In answering the question, we should start with pre-revolutionary colonial culture. If French cultural influence has retained its vigor in the United States, why has not the political authority of France and of French institutions been of equal measure and duration? Yet there is a history here that should be of interest to those who are legatees-through art, architecture, letters, fashion, food, and film-of the enduring authority of French culture in the United States. We have also succeeded in demonstrating in the last few years the extraordinary debt to British radical and dissenting political and social ideas, to the Scottish Enlightenment, and to the Greek and Latin classics that the revolutionary generation incurred even before 1776 and this new-found knowledge puts into the shade more modest questions of French bequests to American political behavior, institutions, and ideas. Perhaps the story should be left at that. We know of course that France was an essential ally in the War for Independence and we know, too, that she became an aggravant afterward. The most recent review of the same subject-Henry Blumenthal’s American and French Culture, 1800-1900 (1975)-makes no mention of political culture at all. While the deep impress of the American dream upon French thought-so richly evaluated in Durand Echeverria’s Mirage in the West (1957)-is fully recognized, the best and fullest study of French influences upon the United States that we have-Howard Mumford Jones’ America and French Culture- published in 1927, devotes but two out of 15 chapters to French influence upon American thought and in Jones’ hands the matter is principally one of opinion and attitude rather than of political culture. The question has seemed insignificant, as if one doesn’t bother with a phenomenon that doesn’t occur. That this story, some of the circumstances behind it, and some of its fateful results have not been set forth before is itself worth noting. It is the story of that influence-upon American politics and political culture-as well as the reasons for its comparatively short duration that I would like to try to relate here. That influence had a curious history-”had” such a history because it ended quite early in our national life. The Treaties of Friendship and Commerce and of Alliance of 1778, in which France recognized American independence and sealed an agreement to aid the new nation in its war with Great Britain, France’s historic archrival-the basis of de Gaulle’s claim to front rank in that funeral procession- marked the formal birth of French influence upon American political culture. France had been the first nation to recognize the independence of the United States. De Gaulle took his place by virtue of history’s protocol. But one doesn’t have to seek for shrouded impulses. We imagine that de Gaulle sought his place at the head of that company out of personal pride, out of his fierce sense of stature-after all, only he remained of the Allied leaders of World War II-out of a conviction of la grandeur de la France. Emerging behind them, solitary, bemedaled, tall and made taller by his kepi, two steps before the other dignitaries and chiefs of state, is the president of the French Republic, Charles de Gaulle. The White House gates swing open, the new president and Mrs. Some of us vividly recall the start of the funeral procession behind the cortege of John F.
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