Published November 25, 2012
When I was a little girl, if my teacher had asked me to make a picture of France, I would have drawn a man with a beret and a baguette, standing next to the Eiffel Tower. A French child, asked the same question about the USA, might have drawn the Empire State Building, with lots of tiny stick figures at its base, or a cowboy with horse and lasso in the wide open spaces of the Wild West. Those were the stereotypes then and some of them are still alive today.
The French media, covering the recent US presidential elections, painted a different picture of American life and politics. Some were stereotypical and clichéd, others, downright wrong. For example, on election night, broadcasting direct from Washington, the anchorman of France’s major public television newscast sagely commented on a map of the United States, showing states won by each of the candidates, except that the blue states were attributed to Romney, the red to Obama, giving Romney a significant lead and a chance for victory.
That blunder was the exception, not the rule. On the whole, the reporting was thorough and insightful, a rare chance “to see ourselves as others see us,” which is why, at November’s end, I’m looking back on the recent elections to take a look at how the French see us.
In April of this year, the French elected Socialist François Hollande President. Tea Party advocates might imagine that the French, at the news of “four more years,” were dancing in the streets, except that for the French, President Obama is a political figure who stands slightly right of center. They see him as a pragmatist, ready to compromise with Republicans to get a political job done.
As for his “socialist medicine,” the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, to French eyes, this is yet another manifestation of Barack Obama’s pragmatism. In a global economy, an American with good health coverage becomes a more healthy competitor. If serious illness does strike, he or she is not knocked out of the race by crushing medical bills. Some commentators wryly observed that a Romney victory could have actually given a competitive edge to Europe. His “less government” ideology most likely would have weakened, not strengthened, America’s ability to compete, causing the nation’s infrastructures to crumble and pushing the middle class towards poverty.
Wary of change, the French admire Americans’ relative optimism in the face of globalization and envy the US move toward energy independence, in part thanks to shale gas, extracted from Marcellus shale. However, on November 13, in his first press conference, President Hollande expressed his intention to respect the 2011 law outlawing hydraulic fracturing, despite large reserves of shale gas in France. He remains willing to reconsider the issue if safer methods of extraction come into use, but for the moment, fracking poses serious risks to drinking water supplies, as many Pennsylvanians know all too well.
A less religious people than Americans, the French were curious about Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith, a religion they largely discovered thanks to election coverage that included informative reporting about The Church of the Latter Day Saints. During the campaign, there were reports about Joseph Smith’s revelation, Brigham Young’s great trek from Iowa to Utah, and the hit Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon.”
Analysis of Mormonism has been interesting too. Anne-Lorraine Bujon, a French researcher in international relations, describes it as an American tradition with Judeo-Christian roots, one which practices the Protestant work ethic, while celebrating the joys of earthly life. Also, Mormons have succeeded in creating a truly American mythology, built around the frontier and manifest destiny, with Salt Lake City as their New Jerusalem.
Other religious matters have also attracted French attention. For example, one of France’s weekly news magazines, Le nouvel observateur (The New Observer), in a recent issue devoted to what the French like best and least about the USA, points out the surprising information, at least to the French, that atheists are held in greater scorn than Muslims or homosexuals by certain segments of the American population. In a country where fervent religious belief is more the exception than the rule, the French have a hard time understanding the omnipresence of God and faith in American life, even though the American wall of separation between church and state is “sturdier” than that of France.
They also can’t quite get the gist of multiculturalism, a word the French translate as “communautarisme,” a slightly pejorative term that emphasizes voluntary separation from society, to form a community where members practice and preserve beliefs and customs different from those of the majority. In France, emphasis is placed on allegiance to a national community of shared republican values (in reference to the Republic) which take precedence over individual or group systems of belief. This explains in part why the French don’t like Muslim headscarves, a visible mark of difference displayed in public space.
As early as 1835, the great French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, in his book Democracy in America, warned against the dangers of democratic individualism, when differences are carried too far, as can sometimes be the case with multiculturalism.
Another example Le nouvel observateur gives is the philosophy of Paul Ryan, Romney’s running mate. Here’s a man who has chosen “my own path, my own journey, an American journey where I can decide for myself and define happiness for myself.” The analytically inclined French point out that this form of hyper-individualism goes against the very collective values he defends. How can he exclude other Americans from making the same kind of personal journey? In his case, happiness has meant a heterosexual marriage. On what grounds, then, can he deny others choices different from his own?
On the whole, the French are pleased by Obama’s victory, though their reasons may not be those Americans suspect. For them, President Obama personifies a victory of the 21st century. He represents a new kind of president and a new kind of American, biracial, multicultural in the best sense of the word, focused more on the Pacific and on Asia than on Europe—and that’s where his re-election hurts. The French, and Europeans in general, feel forgotten and hope that in his second term, Obama will turn to the Atlantic world as well.
