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News Analysis: Meet Mr. Germany and Ms. France
Nina Bernstein/NYT NYT
Monday, September 29, 2003
iht.com
NEW YORK It was on display again last week, that old double standard. On camera, Germany's chancellor got a muscular handshake from America's president and a meeting that let bygones be bygones. France's president got the official cold shoulder and columnists' heated denunciations.
Yet France and Germany had taken the same position on the Bush administration's policies in Iraq. Both were offering to help train Iraqi security forces, but not to send soldiers. Both argued that only accelerated Iraqi sovereignty and a larger UN role could secure peace.
Apparently, it sounded different in French. Somehow, to American ears, it always does. At this point in strained trans-Atlantic relations, an obvious explanation comes to mind: In the American imagination, France is a woman, and Germany is just another guy.
The French themselves depict La Belle France as a bare-breasted "Marianne" on the barricades. They export high fashion, cosmetics, fine food - delicacies traditionally linked to a woman's pleasure. And French has always been Hollywood's language of love.
Germany, meanwhile, is the Fatherland, its spike helmets retooled into the sleek insignia of cars like the Mercedes and the BMW. It also exports heavy machinery and strong beer - products associated with manliness. Notwithstanding Goethe, Schiller and Franka Potente, German is Hollywood's language of war, barked to the beat of combat boots in half a century of movies.
Such images simply overpower facts that do not fit the picture - like decades of German pacifism and French militarism since World War II. So what if France was fighting in Vietnam, Algeria and elsewhere in Africa and deploying a force of 36,000 troops around the world, while Germans held peace vigils and invented Berlin's Love Parade. For Americans, it seems, World War II permanently inoculated Germans against "the wimp factor" and branded the French indelibly as sissies.
Sure, both countries were dubbed members of the "Axis of Weasel" by the New York Post and scathingly dismissed as Old Europe for opposing the war in Iraq. But no one poured schnapps down the toilet, renamed sauerkraut or made jokes on prime-time television denigrating German manhood. Only France can evoke that kind of sophomoric frenzy.
"It's in the way we view both countries," said Irwin Wall, a historian of French-American relations. "We view Germany as producing iron and steel, and we view France as producing perfume and haute couture. You'll never get America out of this stereotype that France is a feminine country."
When Secretary of State Colin Powell refers to America and France as having been in marriage counseling for 225 years, Wall added, "you know darn well he means we're the male partner."
American officials have long used sexist stereotyping as diplomatic strategy. Franklin D. Roosevelt once declared that Charles de Gaulle knew no more about economics "than a woman knows about a carburetor." In 1953, Life magazine likened the French government to "a big can-can chorus" and France itself to a showgirl slipping a billion-dollar bill's worth of American aid into her stocking.
Frank Costigliola, a historian at the University of Connecticut, gives many such examples in his book "France and the United States: The Cold Alliance Since World War II." He contends that assigning France negative "feminine" traits has always served to delegitimize French points of view.
"Associated with France as a woman is France as hysterical, or France as crazy," he said. "It really is a knee-jerk reaction."
Robert Paxton, an emeritus professor of history at Columbia University, agreed. "It's an American stereotype and an American strategy," he said. "There are elements in our culture that the Bush people can play on in stereotyping France as feminine."
The paradox, added Paxton, the author of "Vichy France," is that the French hold a mirror stereotype about America. "They believe the American male has been completely emasculated, and American women rule the roost," he said.
To the film critic Molly Haskell, it seems that France has been cast as the femme fatale, "the seductress who's leading all Europe away from us."
"It's this insidious evil woman," she continued, "and the others are probably good guys who are just being led astray." What does not fit that script is forgotten - like Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's pre-election promise that Germany would not take part in a war against Saddam Hussein even if the United Nations authorized it. Or the fact that in his youth, President Jacques Chirac of France made banana splits at Howard Johnson's in the United States before serving as a French Army officer.
"The Germans are getting away with it because we are so eager to tar and feather France," said Ann Douglas, a cultural historian at Columbia University and the author of "The Feminization of American Culture." "The constant need to denigrate France - and feminization has always been the way to go - is because France has always maintained a separate voice."
A female France is a made-to-order enemy for the Texan in the White House, Douglas contended. With a sagging American economy, and the fear of appearing weak that often underlies aggressive masculinity, she said, French-bashing has new political appeal.
But under Bill Clinton, reflexive animosity also flowed between Washington and Paris, recalled Charles Kupchan, who was a security adviser on Europe in the Clinton years. "When the French sent dispatches about operations in Kosovo, people would just throw them away," he said. "The attitude was, if it's from France, it must be to undermine American power."
Still, said Kupchan, now a professor of international affairs at Georgetown University: "Deep down inside, Americans feel deeper affinity for France than Germany. If France is female, there's also an attraction, a lure, a romance."
The New York Times |
