The Arrogance of the French: Why They Can't Stand Us... And Why the Feeling is Mutual

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Imagine the fun Mark Twain would have had with France￯﾿ﾽs undeclared war on America.That￯﾿ﾽs the kind of humorous insight that journalist Richard Z. Chesnoff delivers in this book. Living among the French in a tiny farming village, Chesnoff vividly dissects the national arrogance, snobbery, and superiority that fuel France￯﾿ﾽs blatant contempt for the United States.

And the feeling￯﾿ﾽs mutual. Frustration with the French in Middle America reached an all- time high when we learned of France￯﾿ﾽs apparent complicity with Saddam Hussein￯﾿ﾽs regime. ￯﾿ﾽFreedom fries,￯﾿ﾽ boycotts of French wine, and mockery of all things French have become part of the current political dialogue.

But as Chesnoff points out, Franco-American rancor is centuries old, and our current disgust with the French dates back to at least the 1980s, when they refused to let the United States use their air space on the way to bomb Libya. ￯﾿ﾽAre they our allies or not?￯﾿ﾽ we wondered. If Americans didn￯﾿ﾽt have such an (unrequited) love affair with French food, fashion, and springtime in Paris, we￯﾿ﾽd be asking, ￯﾿ﾽWith friends like that... ?￯﾿ﾽ

Chesnoff offers witty commentaries on the French way of life and why the two countries find each other so exasperating. Are they really just jealous that we replaced them as a global superpower? Have they forgotten America￯﾿ﾽs sacrifice for France in World Wars I and II? Do they have a right to be haughty when their cuisine, fashion, art, and universities are losing ground to other centers of culture?

This will be the perfect book for anyone who has ever wondered how a beautiful love affair between two countries could go so wrong.

Author Bio: Richard Z. Chesnoff is a contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report and a columnist for the New York Daily News. A former Paris-based correspondent for Newsweek /I> and U.S. News and the winner of numerous journalism awards, he divides his time between southern France and New York.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Pitched somewhere between just kidding and deeply affronted, this book from the veteran U.S. News Paris correspondent (and now contributing editor) systematically airs most of the complaints on both sides of the Franco-American equation, but with an exasperated jingoism that makes clear on every page where his loyalties lie. That heightened tone is part of the point, mirroring the heated, and mostly empty, rhetoric he finds has been bridging the Atlantic for the past 300 years. But Chesnoff's pro-U.S. J'accuse has a set of specific charges that include weakness during WWII, wrongness on Israel, collusion with terror from the 1960s on and oil deals with Saddam that, he says, drove recent French policy on Iraq. Threaded throughout his familiar and very broad stroke macropolitical analyses are micropolitical ones, as Chesnoff goes into great detail, for example, about the mechanics of his rural neighbor's concerted dislike of him (wryly noting that "it probably didn't help that I was a J-E-W"). The result is a kind of slapdash anti-A Year in Provence, drawing on a lifetime's anecdotes of tranger insult with a variety of untempered history lessons thrown in. (Apr. 25) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Those irritating Frenchies. Only they would see America as "the worst kind of beautiful woman: a powerful woman that we desire but feel unworthy of and whom we must therefore degrade." Thus spoke actor-singer Yves Montand in an interview with onetime U.S. News & World Report correspondent Chesnoff (Pack of Thieves, 1999)-and if the urbane Montand thought of America so, then imagine what ill thoughts your average perfidious Parisian must be harboring about us. Of course, Montand was Italian, just as the famously anti-American Jean-Paul Sartre was Belgian. But never mind: The French liked them, so they go on the suspect list, for, by Chesnoff's account, the French and their ilk suffer from fundamental and fatal flaws: They insist on speaking French, despite "the diminished utility of French in worldly affairs," insist on nursing Cartesian concepts, insist on insisting that they have a place at the world table. Plus they opposed the Iraq invasion, and some of them helped the Germans during WWII, which makes them surrender monkeys. Plus "France is a vertical society where rules and regulations come from on high," whereas America is ruled by consensus. (Did you ever doubt it?) Plus they like Jerry Lewis and Michael Moore-and Chesnoff doesn't even get around to Mickey Rourke. Only readers who take such premises seriously will enjoy Chesnoff's diatribe, expressed in sideways assertions that, for instance, our media are superior to theirs because we stopped paying attention to Janet Jackson's breasts after a while, whereas they're still fixated on "an aging Belgian-born pop star named Johnny Halliday" (that would be "Hallyday," monsieur). None of which keeps Chesnoff from maintaining a residencein the Midi, where his neighbors, of course, are rude to him just because they're French and can't help it. . . . Anyone who knows France will recognize this as a half-cooked canard. Anyone who wants to know about what distinguishes France from the U.S. can read Raymonde Carroll's infinitely superior Cultural Misunderstandings: The French-American Experience (1990). That leaves the freedom-fry crowd, and they're welcome to this book.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Michael Barone

"Why do they hate us? It's a question Americans ask not just about Islamist terrorists but also about the French. Chesnoff provides the answers. Americans-and the French-will learn a lot from this book." — senior writer, U.S. News & World Report,and coauthor, Hard America, Soft America

"France sucks, but this book doesn't."  — host, Dennis Miller Live

Bill O'Reilly

"Why do the French hate America? Richard Chesnoff has figured it out and informs us with entertaining clarity." — anchor, The O'Reilly Factor

Clifford D. May

"Richard Z. Chesnoff insightfully-and entertainingly-explores America's most dysfunctional relationship with America's least reliable ally."  — president, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies