French American Relations

Where did all the anti-French anger come from in the USA? Didn't the French help the Americans win their war of independence? Wasn't it the French who gave the Statue of Liberty to the US? As far as I know, there has never been a war between the USA and France, while USA has invaded Canada 5 times. But so far we have not seen "Canada Dry" renamed as "Freedom Dry". It seems it's the French who are a problem for the US. And yet as far as I can tell, Americans are still generally admired by the French.

I have to wonder, how do Americans even come to know anything about the French. Speaking as a Canadian, Americans know practically nothing about us, and we're right next door. The only thing an average American would know about the French is what they see in National Lampoon's European Vacation.

So I did what I always do when these puzzling problems arise, I consulted Google. And I found out that yes indeed, a large number of Americans know about France from personal experience. I should have remembered, they were in France during and shortly after WW2! But that should be good, because the French welcomed the Americans a liberators. Instead there was friction that developed between the Americans and the French. It was bad enough that the US Army felt it necessary to put out a million pamphlets explaining to the GI's that the French were not so bad, and why they acted as they did.

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/841724.html

A pamphlet titled "Instructions for American Servicemen in France during World War II" was sent out, and I will copy a bit from the web page I linked to above.

Like the vehicles and the ammo, the guide did its part to win the war. Soldiers were proselytized on the need to liberate France and the worthiness of the French to be liberated. Neither assertion was necessarily obvious to most GIs. France in 1940 had made a separate peace with the invading Germans, and the first enemies fought by American troops across the Atlantic were French soldiers and sailors in Morocco and Algeria during the North African invasion of November 1942. That was to be forgiven, if not quite forgotten, since many Frenchmen had since thrown in their lot with the Allied cause. “We are friends of the French and they are friends of ours,” the guide instructs. “The Germans are our enemies and we are theirs.”

But many American soldiers, preferred the Germans to the French. Germany seemed cleaner, the people seemed smarter and more compliant. The French seemed stupid, dirty, sullen and did not seem eager to please. Of course, this could be explained by the fact that the French were not the defeated enemy, they were supposedly allies. The fear of being shot apparently works wonders for the population. The French were not afraid of being shot, and acted as normal people would - although they were people who had just endured an occupation where they were enslaved and starved by the occupiers and bombed and shelled by their allies.

I think this situation could be argued to have sowed the seeds of some animosity towards the French among returning GI's. Animosity that remained dormant for years and then was revived by Bush's war on Iraq, which the French warned would be long and difficult, but Bush administration said would "pay for itself" and doubted it would last 6 months. You know, in hindsight it might have been a real good idea to put out a book "Instructions for American Servicemen in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Liberation". I am not the first to think of the idea, see this web site.


To present a more complete picture of Franco-American relations, there were issues after WW II: some Communism in France, the French didn't want to see Germany rearmed while America did, and France had colonies that the USA wanted to see independent.