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PARIS — Au revoir, America. Bonjour, tristesse, France. If that’s overstated, it’s not by over-much.
Here in April, in the month and the place of falling rain and falling in love, I found that the rain had not much changed — but the “love” part had.
If my random and unscientific survey of some French opinion at all represents the nation’s as a whole, then the debut of Donald Trump’s America has left some French triste — a bit sad, even brokenhearted, and also wary and vigilant.
That was in keeping with brutal poll findings from a month before, by the research firm Institut Elabe for the French broadcaster BFMTV. About 3 in 4 French people believe that the United States is no longer an ally of their country.
Almost as many French citizens, having seen the way Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, manhandled Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, are afraid that Russia’s war against Ukraine will spill over beyond Ukraine’s borders, perhaps even into France itself.
They were also paying attention to Vance’s dismissive remarks about Europe on that notorious Signal chat before the U.S. strikes against Houthis in Yemen, that “I just hate bailing Europe out again,” and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s all-caps characterization of Europe as “PATHETIC.”
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And they were repelled by the U.S. Embassy’s high-handed letter in March, addressed to French companies and telling them that if they want to do business with the U.S. government, they have to play by Trump rules prohibiting DEI practices, and asked that they return, within five days, a form certifying that they were.
The two leaders started their day by participating in a more than two-hour virtual meeting with fellow leaders of the Group of 7 economies.
So I went about Paris and asked some people, strangers as well as a few French friends, what they thought of this new “America,” only a few months old, and how their attitudes toward this country might have changed.
Most did not want their surnames used — and you can hardly blame them.
How sorrowful that it has come to this parting of ways, 140 years after the French presented us with that lovely monument to our shared spirit, the figure who lifts her lamp over Liberty Island.
Souville, who is 24 and a student, sat in the thin sun outside the Picasso Museum, and told me that a friend of hers, a fellow student, had taken a short-term, above-board job as a nanny in Utah. She flew first to Boston, where Souville said ICE detained her, went through her social media accounts and spotted some anti-Trump postings, and denied her entry into the country.
“They have created fear. I feel that [Trump’s] government has created a reaction that’s just surreal. The U.S. is so big and influential in the world — also, I am afraid France will follow the example of Trump: racist, anti-immigrant.”
Bernard was at the same museum. He is 71, from a town near Bordeaux, and was in Paris visiting his daughter.
“It’s a betrayal,” he said flat out, a betrayal of the U.S. and its values, even before the betrayal of allies and friends. “I ask myself how a people can elect him twice. He has a vision of military power and he sees nothing except what benefits him. MAGA, MAGA — completely narcissistic.”
“It’s more than a disappointment. It’s stronger — a nightmare. The U.S. represented liberty, and now Trump supports Putin, and what happens now? … I’ve always had faith in the American people, a country I admire, but to see what has happened, it makes you sad. I think the people in the United States won’t stand for this [national] suicide.”
The United States would not be the United States had it not been for France. The American Revolution was an opportunity for still-royalist France to cause trouble for the despised British, and the money and military manpower of France made the critical difference.
It’s not something many Americans know (and something image manipulators choose to ignore) but the French have not forgotten. Each year, around July 4, the French carry out a dignified ritual to change the American flag at the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette in the Picpus Historical Cemetery.
But the French nobleman had more than a strategic love for this future country. He admired the Americans’ battle for independence, befriended George Washington, and came to command Continental troops at the decisive battle of Yorktown. Here in Paris, he is technically buried on American soil: earth from the Battle of Bunker Hill.
It was to this grave that, on July 4, 1917, an American colonel, Charles Stanton, marching with troops arriving to join the French in World War I, spoke feelingly of the two nations’ long alliances, and of America’s debt:
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“The fact cannot be forgotten that your nation was our friend when America was struggling for existence, when a handful of brave and patriotic people were determined to uphold the rights their Creator gave them — that France in the person of Lafayette came to our aid in words and deed. It would be ingratitude not to remember this, and America defaults no obligations.” He ended with a declaration, “Lafayette, we are here.”
So that is when the long alliance began — often strained but never entirely ruptured.
So far.
I barged in on Romane and Justine, 20-something women having a late lunch at a sidewalk table in the third arrondissement. For Romane, as for many Europeans who have dreamed of touring America, “Right now, I don’t want to go to the U.S. Before, I wanted to go to New York all my life. Not now.”
And Trump’s hostility toward Ukraine makes her uneasy; “I don’t understand how he takes a position allied with Russia. And his positions about women, about [human] rights ...”
Justine, a Black woman, picked up the thread. “Rights for women are in danger in the U.S. It’s not here yet, but Trump, he is a model for so many. I never wanted to go there, because the history isn’t one that I admire, what they did to Native Americans. And I wouldn’t want to go there because I’m afraid of the racism. The life of Black people is hard, and he is making it worse. I feel like [Americans] are losing the ideals of justice and humanity.”
Apart from sentiments like these are dollars and cents. International tourism brings more than $2 trillion a year into the U.S. — until now. Tourism execs are unnerved that in the already wobbly economy, summer travel bookings from France are down slightly.
A friend of mine set up a lunch with me and his friend Olivier Desgeorges, who just retired as an engineer in the French ministry of ecology, and he was not at all reluctant to say his piece:
“With all the changes — Brexit, the prospect of war with China — everything is changing everywhere, but [Trump] feels like a betrayal. France never thought the U.S. could treat us as an enemy.”
Like a few other folks I spoke to, he alluded to the long-ago warning from Charles de Gaulle, the legendary French president and wartime general. “Europe was castrated after the war. It developed an economy, but not power, not might. So the consequences are young Europeans here have [an] idea of Europe as an easy paradise: the economy is not so good but we have good food, have chocolate — 70 years of peace is exceptional, but they don’t realize it.”
Instead of cowing Canadians, President Trump’s threats to annex their country have unleashed a wave of patriotic fervor unmatched in living memory.
Europeans “are educated enough to make distinction between Trump and Americans. They just don’t understand the stupidity. And they think it’s going to be the collapse of the might of America. The respect America had, and the negotiating power, are diminished.”
Europe will react accordingly: “That civic nationalism we thought of as bad is going to come back,” he said.
I left Desgeorges after lunch and headed to the Jardin des Plantes, site of the city’s natural history museum and, at that moment, an immense bloom of spring flowers.
There, sitting on a bench facing the sun and reading a newspaper, as he does on every pleasant day, was Ingo, originally from Berlin, who taught university courses in European law in the U.S. for several years.
So he knows the country well, and analyzes internal political nuances as adroitly as a CNN talking head. The GOP, he says, has become “an instrument of its own destruction.”
“Trump says what he wants and the world is at his feet. If inflation goes up and the GDP declines, then Americans won’t want the Republican Party, and won’t allow Trump to openly violate the Constitution for a third term.”
In spite of his many friends and colleagues in the U.S., he won’t visit anymore, because of Trump. And he knows French friends who have lived for years in the U.S. who are now selling their homes there and returning to France, in part from the fear and uncertainty about what might happen to them.
As for the consequence of Trumpism on this side of the Atlantic, he said that reasserting a post-American French and European authority is “difficult. We rely on U.S. military equipment that would take Europe 10 years to be independent of the U.S. De Gaulle said in the 1960s that France can’t be submissive to the U.S., that it has to develop its own nuclear power, its own political power, that the French needed to see themselves as part of a great nation, and should not rely on others for their national security and prosperity.”
The next day was chilly, and I dropped in for a lunch of homemade vegetable soup, pears and cheese with some old friends, Joshua and Rene. Joshua has lived here for more than 40 years, and is still a U.S. citizen. He gets “mostly commiseration and sympathy” from French friends who understand the distinction between the American public and Trump, but are “bewildered by a lot of what is happening in the States now.”
Rene is 87, and clearly remembers August 1944, when his mother took him into the streets and lifted him up in her arms, among the crowds of Parisians, so he could see the 6-feet-5-inch-tall De Gaulle march into the city after it had been liberated by the Allies.
So Rene, for his part, has a long memory of strains and ruptures in U.S.-French relationship, like the angry 1960s French protests against the U.S. role in Vietnam, which the French colonial forces had lost in 1954. The “America go home” protest signs got a lot of use back then, he recalls — and who knows, perhaps they’ll be putting in an appearance again.
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