luopf.blogg.se

Moreover, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted during his travels to America in the early 1830’s, the egalitarian spirit of Jacksonian-era frontier individualism was simply too much for the libertarian affinities of the collective resistance to French monarchical government.ĭespite the enduring mutual admiration of France and America, there are still deeper differences in their political principles.

This asymmetry in our relations may owe to the great American desert, that is, a land without people that the French cultural need for community finds so uncongenial. The sentiment has not been reciprocated, however, on our side of the Atlantic, a fact celebrated ironically by the French gift of Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty in 1889: many fewer French immigrated to America than Americans immigrated to France. The inscription quotes Thomas Jefferson: “Everyone has two homes, his own and in France.” How true that sentiment must be for the thousands of G.I.s, who died in World War II and are now buried all over France. There one can read a reminder of just how welcoming the French people have been for more than two hundred years. Near the American military cemetery at the foot of Mount Valérien, just to the west of Paris, stands a special monument to Franco-American friendship. Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light.