I wonder where the US would be without the $20 million and the military support the French provided during the Revolutionary War?

That is all.

Thank you for making me laugh! I needed a laugh. 'Pierre Six-pack' is absolutely priceless. Your article hit many nails right on the head. The only thing I would disagree with is your idea that the French are only snooty when they're talking to Americans. In fact, they talk to everyone that way. The only French person who was polite to me in Paris was a Frenchwoman who thought I was French and asked me what the shampoo out the front of the chemist cost. But they have, as you point out, a lot to be snooty about. They have a fabulous country and they've got Paris. The Germans have a saying that the ultimate is to 'live like God in France.' Of course, no one handed any of it to them, they had to get out in the streets and take it by force and they still never hesitate to get out in the streets and throw a few cobblestones.The West owes them a lot and it would be easier to admit it if the French could ever forget it for even a minute!

I love France, and I'm tired of people around here dissing it.

I will note that judging France based on the behavior of Parisians is a bit like judging Americans based on the behavior of New Yorkers. Obviously New York has different standards of politeness than much of the rest of America (and I say that as someone who loves New York as well), and the same is true of Paris. If you get out of Paris, I found people to be much more polite.

I love France too, especially the post-structuralist theory. The one thing that Maher leaves out that the U.S. DID learn from France is how to get involved in long-terms imperialist wars. They had Algeria and Vietnam recently, while the U.S. had Vietnam (didn't they learn from the French on that one?) and Iraq.

Now we need our own Godard.

..were enlightenment princes. Many of the delegates from the South, to the conventions that formed the Constitution and the country, would be clearly recognizable as ancestors of the current GOP. They're the ones who insisted that small states have inordinate representation. They're the ones who made sure slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person so that the South itself would have more representation than it should have.

In short, this strain of know-nothing, racist, religious fundamentalism has been with us from the beginning, and at the highest levels of our leadership. Only the Northern delegates were enlightenment acolytes... the South enshrined racism in our Constitution, then fought like hell for nearly two centuries to keep it there. They're still fighting their antebellum fight. The "family values" thing has always been code for racist superiority.

Corporate America has, over many years, found them a handy tool to get politicians in power who make Corporate America's agenda the most important agenda.

These dumb mofos came over with us from England. They never give up. They never give in. We're gonna have to fight them forever. Forever.

You're right, Bill. As someone who grew up in France, I can testify that the French have no lack of self-esteem. They simply like being French. The word "chauvinism" doesn't derive from the name of one of Napoleon's generals for nothing, folks.

In fact, the French probably do consider the Enlightenment "French." But the truth is, if you're talking about the same Enlightenment I'm familiar with, it includes the Englishmen Thomas Hobbes David Hume, and especially John Locke, as well as France's Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire. And it was really Locke, more properly than Voltaire, that Jefferson borrowed from that whole "all men are created equal thing."

Far be it from me to defend the modern Repubilcan South--I'm a firm believer in Schaller's look away from Dixie theories--but I do seem to recall that Jefferson and Madison, who were pretty familiar with Montesquieu and Locke and Hume, were from Virginia.

Nice commentary Bill, and thanks for pointing out the philosophical debt the US owes the French Enlightenment (not to mention French help during the Revolutionary War, something not unlike the role the Russians played in WW2 pinning down 75% of the Nazi war machine so the Western Allies could recuperate).

I'd like to add one other thing though. Francophobia (or at least Europhobia) has a long history as well in the US. While the goal of the Founding Fathers was to put the United States on an equal footing with European nations, this process was always accompanied by a sneaking sense of inferiority compared to the nations of "Old Europe".

Both Jefferson and Franklin worked hard to address percieved deficiencies in any comparisons that might be made with Europe. Jefferson for instance utilized his interests in antiquities to promote the idea that America had a geological past as old and as complex as that of Europe. Even before Lyell's notion of uniformitarianism (that the rocks and geological features of Earth had been shaped by forces identical to those in operation today, and that these had therefore been in motion for fantastically long periods of time) had taken hold among "men of science", Jefferson was still eager to demonstrate the New World's equivalence to Europe in matters both ecological and philosophical.

Finally there is the consequence of American notions of Europe as the source of civilization. At the close of the 18th century, race-based notions of white supremacy were becoming common coin among the North American colonies. The rationales for white supremacy were notions of higher degrees of civilization for Europe compared to others, and European racial superiority over others. These ideas of course sprang out of the rationales developed to justify colonialism and exploitation.

Unfortunately however, if Euro-americans were superior to Blacks and Natives on the basis of their European-ness, then the logical corollory was that Europeans were superior to Euro-Americans since the former were more European than the settlers who were born in the colonies. Notions of racial and cultural purity (going back at least as far as the 16th century in New Spain) exacerbated this notion further.

One could argue that perhaps the notion of racial whiteness was developed in part to promote a sense among Euro-Americans of commonality as equals with Europeans which would not suffer from the same definitional problems as the earlier equation of superiority with Europeanness (I refer interested readers to Daniel Segal's excellent analysis of this issue).

Whiteness (which emerged in the 1670s and was enshrined as a supposed law of nature by the 1820s) is not a fact of biology, rather it owes its origin and continuance to it's power as a political tool. it should be noted that (as Edmund Morgan argues,) this concept probably began as a way to co-opt poor whites into supporting the planter class in the eastern colonies. After the Revolutionary War, it was used to reconcile previously hostile political factions around a notion of normative "American" whiteness. And finally it provided a pathway to absorb poor white males into the body politic without challenging the foundations of the status quo following the so-called Jacksonian revolution.

Despite the sucessfulness of whiteness as a domestic unifier, it was ultimately only partially successful in addressing the notion of European superiority and that of France in particular. French culture and style continued to be heavily associated with elite culture in the US as it was in most of the West. Americans continue to be haunted by the suspicion of their lack compared to France as a consequence of uncritically assimilated colonialist notions of what "true" civilization looks like.

Small wonder then that uber-nationalists of the RIght hate the French. In their hierarchical, Manichean world (where one is either superior or inferior to some degree), the US can only be dominant over others (otherwise "they" will have won), which means that Europe and the French in paritcular must be shown to be lacking somehow.

Like Oedipus, they wish to kill their fathers in order to establish their own status. Sadly, they miss the larger and more important issue: the building of a truly democratic nation out of the legacies of colonialism and supremacism which preceded it.