It is an alliance that is definitely unique in history. At the end of the 18th century, nobody would have gambled on the longevity of this union between France, an old monarchy born of divine right, and a handful of rebels who were inventing a shaky country on the East Coast of America. And yet, in the 21st century, the Franco-American couple is still there: often chaotic, sometimes unfaithful, willingly criticised, it has survived the tests of time. The leaders of the two countries talk, consult each other, receive each other with ceremony and, above all, make common cause every time war strikes in Europe.
On this side of the Atlantic, it is easy to condemn this particular relationship. It consists only of cynical calculations, no friendship, just beautiful but empty phrases. Some French people, who can hardly bear to be indebted to the ally of 1917 and 1944. cultivate a real anti-American obsession: greedy and imperialist, Uncle Sam’s country’s only objective is to dominate Europe and grow rich at its expense. Of course, it’s not to say that each country does not stand up brutally for its own interests; that’s the hard law of politics. But if the alliance survives, it is really because it is based on a solid bedrock of common values: freedom, democracy and human rights. These values define the deepest and most lasting interests of the two countries. When everything is going badly, they come back to the fore.
Of his fight for civil rights, Martin Luther King said: ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ And, if the Franco-American relationship, for its part, bent towards friendship and loyalty? Because a combination of ideals and a convergent bundle of interests, despite the quarrels and clamour of the world, always finish by reuniting these great lovers, the oldest allies of the modern era, the heirs to two democracies, in a common destiny.
The Improbable Trio
On 4 July 1776, the American insurgents pulled off the unthinkable. Hardly 3 million, they declared their independence from the British Crown, the greatest power of the time. They seemed to have no hope; they urgently needed support. They knocked at the door of perfidious Albion’s hereditary enemy: France.
The Franco-American alliance started out with an improbable trio. Firstly, Benjamin Franklin, 70, a pamphleteer journalist, printer, inventor and founding father of the new American nation, who suddenly appeared in Paris to plead the rebels’ cause at the court of Louis XVI. Wearing his beaver fur hat – a rustic touch designed to seduce Parisians passionate for exoticism – the ‘bonhomme Franklin’ became an icon. He was put up in luxury in Passy at the home of Jacques-Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont, a wealthy financier who believed in equality between men and who financed the American war from his own fortune. He introduced Franklin to influential people in the court and particularly to the Count de Vergennes, the foreign minister and third member of the trio. This old foe of the British convinced Louis XVI, the 22-year-old king, to seize the chance to weaken England. Vergennes drew up the treaty of alliance that was signed in February 1778.
The three men brought in enthusiasts for freedom – many were to die later in the revolutionary torment. For a while, the insurgents were in fashion. Queen Marie-Antoinette topped off her voluminous hairstyle with a mockup of La Belle Poule, a French frigate which stood out in the early battles. Beaumarchais, a playwright, spy and arms merchant, also stood up with passion for the cause of liberty. And the Marquis de La Fayette, 18, chartered La Victoire, crossed the Atlantic, became a general in the American army and quickly a ‘hero of the two worlds’. As the commander of the French fleet, the comte de Rochambeau played a decisive part in the victory at Yorktown on 19 October 1781. With the help of the French, the Americans won the war. Peace was signed in 1785 in, obviously, Paris. Was not the French capital a bit American? The envoys who succeeded each other there were men of substance: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe, three future presidents.
First Divorce
It was in Paris that Ambassador Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, contributed discreetly, alongside La Fayette, to the drafting of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. 1776 in America, 1789 in France. The two democracies shared the same aspiration: to invent a new world, new freedom and new rights for individuals. The United States devised a republic based on a system of ‘checks and balances’ designed to head off abuses of power and entrusted the plans for the future capital, at the limit between the States of the North and the South, to Pierre Charles L’Enfant, a French architect and town-planner. He drew streets at right angles and chose the highest hill as the site of the Capitol where elected officials – the symbol of power emanating from the people – were to sit and designated the place where the White House was to rise up. The friendship between the two countries was sealed in stone.
But, in France, the Revolution sank into the Terror. Horrified, the Americans grew closer to their previous enemy, the British monarchy. In 1798, naval battles increased between the young U.S. Navy and French privateers. President John Adams equivocated and waited … It was a ‘quasi-war’, but real war was avoided. This simmering conflict, the only warlike episode between the two countries in all their history, gave birth to the central theme of the Franco-American relationship: they took stock, they were wary, they threatened, then reason won the day and tension fell.
Thomas Jefferson, Adams’ successor as president, followed the same path. His Francophilia was, however, put to a tough test because, after the Terror, came Bonaparte whom he considered a ‘tyrant with no principles’. In 1803, he learned that the First Consul wanted to settle in Louisiana, recently ceded to France by Spain, a gigantic territory that went from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, a third of today’s United States. For Jefferson, this was unacceptable: the arrival of Bonaparte’s troops would mean war sooner or later. He sent two emissaries to Paris to propose to Napoleon that he sell the port of New Orleans. After some hesitation, Napoleon suddenly gave up on America: he ceded all Louisiana for 50 million francs. The deal was excellent: the American nation had doubled its area and the danger was past. But from then on, the Franco-American couple separated. Each to his own.
A 25-year-old historian, Alexis de Tocqueville, was to revive the flame. In 1831, this liberal who was fleeing the monarchic regime of Louis-Philippe, undertook an 18-month journey to discover America. All through history, those who felt oppressed in Europe would often go to seek liberty on the other side of the Atlantic and vice versa. Tocqueville wanted to study the American penal system, but came back with a fundamental work, Democracy in America, such a subtle analysis of the institutions, the place of religion, women and the destructive role of slavery, that reading it is still relevant today. And it remains a meticulous pronouncement of our common values … Then, in 1849, thousands of Frenchmen rushed in turn to America, attracted by another Eldorado: gold. They arrived on the Pacific coast on foot, on horseback or by boat after having sailed round Cape Horn or crossed the Panama isthmus. Few made a fortune, but many stayed, breathing a bit of France into a dawning California.
In 1852, a new divorce: the French threw themselves into the arms of a second emperor and, in 1861, the United States, trapped in the original sin of slavery, started the slaughter of the murderous Civil War: 600,000 dead on the battlefields … In the end, the Union prevailed and, in Europe, the defeat at Sedan provoked the fall of Napoleon III. On both shores of the Atlantic, authoritarian plans had failed. Both peoples licked their wounds. Where was the enthusiastic alliance of the beginning? While the elites dreamed of colonial greatness and watched each other with suspicion, new affinities arose: Impressionism in France was succeeding in its thriving revolution and American painters, soon followed by collectors, arrived in great numbers to take part. Paris, Barbizon, Giverny … A new trans-Atlantic bridge.
The two democracies were nearly 100 years old. In 1865, to mark their union, Édouard Lefebvre de Laboulaye, a professor at the Collège de France who, under the Second Empire, got round censorship by talking about the American Constitution like one talks about love, thought of ‘something grandiose’, a gift to the United States: a giant statue, Liberty enlightening the world, entrusted to the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. It was to take 20 years before Miss Liberty rose up in the port of New York, brandishing her torch to welcome ‘Your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,’ a triple symbol of America, democracy and the Franco-American alliance …
More surprising, at the end of the century was a tiny insect which was to create another link: phylloxera, brought from the New World by a traveller, ravaged France’s vines. Grafts of resistant plants from across the Atlantic were used: French wines were from then on to have some American roots.
‘La Fayette, Here We Are!’
Once again, the European horizon darkened … The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in August 1914 set in motion the spiral of secret alliances, the old continent sank into war. The United States swore that it would stay neutral. It was hanging on to the old isolationist dream, underlined by Washington and Jefferson and reiterated by Monroe in 1823, then by a number of presidents: no restrictive alliances, let’s not get involved in European conflicts, let’s stay in the shelter between our two oceans … But the excessive submarine war in the Atlantic waged by Kaiser Wilhelm II left them with no choice. In April 1917, President Wilson, with the support of Congress, fell in on the side of France. And on 4 July, the anniversary of Independence, General Pershing bowed before the grave of La Fayette at the Picpus cemetery in Paris. ‘La Fayette, here we are!’ one journalist summarised. The brothers in arms came together. American soldiers were welcomed with tears and flowers and star-spangled banners mixed with blue, white and red flags.
The American Army tipped the balance. In total, 2 million Americans came to save democracy in Europe. Of these, 116,000 were killed and 200,000 were wounded. Europe was devastated: 9 million Europeans died, 1.4 million of them French. It was now time to rebuild. When negotiations began in Versailles, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau above all wanted security guarantees and reparations. He found the principles of the American Wilson very naïve: the right of peoples to self-determination, rejection of secret diplomacy and the creation of a society of nations with the mission of organising a pacified world. Wilson saved his plan, but the American Senate, seized by isolationist nostalgia, rejected the treaty. The United States was not to join the League of Nations that it had created. France found itself alone.
This was not, however, the era of each for himself. Artists, writers and musicians, fleeing an America tense from Prohibition and segregation, came to breathe the air of freedom in France. These were the Roaring Twenties: Josephine Baker was whipping the Folies Bergère into a frenzy, Ernest Hemingway was clinking glasses with Scott Fitzgerald at the Dingo Bar in Montparnasse while Zelda incarnated the new free woman, a tomboy or ‘flapper’. All would finish the night in Pigalle, at the cabaret of Ada ‘Bricktop’ Smith, a Black singer and dancer who was more popular in Paris than in New York. Paris was a feast, Tender is the Night … But, suddenly, on 29 October 1929, the lanterns went out. The Wall Street crash, born out of frenetic speculation, ruined the United States and, shortly after, Europe. The dollar collapsed, the expatriates of the Lost Generation went home and misery spread. The demons of fascism and Nazism came out of the shadows.
All For One
In May 1940, the stupefaction was total: the French army, reputed to be the world’s best, was swept away by the panzers. ‘A strange defeat,’ the historian Marc Bloch was to write. A terrible consequence of incompetence, illusion and denials. Who could save France, sold out to the Nazis by the old marshal, if not the American ally? But Charles de Gaulle, the chief of Free France, and Roosevelt, the man of the New Deal, did not get along. The latter did not believe in the myth of a France in exile incarnated by a general at odds with his hierarchy. For him, there were the facts: the shameful armistice and turncoat collaboration … And then, he had promised the Americans that he would not plunge them into war. But Churchill was to convince him and Pearl Harbor would provide the essential argument. The GIs would die in large numbers on the beaches of Normandy, in the valley of the Rhône, then on the frontiers of the east. An alliance in blood between the two nations, despite the antagonism between their two leaders. De Gaulle was to pull off the tour de force of obtaining a place for France at the victors’ table. The vital interests of both countries demanded this, of course. But it was truly for an ideal – liberty – that the soldiers had fought and paid the ultimate price, as had the resistance fighters labouring to prepare the Allied landings.
In May 1945, Europe was drained and the Stalinist bulldozer was threatening. ‘From Stettin on the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent,’Winston Churchill declared. The winter of 1946-1947 was freezing. In the ruined cities and the countryside lying fallow, people were hungry, industry and agriculture were almost at a dead halt … Once again, hope came from across the Atlantic. The Marshall Plan, announced on 5 June 1947, was a perfect incarnation of the alliance: interests and values coincided fully. ‘It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace … Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.’ The Kremlin prevented countries in the East from taking the hand that was offered but, for the others, the aid was massive ($13 billion at the time), without equal in history. Once again, the United States saved Europe and, in recompense, its industry turned over at full capacity. Populations, too, helped each other: masses of private donations from all over the United States went towards New York on board Friendship Food Trains and arrived in Paris on 18 December 1947. An incredible Christmas gift, from one people to another, the equivalent of 700 wagons of food. The following year, the French sent to New York the Merci Trains: 49 wagons (for the 48 States of the time plus the District of Columbia) dating from the First World War and filled with gifts gathered from all parts of France.
At the same time, Stalin tried to absorb all of Berlin in his zone of influence by cutting all access, but the West did not give in and the Americans organised an air bridge that lasted for 11 months. Western Europe called for more American protection and Washington asserted itself as the head of the ‘Free World’. The Marshall Plan was followed by the creation of NATO, of which the United States and France were founding members. For the first time in their history, the Americans committed themselves to permanent alliances, a far cry from the isolationist dream. All for one, one for all: that was the principle of the new pact. Any attack against one of the members would oblige all the others to come to its aid. The gamble was a risky one, but it was to succeed: Europe set in motion decades of peace and prosperity.
For the French, the turnaround in the balance of power was difficult to accept: the United States had become the main world power and, even if it was still the bearer of a universal message, France had become a medium-sized power. The 1956 Suez crisis set the tone: Nasser’s Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal. Israel, France and Britain decided on a military intervention. But, under the joint pressure of the United States and the Soviet Union, the three countries withdrew. The lesson was clear: medium-sized powers were not to call into question the fragile equilibrium between the greats.
Together in the Cold War
From Suez until today, in the old France-America couple, there were still to be tensions, quarrels, crises and falling out of love. But it has to be recognised: every time that there is danger, the alliance comes back together again. At the time of the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, France backed the American position. In 1962, discovering that Khrushchev had based nuclear missiles in Cuba, within range of American cities, President Kennedy set up a maritime blockade of the island. The world was on the brink of nuclear war. In Paris, the diplomat Dean Acheson brought General de Gaulle, who had come back to power in 1958, photos of the missiles taken by a spy plane as proof of Soviet aggression. The French president refused to look: ‘The word of the president of the United States is enough.’ And when the ambassador of the USSR came to remind him that Paris was within range of Soviet missiles, de Gaulle lost none of his panache: ‘Well, Mr. Ambassador, we shall die together.’
General de Gaulle, however, had not forgotten the slight previously inflicted by Roosevelt. He wanted France to have its own voice, its own international vision – ‘Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals’ – and developed an independent nuclear force. Inside the alliance, he played the role of troublemaker. But just how far? If France developed its own bomb, it was under the shelter of the American nuclear umbrella. De Gaulle demanded the closure of NATO bases in France. ‘Do we also have to take away the caskets?’ a bitter high-ranking American officer asked. France left NATO’s integrated command, but not the alliance and it kept a representative on the Military Committee. When he denounced the Vietnam War in Phnom Penh, or shouted ‘Long live free Quebec!’ in Canada, the Americans were annoyed. Then the storm would pass. Nobody could allow themselves the luxury of a break. Finally, de Gaulle was to come to terms with Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, Pompidou with Nixon, Giscard d’Estaing with Ford and Carter …
Even more surprising was the trust between Mitterrand and Reagan, the socialist and the conservative. The inclusion of communist ministers in the French government had nonetheless bothered Washington. But Mitterrand wanted to demonstrate his loyalty to the Western camp: he revealed to Reagan that the DST counter-espionage service had turned a KGB agent, Colonel Vladimir Vetrov – codenamed ‘Farewell’ – and he shared important intelligence with the American ally that revealed the extent of Soviet espionage activities against the United States, particularly in the area of high technology, but also Soviet backwardness in research. Faced by a weakened, but hardening USSR, France and the United States walked in tandem. In 1983, Mitterrand backed Reagan during the deployment of Pershing missiles in Germany with this statement that was to go down in history: ‘The missiles that threaten Europe are in the East, and the pacifists are in the West!’
On the fall of the Wall in 1989, they celebrated together the triumph of liberty. ‘The Evil Empire’, as Ronald Reagan called it, rotten from the inside, did not survive the arms race that the United States had dragged it into, nor the dissidents of Solidarnosc in Poland, secretly supported by the Vatican and the CIA, nor the calls for freedom in the rest of the Warsaw Pact. And yet, this moment of victory was to be just a parenthesis.
‘We Are All American’
For the 21st century opened with the horror of 11 September. The United States attacked on its soil! The shock was immense. ‘Tonight, we are all American,’ the author of these lines said on television, words reproduced the next day by the Le Monde newspaper. A few days later, President Chirac went to New York and flew over the ruins by helicopter. In Washington, next to President George W. Bush, he reaffirmed France’s unfailing solidarity. For the only time in its history, the Atlantic Alliance applied its Article 5 and decided to strike the Afghanistan of the Taliban who refused to hand over Osama Bin Laden.
But hubris overcame the White House and its coterie of neoconservatives, obsessed by another country: Iraq. They wanted to ‘remodel’ the Middle East and justified the matter by claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, of which no trace was ever found. This time, it was spectacular: at the United Nations, France frontally opposed the United States and the foreign minister lobbied the non-permanent members of the Security Council to persuade them to vote against Washington. Between allies, the break was almost total. But nobody crossed the line.
Five years passed. Suddenly, the French raved over Barack Obama with a passion that was hardly reciprocal. In 2009, Nicolas Sarkozy, ‘the American’, went back into NATO’s integrated command. The Alliance was again on the rails. But on 21 August 2013 when Bashar al-Assad bombed the southern districts of Damascus with sarin gas, violating the ‘red line’ drawn by Obama, the latter backed down on planned strikes and left the ally François Hollande, who was on the point of sending French planes, high and dry. The lesson was hard: the Americans could not be trusted, but the French did not have the means to intervene without them. Moscow and Beijing would not forget this.
Soon, there was chaos in the Franco-American relationship. With the help of Kremlin trolls, Donald Trump won the election of 2016 by a whisker. This president was not an ordinary Republican. A populist who dreamed of being an autocrat, he despised his country’s institutions and hated multilateralism. He left the Paris climate accord and the Iranian nuclear deal and threatened to leave a NATO that he declared ‘obsolete’. Once again, the Europeans faced up to their vulnerability: a commitment by one American president could be abandoned by his successor, the word given was not definitive. The attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021, inspired by President Trump himself, confirmed the worst fears. Everyone understood that American democracy could collapse, and the alliance with it, and perhaps also European democracies — contested from inside, threatened from outside.
The presidency of Joe Biden, a veteran in diplomacy, seemed like a respite, not a definitive restoration of trust. There was a new crisis in the old couple in 2021: the Americans, British and Australians negotiated a military alliance, AUKUS, in the Asia- Pacific region, keeping the French carefully outside. It was treachery. Between old allies, the offence was unforgivable and the falling-out official. It was to be Vladimir Putin who, despite himself, revived alliance solidarity. The extreme violence of his attack on Ukraine and the atrocities committed against civilians reinforced NATO, which enlarged to bring in Sweden and Finland. And the Americans came back in force to Europe. Again, the struggle was a joint one, the stakes shared: to save peace and democracy in Europe.
So, from Franklin to Biden, from La Fayette to Macron, the Franco-American alliance, in its best moments, protected the liberty of the two nations. Today, the couple is unbalanced: the United States is the leader in monetary, economic, energy and military matters and makes no secret of this. France, for its part, often feels relegated, loses confidence in its social model and has difficulty inspiring a European unity that could strengthen it. And yet, neither of the two countries can do without the other. Competitors and even rivals, as is shown by the enormous struggle against inflation adopted in the United States which favours American companies, but still brothers in arms, as repeated, hand in hand, by Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron during the latter’s visit to Washington in December 2022. Their militaries know this well, those who maintain the ‘interoperability’ of their means of action and who share sensitive intelligence. The obvious has to be restated: the alliance between France and the United States is necessary for the security and the preservation of the two democracies. It belongs to the peoples before it belongs to the leaders, who are just its temporary guardians. And it depends closely on those peoples’ loyalty to their own values.