There is a romance of the relationship between France and the United States, the mutual fascination of two republics born from the revolution, and, as in all heart matters, there are flares. This is one such moment for the oldest American alliance.
France is a bristle, provoked by the inclination of President Trump to autocratic Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin, his apparent contempt by the European allies and his The threat of social media to store 200 percent of tariffs to “all wines, champagne and alcoholic products based on France.”
Mr. Trump made the Gaullism fashionable than ever by General Charles de Gaulla, who, as president, regularly bridged American dominance, died 55 years ago.
The current coincidence in France is that De Gaulle had the right to develop French own nuclear discouraging means, the right to remove France from the NATO military structure in 1966, the right to insist that France remains independent power and the right to warn that the United States and the Soviet Union.
“Putin and Trump resuscitated de Gaulla,” said Alain Duhamel, political scientist and author. “They have revived the Gaullist belief that two great forces cannot be allowed to control the world and that France may have allies, but it must be autonomous.”
“Give us a statue of Freedom,” Raphaël Glucksmann, a prominent Central-left politician, demanded at the Paris Assembly on Sunday, provided a Gaulllist cloak. He said that the return of the sculpture-France in the 80s of the 20th century and made by the French sculptor Frédérice-August Bartholdi-being justified in the face of the “Americans who decided to move to the Tyrants”.
Karoline Leavitt, a White House press secretary, ranked on Monday by calling Mr. Glucksmann a “French politician at a low level” and said, “It’s just for the United States that the French don’t speak German right now.”
In fact, Mr. Glucksmann, who is Jewish, replied that debt to the United States was much deeper than just a question of mere language. Reaching Americans in English, On Tuesday he wrote on x“I wouldn’t have been here if hundreds of thousands of young Americans did not land on our beaches in Normandy.” But he said that America of these heroes “fought against tyrants was not flattered.
So it works, at the moment of great tension, between two countries that have long been considered lighthouses of freedom to the rest of the world. Little, if at all, other countries such demands on the versatility of its virtue and Liberty’s torch, conceived in Paris, raised in New York, have long reflected this shared aspiration.
It seems no longer. The French are wondering what the remaining ties go back to the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French statement of human rights and citizen rights in 1789. French bankrolling the emerging US Republic, the Marquis service de Lafayette in the Continental Army and even the bond in Norman beaches.
If Mr. Trump really believes that a united Europe, whose construction was the core of post -war French foreign policy, was conceived as “screwing” America, then Europe “must develop economic and military resources to ensure our independence,” wrote journalist and author Renaud Girard in In the column in Le Figaro entitled “General de Gaulle was so right.”
What De Gaulle would think of the obvious readiness of President Emmanuel Macron to expand the French nuclear bounce means in the allies in Europe is unclear, although more than once he spoke about the need to act in accordance with the allies while remaining independent. However, Mr. Macron’s offer apparently, which would leave exclusive control of the bomb in the hands of the President, reflects a changed strategic reality, where, as Mr. Duhamel said, “Whatever is possible with Trump.”
“Who can say whether it may change in future political circumstances,” De Gaulle said as president in 1959. “It has already happened on the face of the ground.” He even suggested that the United States and the Soviet Union “after I do not know what political and social shock could find a common cause”.
At this point, the riots, when every assumption of the alliance of the NATO and the meaning of the “West” is questioned, these citations de Gaulle are among those that are regularly evoked in France.
Mr. Glucksmann wrote in his white house retages: “This America, faithful to the amazing words written on the statue of freedom, your America, costs much more than the betrayal of Ukraine and Europe, xenophobia or obscutantism.”
To mention deeply sympathy and friendship towards the United States, which will last in France: “We all love all in Europe, which we invade so much.”
