There is romance to the relationship between France and the United States, the mutual fascination of two republics born of revolutions, and as in all affairs of the heart there are flare-ups. This is one such moment for the oldest American alliance.
France is bristling, provoked by President Trump’s tilt toward an autocratic Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin, his apparent contempt for European allies and his social media threat to impose 200 percent tariffs on “all WINES, CHAMPAGNES AND ALCOHOLIC PRODUCTS COMING OUT OF FRANCE.”
Mr. Trump has made Gaullism more fashionable than at any time since Gen. Charles de Gaulle, who as president regularly bridled at American dominance, died 55 years ago.
The current consensus in France is that de Gaulle was right to develop France’s own nuclear deterrent, right to take France out of NATO’s military command structure in 1966, right to insist that France remain an independent power and right to warn that the United States and the Soviet Union, both nuclear-armed, might “one day come to an agreement to divide up the world.”
“Putin and Trump have resuscitated de Gaulle,” said Alain Duhamel, a political scientist and author. “They have revived the Gaullist conviction that two big powers cannot be allowed to govern the world, and that France may have allies but must be autonomous.”
“Give us back the Statue of Liberty,” Raphaël Glucksmann, a prominent center-left politician, demanded at a Paris rally on Sunday, assuming a Gaullist mantle. He said the return of the statue — given by France in the 1880s and made by the French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi — was justified in the face of “Americans who have chosen to switch to the side of the tyrants.”
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, retorted on Monday by calling Mr. Glucksmann “a low-level French politician” and saying “it is only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now.”
In fact, Mr. Glucksmann, who is Jewish, replied that the debt to the United States is far more profound than a matter of mere language. Addressing Americans in English, he wrote on X on Tuesday, “I would simply not be here if hundreds of thousands of young Americans had not landed on our beaches in Normandy.” But, he said, the America of those heroes “fought against tyrants, it did not flatter them. It was the enemy of fascism, not the friend of Putin.”
So it goes, in a moment of great tension, between two countries that have long seen themselves as beacons of liberty to the rest of the world. Few, if any, other countries make such claims for the universality of their virtue, and Liberty’s torch, conceived in Paris, raised in New York, long reflected this shared aspiration.
No more, it seems. The French are wondering what remains of ties stretching back to the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789. The French bankrolling of the nascent American republic, the service of the Marquis de Lafayette in the Continental Army, and even the bond written in blood on the Normandy beaches seem irrelevant to the Trump worldview.
If Mr. Trump really believes the united Europe whose construction has been the core of postwar French foreign policy was conceived to “screw” America, then Europe “must develop the economic and military means to secure our independence,” the journalist and author Renaud Girard wrote in a column in Le Figaro titled “General de Gaulle was so right.”
What de Gaulle would have thought of President Emmanuel Macron’s apparent readiness to extend the French nuclear deterrent to allies in Europe is unclear, though he spoke more than once of the need to act in concert with allies while remaining independent. But clearly Mr. Macron’s offer, which would leave exclusive control of the bomb in the president’s hands, reflects a changed strategic reality where, as Mr. Duhamel put it, “anything is possible with Trump.”
“Who can say whether in the future political circumstances might not change completely,” de Gaulle said as president in 1959. “This has already happened on the face of the earth.” He even suggested that the United States and the Soviet Union “after I don’t know what political and social upheaval might find common cause.”
At this moment of turmoil, when every assumption about the NATO alliance and about the meaning of the “West” is questioned, these quotes of de Gaulle are among those being regularly invoked in France.
Mr. Glucksmann wrote in his retort to the White House, “This America, faithful to the wonderful words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, your America, is worth so much more than the betrayal of Ukraine and Europe, xenophobia or obscurantism.”
Alluding to the deep well of sympathy and friendship toward the United States that endures in France, he added: “We all in Europe love this nation to which we owe so much. It will rise again. You will rise again. We are counting on you.”
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