Franco-American
The book that I mentioned yesterday, Cultural Misunderstandings, takes its place on a lengthening shelf of titles including The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, The Philosopher's Demise, Into a Paris Quartier, Our Paris, and Almost French. These are not books about Paris, but books about Anglophones stubbing their toes on alien expectations. They're about self-discovery, in short. Stay at home, and you will never get to know yourself.
You can travel to any foreign jurisdiction to encounter yourself in cultural misunderstandings, but there's no question that, from the standpoint of literary quality, France is the premier destination. Now, why would this be? Have generations of well-brought-up Americans been brainwashed into discerning the superiority of all things French? I am certain that many people think that that's exactly what it comes down to, and I know more than one American who hates France and the French, sight unseen, out of disgust for their schoolmates' going on and on about French culture. And there is good reason to regard French as "elitist"; for centuries, it was the lingua franca of cultivated people whether they spent any time in France or not. I remember, last year in Istanbul, overhearing two evidently Turkish matrons discussing clothes in smooth if strangely-accented French. It's probably easier to talk about the kind of clothes that affluent, Westernized ladies wear in French than it is to do so in Turkish.
But France and the United States have a truly special relationship. There would be no United States without the (misguided) assistance of the French monarchy - we can start with that. Somewhat weightier is the fact that, of all European peoples, France has contributed the least to the American melting pot. Many French people emigrated to Québec, it's true, in the seventeenth century, but Canada was French at the time; the French seem disinclined to leave Francophonia. Setting aside the Québecois contribution to American civilization, are there any French neighborhoods anywhere in the United States? Have there ever been? Perhaps, but they have vanished. The links between the two countries are strongest not at some immigrant base but at the top, where good educations instill mutual familiarity and regard.
There is only one other country in the world that is as full of itself as France and the United States are, and that is the former Middle Kingdom. By "full of itself" I mean that these countries simply can't contain themselves; they need to make an impression on everybody else. (The beginning of wisdom, when contemplating the British Empire, is to see how untrue this was of the soldiers and administrators who wielded authority abroad.) In France, the need is embodied in la mission civilisatrice - the civilizing mission. Needless to say, there are few Americans (and all of us live in Manhattan) who believe that what this country needs is the civilizing aid of primates capitulards toujours en quête de fromage. Similarly, the French have developed a marvelous ectoplasm of bogus cool that they use to inoculate themselves against contamination by the shrapnel of American popular culture. As Bernard-Henri Lévy suggested in his talk at the 92nd Street Y a while back, you can't have two countries that insist, as both France and the United States tend to do, that they're "Best Country."
Toward the end of Cultural Misunderstandings, Raymonde Carroll surmises that the French equivalent of money, as a cultural solvent or common term by which almost anything can be measured, is seduction.
Like money for Americans, amorous seduction is charged with a multiplicity of contradictory meanings for the French, depending on the person to whom one is speaking and the moment one raises the topic. Nonetheless, if a (French) newspaper article defines a particular person as séduisante, the term does not refer to indisputable characteristics but to a category recognizable by all, to a common pointing of reference, to a comprehensible description shortcut.
Bearing in mind that being seductive requires at least as much work as getting rich (you can be born rich), we see what a volatile couple France and the United States are going to make, attracted and repelled à la fois.
