Francophilia

The woman behind the counter comes out onto the sidewalk and gives me instructions, pointing and speaking slowly, asking solicitously at intervals whether I understand. I say “Oui,” lying, figuring at least I know how to get started. Several blocks on, I go into a shoe store to get a new set of instructions. The lady there hasn’t heard of La Fourchette, so she gets out a phone directory, finds the address, and draws me a map so I can finish my journey.

We’re talking about the French here, those people who pretend they can’t understand foreigners who fracture their language and who make no effort to be nice to tourists.

It was the same everywhere. The night before, I had been in Lyon with my wife and friends having dinner at a local bouchon. We were the only non-French people in the place. The proprietor patiently helped us through our order (lots more fractured French), mimed what he couldn’t get us to understand otherwise, and was charmingly funny. Those stuck-up French.

We were in the provinces, you say? Parisians are not like that? During the five days my wife and I were in Paris, we encountered one surly young waiter. Otherwise, we met a parade of helpful Parisians of several ethnicities. Some were merely pleasant and efficient; others seemed to find clueless Americans kind of cute.

As time went on, something struck me (besides realizing what a good time I was having). I have loved Europe everywhere I’ve been, but there was something oddly different about the French, and I finally figured it out: The French are Europe’s Americans. Describe the French, and you’re usually describing Americans.

Take the notorious French attachment to their own language. The French aren’t like the Germans, Dutch, and Scandinavians, whose English is often so perfect that their corporate executives can (and sometimes do) conduct their work in English even among themselves. The French think that the French language is special and helps define who they are, and want to hear French spoken in their own country. As an American who goes silently berserk whenever I hear “Press one for English,” I have no problem with that. Do you?

We complain that the French are infuriatingly certain of the superiority of things French. True–and it is a kind of pride that is rare in today’s Europe. A few years ago I published a book called Human Accomplishment that was largely a paean to the brilliance of the European legacy. When I lectured on the book before European audiences, I discovered that my listeners did not enjoy hearing me recite their story; but were embarrassed. They had bought into the notion that Western civilization–i.e., European civilization–has been a source of evil rather than a font of the greatest achievements in human history. I have never given that lecture in France, but I bet you wouldn’t catch a French audience reacting that way (except, perhaps, for an audience of intellectuals). The French are just as chauvinistically proud of their artists, scientists, and inventors as the stereotype has it. And as the stereotype of Americans has us.

We complain that, in foreign affairs, the French go their own way, ignoring the interests of everyone else when it suits their purposes. Well, yes. Like us.

I probably shouldn’t have mentioned geopolitics, because I’m talking about French people and American people, not about the policies of de Gaulle or Chirac. But after reading non-French accounts saying that French counterterrorism units are the best in the world, and seeing the scarily kick-ass troops who patrol the grounds of the Louvre, I am no longer laughing at jokes about French fecklessness in the war on terror. And after seeing a few of the World War I cenotaphs that may be found in almost any French town, and having counted the names of the dead and estimated just what proportion of the town’s male population they must have represented, I am no longer laughing at jokes about French courage.

So, much to my surprise–for I did laugh at those jokes before–I’ve become a Francophile. But it’s not as if I’ve fallen in love with some exotic foreign culture. The French are stubbornly independent, think theirs is the world’s greatest culture, do the things they do best better than anyone else, are irritatingly proud as a people but warm and helpful as individuals.

Remind you of anyone we know?

Charles Murray, the W.H. Brady scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of the forthcoming Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality.