France and the United States: From Liberation to Exasperation
The liberation of France began on June 6, 1944, when an Allied force of more than 150,000 American, British, and Canadian troops invaded the northern shores of Normandy. Most French people were happy to see the Germans driven out and grateful to the Allied soldiers who arrived in their place bearing food, coffee, cigarettes, and other staples not enjoyed for years. Scenes of ecstatic crowds welcoming Allied forces with cheers and embraces established an iconic template of liberation. The cities and towns of France savored their restored sovereignty, even as they counted the terrible costs of the offensive that brought it about.
D-Day has remained an emotionally resonant event on both sides of the Atlantic. Every year, millions of tourists visit the landing sites and nearby towns, which are dotted with museums, memorials, and the hauntingly enormous graveyards of the fallen. Most of these sites lie within the French département of Calvados, home to four of the five D-Day landing beaches (Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword). As the landing forces moved inland, they encountered the small towns and villages of rural Normandy, and their interactions with the locals make for particularly interesting reading in the many war memoirs from that time.
One Normandy specialty comes in for special mention in many remembrances: the fiery apple cider brandy also named Calvados. It was historically called eau-de-vie de cidre, indicating that it was a distillation of the local apple cider, a tradition that appears to have begun in the sixteenth century. Proper Calvados is aged for a minimum of two years in oak barrels, taking on a golden-lit hue and smoother flavor. American troops took a great liking to both cider and Calvados, although they had to be careful with the latter given its potency (it is usually around 85 proof). Rumor had it that Calvados could be used to fuel the GIs’ cigarette lighters, a reasonable enough suspicion given that in both world wars, armies had requisitioned Calvados for use in the armaments industry. It was this mistreatment of their beloved brandy that drove Calvados producers to seek an AOC for their product, which was granted in 1942, thus preserving the brandy for its originally intended purpose.
Unfortunately, the celebratory mood and newfound bonhomie did not last very long. Even in the early weeks of liberation, some American forces received less friendly welcomes, and American military commanders became exasperated with their French counterparts. In 1945, the U.S. military published an extraordinary booklet for American soldiers stationed in France, titled 112 Gripes About the French. It lists a fascinating range of common complaints from servicemen—the French are ungrateful, arrogant, cowardly, too cynical, too dirty, too garlic-scented, and so on—and offers robust rebuttals to each one, reminding Americans not only of the extreme deprivations of occupation but of France’s historical contributions to world civilization. An entire section is devoted to debunking the idea that the apparently more efficient, cleaner, and braver Germans would be more natural allies for America, an indication that even at this early date, trouble was brewing for postwar relations. Interestingly, there are no gripes about French food, except that soldiers were not being offered enough of it.1
After the German surrender in May 1945, a new era of Franco-American prickliness ensued, as the challenges of recovery and the emergence of Cold War politics complicated the relationship across many realms. One of the most visible was the gastronomic, which took on an exaggerated symbolic importance as political tempers frayed, resulting in periodic spats and controversies.
One of the earliest occurred in 1950, when it appeared that France might actually ban Coca-Cola. Thanks to a long history of aggressive marketing and its patriotic efforts during World War II, Coca-Cola had become one of the foremost symbols of the United States and all it stood for—capitalism, free markets, and staunch anticommunism. The company did not shy away from politics; its chairman of the board, James Farley, proclaimed in 1950: “The time has come for Americans to challenge the aggressive, godless, and treasonable practices of totalitarian communism.”2 This overt stance made the drink deeply unpopular among European communists, who joined forces with local beverage producers worried about competition as Coca-Cola began trying to establish a foothold in Europe after the war.
In spring 1945, a U.S. Army medic named Victor Kobas arrived in Paris for a posting of several months. He collected a number of postcards and photographs during his time there, as well as this helpful brochure produced by the U.S. Army, filled with maps and tourist tips for the liberated capital. He passed his collection on to his son, and the brochure was rediscovered during the writing of this book by his granddaughter, Jeni Mitchell. The illustration reveals American assumptions about the cultural highlights to be enjoyed in Paris, while also incautiously depicting the towering position of the United States that so infuriated many French people in the postwar era. Courtesy of George Kobas and Linda Grace-Kobas.
In France, the Communist Party was the largest party in the National Assembly, with enduring support from about a quarter of the population. This made France a key battleground in the emerging Cold War, as the United States and the Soviet Union competed for the loyalties of European populations. French Communists deplored the outsized influence of the United States in postwar France and began to refer to this creeping Americanization as “coca-colonization,” after Coca-Cola’s plans for establishing bottling plants in France were revealed in 1948. In this view, Coca-Cola was just another symptom of the American effort to subjugate France, a sort of cultural subversion that underlay more obvious schemes like the Marshall Plan and NATO. America’s newfound hegemony in the political, military, economic, and cultural realms was increasingly assured, an anxiety-inducing state of affairs for one of Europe’s oldest great powers.
The Communists were not the only ones opposed to Coca-Cola. French producers of wine, juice, and mineral water worried about unfair competition, and public health activists accused the drink of being addictive, possibly even poisonous. In 1950, this coalition of opponents arranged a vote in the National Assembly on the matter. The Communist proposal to ban Coca-Cola outright was defeated, but a more moderate proposal was suggested that would grant the government the authority to ban “nonalcoholic beverages made from vegetable extracts” (in other words, Coca-Cola). This motion passed, but it had no real effect as it did not directly mandate a ban.
After several years of legal wrangling and appeals to government officials on both sides of the Atlantic, Coca-Cola was finally able to proceed with its operations in France. It was not wholeheartedly embraced by the French public, however, and even today France (along with Italy) has the lowest rate of Coca-Cola per capita consumption in Europe, about a third of U.S. consumption rates. Yet as in other countries, it still came to symbolize a kind of carefree and youthful pleasure seeking. In his 1966 film Masculin Féminin, Jean-Luc Godard characterized the young people of France as “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.”
The American press and public were not happy with French opposition to Coca-Cola, and in their reaction we can see the rhetorical strains of many future clashes over gastronomic trade. Farley thundered, “Coca-Cola was not injurious to the health of American soldiers who liberated France from the Nazis so that the Communist deputies could be in session today.”3 Others called for the United States to ban the import of French wines. The crisis was resolved before such drastic measures came to pass, but new controversies would arise over the years whenever the United States decided to ban French products, whether on grounds of public health or politics.
One of the more frequently banned items, as we have already seen, has been cheese. Before World War II, the United States had very few regulations about cheese at all, but in 1949 it banned the import of cheeses made with unpasteurized raw milk if they had been aged less than sixty days. This encompassed a whole swathe of the French cheese industry, notably the producers of Camembert in Normandy. Later, in the 1990s, the FDA came close to banning all raw milk cheeses, but it eventually backed off. In 2014, however, it lowered the acceptable bacteria levels in raw milk cheeses, effectively banning some of the best French cheeses, like Roquefort, Saint-Nectaire, Morbier, and Tomme de Savoie. New inspection regimes eventually lifted this ban, but an atmosphere of resentment and uncertainty remains. French cheese producers remain bewildered by American bans. Is this simply a cultural difference, with Americans exhibiting more squeamishness over the idea of raw milk anything? Or are these bans actually driven by political and economic motivations? In any event, it is difficult for the French to retaliate in kind, as France imports hardly any American cheeses at all (with the exception of processed cheese products, like Cheez Whiz, for the benefit of homesick expats).
Sometimes the motivations for these American hit jobs on French cheeses are not mysterious at all. Roquefort has been subject to several U.S. tariff hikes as part of explicit retaliatory measures for European bans on the import of hormone-treated beef from the States: a 100 percent hike in 1999 and a crippling 300 percent hike in 2009, during the last days of the George W. Bush administration, which also included higher duties on French truffles and foie gras (this was thankfully reversed by the Obama administration). This focus on Roquefort is a bit curious, given that only a few hundred tons of the cheese are usually exported to the United States, perhaps 2 percent of total sales. It seems that much like Coca-Cola functioned as a symbol of the United States in the postwar years, Roquefort has become emblematic of France in the “cheese-eating surrender monkey” era.4
The 1999 Roquefort tariff hike produced one of the most celebrated acts of food activism in modern France, when a Roquefort sheep farmer named José Bové dismantled a McDonald’s under construction in Millau. Bové, a longtime local food activist, wanted to call attention to the new tariff’s harmful effects on the Roquefort region, as well as to the fast-food chain’s use of hormone-treated beef globally. He claimed his campaign was not anti-American per se, but part of a broader antiglobalization stance, in keeping with his long-standing opposition to the industrialization of agriculture and the destruction of local food traditions. He spent six weeks in jail for the crime, but it propelled him into national politics, and he was twice elected to the European Parliament. He ran for the presidency in 2007 and received more than 400,000 votes. His political activities have made him a figure of intense controversy in France, but his views on food are not particularly extreme to many people.
From this episode, and considering the rise in French anti-Americanism over the years, Americans might be tempted to think that most French people would never set foot in a McDonald’s. Surely, this must be the epitome of malbouffe, a terrible French insult applied to “bad food,” or what we would usually call “junk food.”5 But in fact, the second most profitable market for McDonald’s worldwide is France, where it is affectionately known as McDo. To be clear, a French McDonald’s is worlds apart from the American version. The company has astutely adapted to French tastes, offering everything from croissants and baguettes to Roquefort burgers and Le Croque McDo. The beef comes from grass-fed cows, and the chicken has not been washed in chlorine (another American habit banned in the European Union). Many of the franchises are designed to look more like cafés than fast-food joints. So it becomes a bit more understandable that French people would deign to eat in McDonald’s, even if its popularity still seems out of place given the usual clichés about French habits and tastes.
McDonald’s only expanded to France in the 1970s, around the same time France was exporting to the United States a food trend at the opposite end of the gastronomic spectrum: nouvelle cuisine. The roots of this new approach to cooking can be traced in part to the tumultuous year of 1968, when France, like the United States, experienced serious social unrest and cultural upheaval. The unpopular American war in Vietnam was a source of anger and protest among French youth as well, married to a deeper resentment over the increasingly authoritarian and conservative government of Charles de Gaulle. The traditional opposition parties on the left had collapsed, leaving fewer outlets for effective political expression. In May 1968, student protesters demanding radical reforms were joined by the trade unions, and for several weeks France was paralyzed by general strikes and demonstrations. Barricades and riots roiled the Latin Quarter of Paris, and the prospect of revolution seemed tantalizingly close. In the end, the government cajoled the trade unions and the middle classes away from revolt, mixing the offer of new elections and limited concessions with an implied threat to restore order by force. The protests wound down, but “Mai 1968” retained an enormous resonance within French society, representing a generational shift toward antiestablishment approaches in politics, literature, film, academic theory, and many other facets of life.
This broad challenge to conformity and stasis within the social and cultural realms echoed within the gastronomic world as well, where food critics like Henri Gault and Christian Millau and talented chefs like Paul Bocuse, Jean and Pierre Troisgros, and Roger Vergé were already challenging long-held tenets. Much as the French Revolution shattered the grip of ancien régime cuisine, the upheaval of 1968 facilitated a direct challenge to the cuisine classique that had been perfected and codified by Auguste Escoffier at the turn of the previous century. Six decades later, French chefs were still trained and expected to conform to Escoffier’s methods and recipes, with little scope for innovation and experimentation. Nouvelle cuisine represented a radical turn in cooking style, facilitated by the broader social currents that exploded in 1968. Its four fundamental values—truth, lightness, simplicity, imagination—were in many ways also the values of the May 1968 protesters.6
In a 1973 article, Gault and Millau popularized the term nouvelle cuisine and defined its “ten commandments,” capturing the essence of the approach that would become so popular over the following decade. The natural flavors of food should be preserved by using only fresh ingredients from local markets, with much shorter cooking times, and enhanced by fresh herbs rather than heavy sauces and marinades. This resulted in a more delicate and healthy style of cooking, presented in newly formalized ways. Chefs should be constantly inventive but not overcomplicated. Regional dishes and foreign flavors, especially those of Asia, could be drawn upon in creating innovative dishes, and modern time-saving devices like food processors and microwaves were no longer sacrilegious. If some of this sounds familiar, you are not mistaken: nouvelle cuisine, as Waverley Root noted in the New York Times at the time, was more restoration than revolution, an attempt to return to the more natural culinary traditions that predated Escoffier’s opulent transformation of French haute cuisine.7
Many chefs and critics disparaged nouvelle cuisine, but it became a popular food trend not only in France but in the United States well into the 1980s, when it succumbed to caricature and cliché itself. Its influence was not wholly lost, however, as its most important principles were absorbed into new styles of cooking, on both sides of the Atlantic, that continued to emphasize fresh regional products and a lighter touch. In the United States, the “New American cuisine” that emerged in California in the 1980s and 1990s drew upon the nouvelle cuisine approach and was sometimes referred to as “California-French cuisine.” Nouvelle cuisine also helped inspire “fusion cuisine” of many different varieties around the world.
It is perhaps fitting that the 1970s were the decade of both McDonald’s and nouvelle cuisine, two trends that crossed the Atlantic in opposite directions. Much is made of the fundamental differences between our two countries, of the robust anti-Americanism that emerged in France with the ascendancy of American hegemony, and the reflexive anti-French attitudes among many in the United States. The vast gulf between nouvelle cuisine and a McDonald’s meal seemingly epitomizes an unbridgeable civilizational divide. Yet the popularity of McDonald’s in France, and the French roots of modern American cooking, suggest a different implication, one of shared humanity and habit, of convergence rather than distance. Indeed, the history of Franco-American relations since World War II suggests more affinity than commonly recognized, a mirroring of political and cultural anxieties in an ever-changing world. We alternately admire and despise each other; we celebrate our shared history of revolution and democracy while competing to best represent that tradition to the world. Each country is infused with the cultural by-products of the other, even as fear of contamination—whether by French bacteria or American consumerism—pollutes gastronomic exchange. We each feel superior to the other, but it is an arrogance inflected with respect for what the other has achieved, however grudgingly it may be admitted.
France and the United States are both countries of great passion—usually for entirely different things, it is true, but there is enough shared fervor and appreciation to overcome even the darkest stretches of our relationship. Even as our political administrations clash amid the tragedies and uncertainties afflicting the world today, there are glimmers of amity in the realm of gastronomy: artisanal food movements in the United States have much in common with French regional traditions, and there is a greater appreciation of our respective cuisines outside the rarefied confines of Paris and New York. While food can never be completely divorced from its broader social and political context, it offers a space for peoples across borders to interact and converse, to come to some understanding of each other outside the boundaries of crude propaganda and lazy stereotypes. It is to this form of cultural exchange that we hope our book has contributed, in some small way.