The Anti-U.S. Syndrome

When I was a boy in the South of France, in the 1920s, all the elders and betters I met were enthusiastically pro-American. In class we were told, quite regularly, that the United States was the Number One country in the world. One war later, the French (in a broad sense) turned anti-American.

The great fact of political life in France, immediately after the war, and then in the late 1950s and through most of the 1960s, was Charles de Gaulle. President Roosevelt had persistently snubbed de Gaulle during the war, and de Gaulle didn’t like being snubbed. Still, a million French men and women turned out to greet President Eisenhower in the streets of Paris in 1959. (The estimate is General de Gaulle’s.)

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Brian Crozier

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When I was a boy in the South of France, in the 1920s, all the elders and betters I met were enthusiastically pro-American. In class we were told, quite regularly, that the United States was the Number One country in the world. One war later, the French (in a broad sense) turned anti-American.

The great fact of political life in France, immediately after the war, and then in the late 1950s and through most of the 1960s, was Charles de Gaulle. President Roosevelt had persistently snubbed de Gaulle during the war, and de Gaulle didn’t like being snubbed. Still, a million French men and women turned out to greet President Eisenhower in the streets of Paris in 1959. (The estimate is General de Gaulle’s.)