If anyone needed proof of France's love for Barack Obama, le Figaro offered it today with an opinion poll. This finds that 80 percent of the French want the Democrat candidate to win the US presidency while only eight percent favour John McCain.
The poll was carried out by TNS Sofres on September 2 and 3, before McCain benefited from the Sarah Palin bounce but it gives an idea of the overwhelming wish in France to see a President Obama take office. Eighty-six percent have a good opinion of him compared with only 35 percent for McCain. The strong support cuts across social class and the political spectrum. The most senior French politicians at the Democratic convention came from President Sarkozy's rightwing UMP party, not the leftwing opposition.
The BBC found pro-Obama feeling to be strong worldwide in a poll this week, but the passion seems to run higher in France than anywhere. There are reasons for this.
France has an idealised and schizophrenic view of the United States that dates back to 1776 when King Louis XVI helped the colonial insurgents fight Britain's peace-keeping force. France feels that it has a founding share in the nation which bestowed jazz, GIs, cocktails, JFK and Clint Eastwood on Europe. It dislikes what it sees as the more primary, messianic and intolerant America that is represented by Republicans and personified by George W Bush.
Given the demonisation of Bush, it is surprising that the Figaro poll found that as many as 18 percent of the French hold a favourable opinion of him.
French misunderstanding of the USA has been glaring in the coverage of Sarah Palin. TV reporters have been at a loss to explain hockey moms and the excitement over a woman whose pitch is patriotism, religion and family values. France prefers American frontier heroes of the fictional kind, courtesy of John Ford or Sergio Leone. Few have noticed that Palin invented a French name for the company which she registered earlier in her career -- Rouge Cou. "It’s a classy way of saying redneck," she told The Anchorage Daily. "It’s a French word, rouge is red, cou is neck. It’s for marketing and consulting, in case I wanted to go that route" (No doubt she has been told that it should be Cou Rouge).
French readiness to take a dark, even irrational, view of America was on display again this week when Jean-Marie Bigard, a popular comic and actor, proclaimed his belief in the conspiracy version of September 11 2001.
"It is absolutely sure and certain now that the two planes that crashed on the (Pennsylvania) forest and the Pentagon never existed. There was never a plane... It is a vast lie", he said on Europe 1, a popular national radio station. After a dressing down by his managers, Bigard apologised today but he did not retract the view, which is shared by many in France as we have seen here before (The New York Times had a good piece yesterday on the consensus in the Middle East that 9/11 was a US conspiracy).
You can dismiss Bigard's ideas as provocation by a loud-mouthed celebrity except that some people take him seriously. President Sarkozy is a friend and even invited him along on a recent trip to the Vatican and presented him to Pope Benedict XVI.
To take the argument full circle, Sarkozy is a good example of the French Americophile. He loves the ideal United States to the point of excess, as he showed in his rapturous speech to Congress last autumn. He admires the power, the can-do outlook and the style (His Hungarian-born father has even said that he would have preferred his boy to be president of the USA.)
But Sarko has trouble understanding the real America. He has never learnt its language. Carla Bruni, his supermodel wife, a one-time New York City resident, has been briefing him. She offered a telling glimpse the other day in a Europe 1 interview. She said that Sarko did not listen much to "Anglo-Saxon" music. He prefers French pop and rock artists because he understands the words, she said. One of his favourites is Johnny Hallyday, the evergreen rock idol. Known once as the "French Elvis", Hallyday has of course spent nearly 50 years perfecting his act as France's idea of an American.
Johnny even customized one of his great hits in Sarkozy's honour. Its title, Quelque chose de Tennessee became Quelque chose de Sarkozy. |
