May is a great month in France. The French tennis Open, the Cannes Film Festival, lots of public holidays, and the renewal of the tourist season. Those of us who live here year-round are delighted to find that we’ve made it through the low-grade pain of perpetually un-seasonal weather and that our hormones still work.
Secretly, we all cheer for the sexist impulses within us when it comes to scant clothing and risqué advertising. The sidewalk terraces get busy, light-bodied red wines and cool rosés begin to flow, and Parisians — men and women— suddenly all look great again. The sweet-musk scent of flowering horse chestnut trees ignites a fresh start on life. Anglo-American expats in Paris stop their perennial meditation and know once and for all, until next year at least, that, yes, this is the better side of the Atlantic to reside on.
We are always looking for ways to reinforce that decision, of course, and there is nothing better than a short trip back to the lower 48 to help us along. (Plus Hawaii and Alaska). Often, those first two hours on that once-native soil are enough to break the dromedary’s back.
As I filed through the immigration line at Logan Airport with a sleeping toddler in my arms I asked the inspector if he’d be so kind to pull our passports from my wallet. “If you have money in this thing, I don’t want my fingerprints on it,” he barked. And, voilà, America-as-TV sitcom sprang to life. Filing through customs, it became clear that they see us Europeans in one very simple term these days — carriers of foot and mouth disease.
An incredulous French friend told me that he had seen a man handcuffed at Dallas’ arrivals terminal recently, for defying the “No smoking in the airport” sign. A French doctor that I know explained how a Las Vegas policeman had warned him that he had five minutes to put the bikini top back on his two-year old daughter who was splashing playfully in the hotel pool. He was dead serious: there was a city ordinance. Add these tiny details to President Bush’s conviction that the environment must take a back seat to employment, the country's overwhelming support for 24 admitted spies eavesdropping on China, and the first amendment battle whether the execution of Oklahoma bomber, Tim McVeigh, should be diffused over the Internet, and frankly you get a country that has become increasingly difficult, impossible even, for Europeans to understand.
Not so long ago, a lot of commercially creative and ambitious French people – belonging to a growing entrepreneurial class lamenting the confining nature of life à la française – applauded with bravado the healthy and boundless frontier of the American scene. Many today are starting to question whether things are really so bad here, where you still linger at the table with a cognac and a second coffee, and banter with your friends about a trek to Nepal or a film you just saw called “Little Senegal.” Okay, it’s not so great smoking in public places, but no need to get out the handcuffs.
The difference between the two cultures is the difference between form and content. When we talk about America, we’re approving the large framework in which most things are possible. When we talk about France, we connect with the depth of substance that the civilization has produced. If America is the expansive walk-in closet, then France is the tailored silk suits on each hangar. You can’t compare the house with the furniture. When we rebuke the US, we are reminded that the country produces some of the best tables and chairs on earth. When we criticize our adopted house in France, we are reminded again of the tables and chairs. And that’s the crux of our dilemma. As expats we like the furniture but wish to remodel the house. As visitors or tourists we like our house back home, but want to sleep like Louis XV.
David Applefield (david@paris-anglo.com) is the editor of www.paris-anglo.com and the author of Paris Inside Out and The Unofficial Guide to Paris.
