FRANCE-U.S. RELATIONS

In colonial North America dynastic, religious, and ethnic rivalries frequently produced bloodshed between Protestant British and French Catholic settlers, leading them to fight four wars between 1688 and 1763, until in the Seven Years' War Great Britain ejected the French from continental North America. When the British colonies revolted, France retaliated by secretly supplying them with guns and other supplies.

After Congress declared independence in July 1776 its agents in Paris recruited officers for the Continental Army, notably the Marquis de Lafayette who served with distinction as a major general. Despite a lingering distrust of France, the agents also requested an alliance. After readying their fleet and being impressed by the American victory at Saratoga in October 1777, the French in the following February concluded treaties of commerce and alliance that bound them to fight Britain until American independence was assured.

Later a fleet and an army commanded by the Comte de Rochambeau arrived in the United States. At the crucial victory of Yorktown in October 1781 French forces outnumbered Americans. In the peace negotiations between the Americans and the British in Paris in 1783 the American commissioners, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and particularly John Jay, suspected the French of a willingness to sacrifice the American interest in the western territory extending to the Mississippi River and of being hostile to American fishing rights off Newfoundland. Hence, with Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, Jay violated the spirit of the alliance by directly bargaining with the British. Nevertheless the allies cooperated to produce a favorable treaty. In all, the French contribution to American independence was decisive.

Six years later the revolution that toppled the Bourbon monarchy dissipated some of the American warmth for France. In February 1793, at war again with Britain, France viewed George Washington's policy as partial to the enemy. It also regarded as hostile Jay's Treaty of November 1794 between Britain and America. To overcome this resentment John Adams in 1797 sent a special mission to Paris. When Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the French foreign minister, demanded a bribe, Adams exposed the episode, known as the xyz Affair, and two years of hostilities at sea, or the Quasi-War, followed. It ended in September 1800 with the Treaty of Morfontaine which rid the United States of the "entangling" French alliance.

At the same time First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte regained the Louisiana Territory from Spain, leading Thomas Jefferson to consider war to prevent French control of the Mississippi River. Fortunately, because of an insuppressible slave rebellion in St. Domingue, among other reasons, Bonaparte's North American plans collapsed. To keep Louisiana out of British hands in an approaching war he sold it in April 1803 to the United States for $15 million. In their warfare the French infringed on American maritime rights but less than did the British. So in 1812 the United States declared war on Britain and fought indirectly as an ally of France.

In 1834 when Andrew Jackson demanded payment for property destroyed during the Napoleonic Wars, France severed diplomatic relations. When tempers cooled, cordiality and modest cultural exchanges resumed, as in visits to the United States by Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America (1835). During the Civil War the Union believed that Napoleon III favored the Confederacy. Furthermore, he intervened in a civil conflict in Mexico. Abraham Lincoln opposed the French occupiers and through judicious use of threat pressured them to leave in March 1867.

In subsequent years the fundamentals of the relationship changed. The United States, rising to the status of a great power, came to overshadow France. All during this period the friendship remained firm—as symbolized by the Statue of Liberty, presented in 1884 as a gift to the United States from the French people. In 1906 when Germany menaced France over Morocco, Theodore Roosevelt sided with the French. During the First World War the United States again sympathized with France and joined it as a cobelligerent. In the peacemaking, however, though sharing major objectives, the two countries clashed over particulars such as debts, reparations, and restraints on Germany.

Nevertheless, during the interwar years, the two nations remained friendly. Beginning in the twenties American intellectuals, painters, writers, and tourists were drawn to French art, literature, philosophy, theater, cinema, fashion, wines, and cuisine. In turn, American novelists such as William Faulkner and numerous filmmakers influenced French life.

In 1928 the two nations sponsored the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war, and in the thirties both supported democracies against dictatorships and favored capitalism over communism. In the Second World War Americans again favored France in opposition to Germany. Franklin D. Roosevelt aided the French with money, munitions, and supplies. This friendliness changed, however, when defeated France in June 1940 established a fascist regime at Vichy. After the United States entered the war its forces attacked Vichy's bases in North Africa.

In the postwar years both cooperation and discord persisted. The United States helped revive the French economy with Marshall Plan aid and in 1949 again became a formal ally through the North Atlantic treaty, but it disapproved of French efforts to regain control over former colonies in Africa and Southeast Asia. In 1954, for instance, Dwight D. Eisenhower refused to intervene in Vietnam to save besieged French forces at Dien Bien Phu.

Both countries opposed the Soviet Union in cold war confrontations but went through another crisis in 1956 when French, British, and Israeli forces attacked Egypt and Eisenhower forced them to withdraw. After Charles de Gaulle became president he clashed with Americans over France's building of her own nuclear weapons, Britain's admission to the European Economic Community, and France's role in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato).

While no major crises marred the following decades, the two nations differed over the waging of the Vietnam War, in part because French leaders were convinced that the United States could not win. In the eighties the two nations cooperated on most international matters, though at the end of the decade popular opinion within each differed on the desirability of a reunified Germany.

Despite the rifts, the often ambiguous relationship remained stable and remarkably friendly. The two countries continued to share a democratic tradition and to respect each other's culture and way of life.

Henry Blumenthal, American and French Culture, 1800-1900: Interchanges in Art, Science, Literature, and Society (1975); Jean Baptiste Duroselle, France and the United States: From the Beginnings to the Present, trans. Derek Coltman (1976); Marvin H. Zahniser, Uncertain Friendship: American-French Diplomatic Relations through the Cold War (1975).

Alexander DeConde

See also French and Spanish Settlements; Jay's Treaty; Kellogg-Briand Pact; Louisiana Purchase; Revolution; Statue of Liberty; XYZ Affair.