 This week, both 'Libération' and the 'Washington Post' published stories on how anti-French sentiment was beginning to bite (Post article requires free registration). Ah, how the world has moved on since Google ran such a celebration of France, liberté, fraternité and ... démocratie.
 Back in February, 'Le Nouvel Observateur' took a look at "these French people who've chosen America" (story in French). There weren't many of them, but
'Leur position, face à ceux qui disent: «Non à la guerre, malgré Saddam», peut se résumer ainsi: «Oui à la guerre, malgré Bush».'
("Their position, up against those who say: "No to war, despite Saddam, can be summed up like this: 'Yes to war, despite Bush'." )
'Libé' tells us that last week, according to separate polls, 46 percent of Americans were ready to boycott French products, while 59% of the French were hostile to the US-British military intervention in Iraq.
 Now that American tourists have begun to arrive in larger numbers around this Easter weekend, sentiments are running high. The nearest McDonalds has shut down for renovation. It was among those stoned last month. They tried to keep it open with boards instead of windows for a week or two, but trade fell off. At the end of that demo, by the way, the riot police turned their water-cannons on the people in the cinema queues as well as the inevitable band of casseurs that trail along on such occasions, so a good time was had by all. Perhaps I prematurely wrote in a long piece on March 7 that the spat between peoples, as opposed to the politicians, were likely to remain little more than a "difference between friends".
Derisory, uncivilised and always funny, 'L'Echo des Savanes' has in its May edition rounded up some of the best and the worst of 'How the Americans judge us today'.
I've run into plenty of visiting Americans and Brits during the week's going about town, but observed no real hostility on the part of the French, apart from overhearing the occasional rude remark behind backs and a little more gruffness than usual from one or two shopkeepers and waiters.
 But I've also been wondering what Americans who live here, outside my usual circle of friends, have been saying about such behaviour. They have several sites of their own, and when 'Americans in France' last reported on "Anti-Americanism", they mentioned a poll saying that 70% of the French opposed the Iraq war. While this percentage has dropped since, you can now see graffiti and defaced advertisements around town where the "Fuck Bush!" message has metamorphosed into a "US Go Home!" one, and I don't think it's Paris they're talking about...
One longtime US writer in Paris, Harriet Welty Rochefort, has with her webmaster husband Philippe set up a remarkable and most informative personal Franco-American Website. Their aim is to
"help American visitors better understand France and the French and, hopefully, benefit from some tips on Life in France."
But much of what they've written works the other way round too: a well-researched page on "Intercultural Differences !" also asks the question "what do Americans hate most in France?"
As to the Brits, maybe I'll get to that another day. It is, after all, a long story.
I don't altogether share the cheery outlook expressed by the Welty Rocheforts, since I suspect the fallout from the Iraq war is going to last even longer and run deeper than many of us feared, but theirs is a fine piece of "work in progress".
At 'Merde in France', the first totally bilingual blog I've run across, a strikingly provocative author I have yet to identify describes just being here as "more than 20 years behind enemy lines"!
3:17:55 PM link 
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