The Franco-American Misunderstanding

If There is to be a True Amity Between France and America it Will Not Be Brought About by Overselling Lafayette, Joan of Arc or Flaubert

WALTER LIPPMANN

WERE I in charge of my country's foreign propaganda, I should lay down a number of strict rules for all travelling orators, generals, exchange professors, prizefighters and tennis players. Before they were permitted to cross the ocean all of them would have to go through a special course of training designed to break their nerve. They would have to spend four consecutive weeks in the press gallery of their national legislature. They would have to ride in smoking cars for at least four weeks more. They would have to read all the leading articles of all the newspapers for six months. They would have to attend a performance of every musical comedy for a season. On Sundays they would have to sit in a rocking chair on the porch of a summer hotel. Finally when they were altogether broken, they would be permitted to go abroad. But even then I should not trust them to protect my country's honour and good name. And so I should attach to each of them on their travels one of the thirty authors who, in whatever country it happened to be, were writing the encyclopedia of its faults.

On the way over in the ship, they would have memorized the secret code of instructions. On landing, therefore, they would know just what not to say to the ship's reporters. At the outset they would deny that there was an historic friendship between the two nations. They would then ask for a social register of the people in every community who dote on distinguished foreigners. They would note carefully their names, their addresses, their customary haunts. Thus forewarned nothing would induce them ever to meet these charming entertainers. For in the secret code it would be written: "Avoid the systematic pro-foreigners. Avoid all people who have made a pet out of your nationality. They will tell you what they think you would like to hear. They mean well, but the harm they do is great. Remember the sad case of Ambassador Philandrovitch who fell in with the admirers of his country's rugs, and cabled home every week to his government that the daily wish and the highest hope of every American from Maine to California was to be permitted to help extend the frontiers of Philandria."

Hints to Honoured Guests

PUBLIC banquets would not be forbidden, but the rules of conduct would be rigid. The honoured guest would sit with a pained expression on his face while the toastmaster told the assembled company that they had before them a worthy representative of a race that had produced Joan of Arc, Shakespeare, Dante, Lafayette, Napoleon and Andre Tardieu; that in welcoming him to their shores they were welcoming a whole nation, and that he, as toastmaster, wished to say that all they had was there for the asking now and forevermore.

The honoured guest would then rise and deny that there existed any such nation as the toastmaster described. "We are not a race of saints and heroes and poets," he would shout pounding the table. "We resent such talk as you do and as everyone does. We are too busy. We have too much to quarrel about at home. We do not all speak classic prose. None of us speaks heroic blank verse. We are not a charming woman in a liberty cap. We are not a jolly squire with side whiskers. We are not a Roman eagle. We are not a bundle of abstractions that you can personify and then idolize or damn as it happens to suit you. We are a collection of exceedingly varied human beings, speaking more or less the same language with different degrees of accuracy, and obeying the same laws more or less honestly. We are not an ideal to be gushed over. We repudiate all that as an insult to the opposition party, of which I am now a passionate member, thanks to the course of training I took before embarking on this voyage. If you must go in for this sort of thing, stick to the South Sea Islanders who have nothing to lose when your romantics go on a pilgrimage and discover that in Tahiti they do not have tiled bathrooms, bellhops or scrupulously honest taxi-drivers. We insist upon being treated as a fact, as a complicated fact, which you will have always with you, with which you will have to get down to business, to which your likes and dislikes, your tags and symbols and epithets are an irrelevant nuisance."

St. Whitney Warren and After

NEEDLESS to say propagandist relations between France and America have not been conducted on this basis. The returns are now in. The period of St. Joan of Arc and St. Whitney Warren has been followed by the period of the mendicant friars with Poor Briand in the leading role, and no end of disappointment everywhere. What happened to France at the Washington Conference is the companion piece to what happened to America at the Paris Conference. The jerry-built idols of the professional friendship-makers collapsed with a roar and a crash and blinded everybody with their dust.

The French had to discover at Paris that the circle of expatriates were not the spokesmen of a nation, but a mirror that reflected back whatever the Quai d'Orsay wanted to believe. These Paris Americans were an extraordinary set, and it is necessary to have heard them with your own ears in order to believe that they really exist. Before there was any considerable American army in France they held the pass at Thermopylae. After the American army did come it was too busy to do much talking for America, and although no one denied what splendid fellows were in it, the real inside truth about the United States was still imparted to the Foreign Office, and by the Foreign Office to the French press, and by the French press to the French people, from a small group of income receivers living within a radius of a mile from the Arc de Triomphe. Once by mistake a deserving Democrat got to Paris. But as he could talk no French and as he felt that a missionary should see the home life of the people, he soon found himself completely surrounded by some of the more public spirited members of the set. And before he had been there very long he had not only poured the last drop of American blood on the altar of France, but also had most generously presented the French nation with the natural resources of the United States and the bulk of our national income.

It was never quite clear how much stock Frenchmen put in this sort of talk. Occasionally they would look at Americans in a way that might have been admiration, but might also have been bewilderment. They had been through this thing before. They had long' memories of alliances and counter-alliances. And now and then they would drop a remark about how extraordinarily refreshing it was to meet the scions of a people unspoiled, unwearied, uncorrupted by the cynicism and selfishness of the Old World.

But, at any rate, if the French politicians did not believe all they heard, they thought it good policy to pretend that they did. They encouraged their constituents to believe it. And so gradually there grew up in France the conviction that there was a big brother around the corner who would get everything, and guarantee everything, and fix everything, and above all pay everything. America ceased to be a nation like other nations. America was the deus ex machina in peace as well as in war. And when this view did not prove to fit the facts, either in France or in Italy, there was a cry of bitter disappointment add a sense of betrayal.

Sophisticated America

THE version of America which was built up for export was worn pretty thin when Mr. Wilson left Paris; it was mere shreds and patches after the Senate had finished with the treaty and Mr, Harding had made a separate peace with Berlin. The hint was too obvious, the demonstration too complete. And so the Foreign Office and the inspired press scrapped the Parsifal view of the United States. America was completely transformed. From having been the most na'ive of the nations we were now cast for the most sophisticated. We were supposed to have gone in for Rcalpolitik with a vengeance. Was not our navy competing with Britain's? Was not our merchant marine threatening the English shipping interests? Was not Wall Street eager to supplant Lombard Street? Was it not obvious according to all the rules of the game that the Washington Conference was a sparring match between America and Britain for world supremacy, and that these two powers would bid against each other for the support of the others, as all the great rivals have in the past ?

The thing to do, therefore, was to play that game with all the engines of diplomacy. The cue now was realism. And realism meant being as unwilsonian as possible and working side by side with the Republican realists. A thousand times they had proclaimed their distrust of pledges, words, agreements, phrases. Ten thousand times they had proclaimed their virility, their belief in the big stick, in the nation isolated and armed. They would understand. They would rejoice in France's strength, and count upon it in the Anglo-American dispute. As thorough Metternichians the Republicans would quickly see the advantage to America if England were kept busy in the English channel.

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Doped in this fashion the French delegation landed in America. Marshal Foch had a glorious reception, and the realists told themselves they had guessed right. There was the tour of the Marshal to prove it. Obviously the Americans Were cementing the Franco-American entente against Great Britain which was to sweep the Washington Conference and then proceed in triumph from the Rhine to Angora. None of this, naturally, had occurred to the Americans either out in the country or in the White House. They were thinking some about Japan, a great deal about taxes, and not a little about the sheer idiocy of the diplomatic game and of the spectacle of arming to the teeth after a victorious war to end war. If there was any unspoken scheme in the mind of any official, it had to do with Japan's naval plans and Senator Borah's election plans.

But side by side with the simple desire to make a success of the conference, rather than to checkmate the British in Upper Silesia or Syria, there existed the uncontaminated version of France exported to this country during the war. Into the making of that picture had gone the heroism of the French troops as well as the prestige of French taste and French wit. Never before had the world seen so marvelous a compound of the arts of peace and the arts of war. For the first time it was proved that grace need not mean weakness and that furious resistance might be found in people who were skeptical and urbane. It was no illusion. This mixture exists in France as nowhere else on earth, and the idolization of France, tainted though it was in part with vast snobbery, was founded on fact. France during the war did show the qualities that must be combined if civilized life is to be worth while and yet capable of surviving.

The Will to Believe

BUT just as we are very likely to think because Athens and Florence were so splendid, that they were at the same time wisely and humanely governed, so we assumed that since the French poilu was great, French landscape enchanting, French prose, French wine, French repartee the best there is, it followed that French politicians and hired press agents and itinerant marquises were also great. We forgot, or had never stopped to think, that it is perfectly possible not only to mix courage with grace, but to mix personal ambition and factional intrigue with both. It is perfectly possible even to have a whole nation of morally-minded people represented in international affairs by a quite immoral policy. For the writ of conscience does not run beyond the frontiers of the data men have, and no nation in the world has the data about other nations which would enable it to be wholly reasonable and moral in world affairs.

Knowing little of France we had only the ideal version to go upon. The American imagination worked upon it. Here was a people representing a mixture of two ideals that we admired. They were brave and they were civilized. Why should they not also possess our good qualities, our moral passion, our fundamental good nature, our willingness to forgive and forget, our desire to get down to business, our desire to put through what we start to do? There was no theoretical reason why the French should not be good Americans as well as good Frenchmen. For we were in love with love, and at the same time not a little in love with ourselves.

And so poor Briand came to Washington, his head full of fantasies about the American lust for Realpolitik, and there collided with real Americans, their heads full of Rochambeau and Lafayette. In the melee which resulted France had much the worst of it. She not only squandered her moral capital, but offered us what we took to be added reasons for a feeling of lonely virtue in a wicked world. Every move she made deepened our sense of the importance of the Atlantic Ocean. And having been balked in our desire to make Washington a smashing success, we were confirmed in the conviction that Genoa and Geneva were not places where we could afford to be seen. Mr. Hearst cried "Vive la France!"

Understanding Between Nations

THE root of the mischief is the notion that sympathy between nations consists in looking only at the brightest side. It is believed by all good propagandists and all secretaries of societies for the promotion of union between peoples that the thing needed is emphasis and reiteration upon the virtues and the glories, the heroes and the saints of the two peoples. They imagine that is the way to "sell" one people to another. They think that the way to make the world sympathize with Poland, for example, is to put Paderewski and John Sobieski in the shop-window and keep Dmowski and Grabski in the cellar. They are wrong. These are fake sales. Political understanding that will stick cannot be based on admiration for a genius or two, a fine historical tradition, or an exhibit of abstract qualities. Real political understanding requires a feeling of familiarity and some sense of the actual complication of affairs.

Take, for example, the relations between New York and New Jersey. Not a society for cultivating good relations. Not a propagandist. Not a sign of admiration one for the other. No New Yorkers travelling in Jersey to explain that Theodore Roosevelt belonged to the Empire State. No Jerseymen offering Woodrow Wilson as testimony to their greatness. Only a pervading sense that the entanglement of the two states is a permanent fact which cannot be mended or ended by abstraction and generalization. It is all, if you like, on a lower plane, but the big thing about it is that the sense of foreignness is gone, and gone with it the primitive worship or fear of an alien thing. New Yorkers know as a matter of course that all Jerseymen do not think alike, that in Jersey they differ violently among themselves, that the reason why "New Jersey" does This or That is a compound of a thousand converging ambitions, needs, guesses, illusions and temperaments, which have their parallels and their analogies in New York.

But as between nations the fiction exists that policy is the product of a mystical unity, and that it is somehow unpatriotic not to pretend that any act of a Foreign Office is not the whole nation speaking with one heart, one voice, one mind. This pretence is supposed to work out to the nation's advantage.

It rarely does, even temporarily. It never does in the long run. For almost never does any act in foreign affairs please all classes in the other nation affected. And if those who are displeased are led to think that this act is unanimously supported, their displeasure spreads from the act itself to the whole nation. Say that "France" was back of the submarine policy proposed at Washington and all Frenchmen suffer. Say that the Bloc National was back of the submarine policy and that the Bloc may command the votes of sixty percent of Frenchmen, and you confine the argument within limits. You preserve the entente with the other forty percent for the time when they may become sixty percent.

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In every nation there is at almost every moment enough variety of opinion to arouse sympathy among all the various groups of opinion in the other. It is imprudent, therefore, to put forward only that one opinion that happens to prevail at the top. The wise thing to do is to expose the variety, and establish communication not only between the dominant opinions, but between those which are not yet dominant, but may be. All the eggs will not then be in one basket. And "America" instead of condemning "France" will be able to condemn the Bloc National and yet remain ready to cooperate with the opposition when it returns to power. No Ohio Democrat works himself up into a state of hostility to New York because he does not like the Republican governor of New York. He has too many connections with New Yorkers who are not Republican.

It is familiarity, rather than eulogy, that nations ought to seek in their relations with each other. Even if it is a familiarity that breeds contempt, it is better than the unfamiliarity which idealizes or baits the alien. These unified attitudes towards whole nations are always in the nature of the case untruthful. You cannot indict whole nations, and you cannot adore whole nations. You can indict parties, individuals, policies, qualities; you can adore this and that and the other thing. You can like Briand and dislike Poincare, favour the Left Center and denounce the Bloc National, approve the Russian policy, if you like, and damn the reparation policy.

But France as a political whole you cannot damn and you cannot favour. You can say nothing that is not dangerously untrue of the whole of it, except that political France is an enormous complicated fact changing from day to day and from place to place, with which your representatives from day to day and from • place to place must deal.