Au Revoir

By TAD BARTIMUS

I went to France for culture and historical perspective; I left with new lingerie and a greater appreciation for my country's history.

I planned my days around visits to monuments, museums and churches, but my fondest memories are of serendipitous glimpses into the lives of ordinary people in this most-civilized nation: the long table of Parisian cooks in immaculate toques dining together; the milliner whose custom-made chapeaus of straw, lace and tulle resembled glorious wedding cakes; a young Audrey Hepburn look-alike, in chic black tights and ballet slippers, cheerfully programming a new cell phone in the street.

I arrived amid warnings about SARS and potential terrorism, the declining U.S. dollar, and the acrimonious fallout of France's refusal to join America and its allies in the invasion of Iraq. My conservative friends excoriated me as unpatriotic because I refused to cancel my long-planned, prepaid visit. My timid friends worried they'd never see me again because of a bombing attack on the Champs d'Elysees.

Times change.

President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair now are under intense pressure to explain why they used apparently erroneous intelligence to justify the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Blair, particularly, is under fire following the suicide of respected scientist Dr. David Kelly, a primary source for the BBC report that broke the controversy wide open.

Meanwhile, the dollar has stabilized against the Euro and SARS is apparently contained.

I never feared for my personal safety in France. In Provence's colorful open-air markets, where many of the stallkeepers (often immigrants from France's former African and Middle-Eastern colonies) are Muslim, I was greeted with smiles. Why not? I came to France to spend money, admire its natural and man-made beauty, then leave.

Judging from my conversations, it's not Americans the French don't like, it's our president.

"Stupido cowboy," groused a postal clerk who took extra time to decorate my package home with beautiful stamps. "Such an untraveled man," said a Parisian matron fluent in four languages.

France's refusal to join the allied coalition against Iraq didn't sit well with many Americans, who note that we have twice bailed out the French and therefore believe that they owe us. Last week, France and Germany announced they would not provide troops to help America and its allies keep the peace in Iraq, further inflaming American sentiments against the two countries Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has dismissed as "old Europe."

Judgmental Americans rarely consider that France is worn out by war. In the last century alone, its soil was the primary killing field for two multi-nation clashes that cost millions of lives. Since it was called Gaul, France has been a prize fought over by invading armies that burned, looted, raped and razed. Every town and village square has a memorial to war dead; thousands of American vets are buried in Normandy.

There's nothing like a trip to France to remember how our countries' histories are inextricably linked. An American in Paris today walks where Benjamin Franklin and John Adams found money to pay for the American Revolution, where Thomas Jefferson bought books that helped create the Library of Congress, where a statue erected by the pennies of U.S. schoolchildren honors the Marquis de Lafayette, French aide to Gen. George Washington.

Avenue du President Kennedy, Avenue du President Wilson and Avenue du New York are ventricles in the heart of Paris. Smack in the middle of the River Seine, a miniature version of the Statue of Liberty holds her torch high.

These prominent reminders of a much older France's enduring affection for its more impulsive and far younger sibling convinces me that our current breach is a temporary fit of pique that will pass. We are, after all, bound together by our mutual beliefs in liberte, egalite and fraternite.

We also share ignominious back-to-back military defeats in Vietnam. Lessons learned there, as well as from its failed colonization of Algeria and other Middle Eastern and African countries, make France leery of being an occupying force in Iraq in these dangerous times. No wonder French President Jacques Chirac can barely contain his "I told you so."

I didn't return from France with just a suitcase full of frilly unmentionables and a greater appreciation of a nap after too much lunch. I also came home with a worldlier view of my country. This broader perspective makes me a more vigilant patriot and a better American.

© 2003 The Women Syndicate

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