Jean Cocteau & France shut up about America challenge. Difficulty: Impossible.

God save America from the condescension of the continental French

Why does every French intellectual who visits America get infected with the Tocqueville pathogen? They can't help it. Lafayette helps out with the Revolution and now they all feel entitled to backseat-drive American culture. They simply must talk to Americans as if they (the French) have understood some beautiful existential truths about “what it means to be American” that Americans sorely lack, which they quickly (and vaguely) dispense while affectionately cooing to this hypothetical American audience in the manner you might dote on a beloved infant. You'd think it'd have ended by the time America was renaming “French” fries “Freedom” fries in the Congressional food court, and yet we still have assholes like Bernard-Henri Lévy¹ to contend with as they arrogantly prattle about American cultural deficiencies while their own culture approaches a fifty-year drought of relevancy.

I come from a culture of filial piety, which has its pros and cons—one of the most glaring cons being that when certain members of the Indigenous community reach a certain age they feel entitled to a wisdom they've never earned, as if spending an entire unexamined life watching Judge Judy will have somehow by now crystallized into advice worth hearing. The continental French seem very much the same way. Their country is old and has been through a lot of changes, therefore, via some arcane historical transitive properties, they themselves are imbued with that wisdom as if they lived that history themselves. There really seems to be this strain of absolute delusion in one out of every five Frenchmen where they are literally convinced that they themselves served with Charlemagne, suffered under the English yoke after Agincourt, and stormed the Bastille. There's also a continuing current you pick up from Parisians—and you meet a lot of them here in Montreal—that suggests that they still think of Paris as the center of World Culture, in spite of the fact that that hasn’t been the case for ages and they are actually very clearly decades behind North Americans on almost every cultural front and embarrassingly blind to it.

Jean Cocteau, in his essay Letter to the Americans, is particularly deranged, even going so far as to claim that only the French “really” appreciate American literature, a haughty claim of French intellectual superiority, as if Americans weren't the ones who wrote the damn books in the first place. I'm not even American and I still feel offended on their behalf. Fuck off, Jean! Give it a rest! But he simultaneously thrusts such lofty responsibilities onto the Americans as “[saving] the dignity of humanity” and “[vanquishing] the living dead” and sometimes even provides bizarre overtures to American Imperialism (“your role is to use your immense forces to aid the few heroes who are bleeding the white blood of the soul”). Some comments are simply so indescribably stupid they have to be seen to be believed, such as his bizarre digressions about Asians (“Asian peoples who are oppressed because they refuse to make a deal with the devil, dizzy with the vertigo of numbers that mislead, since two and two do not make four”), the Rothschilds (“I'll leave to the meditation of businessmen how two and two can make twenty-two, emblem of Rothschild”), the marginalized (“I like a race only if it’s oppressed”), arrogant and bombastic claims about the natural wonders of the world ([refusing to look out the window of the plane to see the northern lights] “the aurora borealis of my dreams is more important than the aurora borealis of the sky”), and (surely unrelated) his frustration that everyone accuses him of being under the influence of opium, a drug that he nonetheless admits he sometimes uses almost every day. Thank God he died before the 1980s. Can you imagine how insufferable he’d be?

“Listen, America. Shut up, listen: I’ve got a lot of great business ideas you should get on board with, man. You could be in on the ground floor. Ever heard of baguettes?”

1. Ol’ Bernie-Henry has also now taken to call Canadians fascists. He’s probably jealous that Quebeckers have twice the culture that France will ever have again.