings, millinery, dresses, jewelry, perfumes and cosmetics-have had to run the gauntlet of high fiscal tariffs in the United States...

...Unless we understand France, we will be in grave danger of drifting into unnecessary conflict with the massed business interests of Europe...

...What we sell France is American merchandise...

...For the American economist, all gall has been divided into three parts, the largest and most bitter of which takes its cue from Paris...

...In the first place, the American tariff has borne very hard on French luxury exports...

...And France, finally, represents to us the Latin race, with whose destiny our own is so incongruously but inevitably commingled...

...The American system of valuation, the American practice of sending Treasury agents to discover foreign costs of production, the American penalties for failure to permit these agents to discover these costs, have irritated the French...

...France has grumbled at this...

...It is essential that the business interests of the two nations should understand each other...

...The consequence has been a continual backing and filling, complaint and counter-complaint, and a protracted negotiation for a new commercial treaty between the two countries...

...In France, what one might call the sacramental view of money prevails...

...Prohibition offends France as being as great an excess as drunkenness...

...What of the unities...

...Latins to west of us in the Philippines...

...And then there is French industry...

...It has been France's hard luck that so much of her native enterprise has been concentrated in the production of luxuries...

...It is, probably, this deep-seated sense of needing France in a way which is indissolubly linked to our national past and future that is the best assurance that Franco-American differences will be composed...

...the second will have to await the day when the French admit that it is as possible and as legitimate for an American to make money in business as it is for a Frenchman, and that in neither case is commercial success necessarily the mark of Babbitt barbarity...

...This is not the so-called "debt question," now ratified by both countries and safely out of the way...

...Prohibition has not merely injured France economically by shutting off a large prewar market for the fine French wines, cordials, liqueurs, champagnes-to name which is madness in this Vol-steadian day...

...Sooner or later that union will come, in one form or another, but it must include France, and French brains and French resources will assure to France a large degree of leadership in the joint European enterprise...

...it is a social sacrament...

...Carter analyzes the misunderstandings which have arisen between post-war America and France, traces most of them to business and finance, but reveals the curious psychological character of some...

...This is serious...

...When American tourists pasted depreciated French bank-notes on their suit-cases, it was in a spirit of financial horse-play...

...what the French sell us is-France...

...When American business men begin to realize that, the first part of economic disarmament between the two countries will have been accomplished...

...Unless we understand France, the financial troubles of the past ten years will arise to haunt future generations which have never known the war that produced them, and which will ignore the consequences of a failure to maintain international solvency and stability...

...Latins to east of us in France, Portugal, Spain and Italy: unless we know the Latins we can never achieve the destiny which is written in our stars, and France is, for us, the best of tutors in appreciating the genius of the Latin race...

...Each nation has defended its new system with eloquence, logic and moral energy...

...France has an ideal location as distributing centre between western and central Europe, between the British Isles and northern Africa...

...France has adopted the "bargaining tariff," with different scales of duties for different states...

...The key to the understanding of France is French civilization, that strange salty blend of Latin mysticism and Gallic rationalism, of imagination and logic, of form and content...

...This has naturally exasperated the parent corporation which, by establishing a subsidiary, has sought to adapt its business more perfectly to the needs of the French market...

...France contains the largest permanent American "foreign colony" in the world, excepting only Canada...

...It is idle to vaunt ourselves on the fact that France must buy our cotton, petroleum, copper, prunes, wheat and tobacco...

...They like music and wine (as does every nation) but they are dour, persevering, intelligent, and as efficient and hard-working as any race in the world...

...prohibition has shocked France to the core...

...The French are not a frivolous, inefficient people, fond of dancing and light wines...

...Of course there are bonds which make for friendship, too...

...In what way do France and America compliment each other...

...This is the second of a series of papers which Mr...

...Unless we can understand and appreciate France we cannot expect to make economic headway on the European mainland...

...France has a civilizing mission in the modern world, as intermediary between ancient truths and modern necessities...

...Then there is money...

...Tariffs and taxes, films and automobiles, prohibition and perfumes, even debts will pass away or yield to new controversies on God knows what, but God, who made the French, knows that they will be bitter...

...their dissimilarities are what will cause us difficulties and these dissimilarities are common to the entire continent...

...We buy nearly a fifth of all French exports, we supply France with nearly a sixth of all her imports...

...Latins to south of us in Mexico, in the Caribbean, in South America...

...Good Americans go to Paris when they die or when they are very young...

...For unless we, as a nation, discover how to adjust our rather cloudy business ideas and rigid business methods to the logical ideas and flexible methods of the French, we will fail to grasp the opportunity which the twentieth century so advantageously offers us: the economic synthesis of the world...

...in 1927, France mined three-quarters as much iron ore as did the entire United States and eclipsed the United States as a steel exporter...

...What this means can be brought home by a few plain statistics...