Now that the furor over Iraq has died down, anti-war sentiment in France has subsided to leave a residue of disappointment with the shortcomings of the American occupation and a certain I-told-you-so schadenfreude.
Resentment of the American president they call le cowboy remains at a permanent high tide, however. Has this attitude poisoned French opinion of Americans in general?
It's no state secret that Bush is not the most popular world leader in France -- he's viewed as coarse and unrefined, and his unilateralist policies are reviled. In a country where politicians are expected to be elegant, eloquent, and diplomatic, Bush's twang and strut are insupportables.
The French are also surprisingly familiar (and displeased) with Bush's advisers and intellectual bedfellows, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleeza Rice.
One dinner party joke about the Bush administration plays off the French word con, which means "idiot," and begins with the question, What do you call neo-conservatives for short?
The answer: Des n?©o-cons.
Still, all the recent Franco-American rancor has been more vocal -- or at least more demonstrative -- on the American side of the pond. They never poured our Coca Cola into the streets, for example.
There was, of course, a moment when the French infuriation with the Americans was at very high levels - the U.S.'s repudiation of the Kyoto protocol, battles over steel and agricultural tariffs, and conflicting views over the Middle East increased diplomatic temperatures.
The boiling point was, of course, Iraq.
While Americans became increasingly irritated by French President Jacques Chirac's endless stonewalling, and while France's refusal to admit that the removal of a genocidal despot might be a worthy war objective, the French, in the meantime, resented the fact that Bush seemed dead-set on embarking on the war, over any and all objections. (This view has, in the end, been mostly vindicated.)
They managed to laugh about the freedom fries, but the pouring of French wine into the gutters was just a bit too much. When the anti-French sentiment in America got out of hand (e.g. when the host of CNN's "Crossfire" suggested we "beat up the French"), people here got a bit tired of what the newspaper "Lib?©ration" called "le frog-bashing."
They cannot have been too pleased by the bandying around of that now-famous phrase of Groundskeeper Willie from the "Simpsons," which brands the French "cheese-eating surrender monkeys."
The conservative French newspaper "Le Figaro" translated this line as primates capitulards et toujours en qu??te de fromages -- "capitulating primates always in search of cheeses," which just doesn't have the same ring to it.
But in this war of words, Bush's wild west rhetoric was the straw that broke the frog's back. When Bush warned Iraq that the "game is over" in February 2003, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin testily responded, "It's not a game, and it's not over."
Bush's foreign policy rankles France from top to bottom: a recent survey asking Frenchmen about their opinion of the role Bush plays in world affairs resulted in 82 percent of respondents answering "somewhat negative" or "very negative."
The good news is that even though le cowboy is the American president -- and in some ways archetypically American -- the French don't seem to take this out on the American people.
Another survey in March 2003 asked French respondents whether U.S. foreign policy "is directly linked to the personality of George W. Bush" or whether "the U.S. would have more or less the same policy with another president." More than three-quarters of the respondents agreed with the former statement, which must be good news for Franco-American relations.
If the French are disgusted by U.S. foreign policy, at least they recognize it as an aberration linked to one powerful man and not necessarily to the other 280 million of us.
I've found that the French are generally quite responsible about making the distinction between their dislike for the current administration and the United States as a whole.
They're as nostalgic for Clinton as are America's die-hard liberals. They thought the Monica Lewinsky affair was amusing rather than outrageous - and invoking the scandal still stirs up hearty Gallic chuckles. (Presidential dalliances are acknowledged with a wink and nod in this country - the last president, Fran?§ois Mitterand, was even suspected of having an affair with his own prime minister.)
And though Clinton won't be coming back, anticipation is high for the presidential elections in November -- and the existence of John Kerry's French relations has not been overlooked.
Perhaps his election will usher in another great age of Franco-American cooperation and hearken back to the days of Franklin and Jefferson and La Fayette and de Tocqueville.
Perhaps. For the moment, I think both sides would be content with settling back into the old equilibrium, where they make fun of our food and we make fun of their body odor. Frogs and cowboys, contentedly stalemated.
