America’s recent epidemic of France-bashing may have reached its most absurd point last weekend, when someone in New Orleans’ French Quarter began circulating a petition to re-christen the place the Freedom Quarter.
Then, again, it’s probably only a matter of time before “freedom kissing” and “freedom onion soup” enter the lexicon.
Before the situation becomes any more gauche, it might be worth remembering that the French are more than just a people who happen to disagree with current American foreign policy. They also represent a glorious culture that has influenced American arts and letters so profoundly and for so many generations that we have come to consider French inventions our own.
It’s not just the Statue of Liberty, in other words, that arrived as a gift from France (having been designed by the French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi). Equally important, our visual art, our dance, our literary achievements and even our most singularly American music — jazz — would not exist (at least not in their current forms) had the French not given us a lesson or two. Every time we go to the ballet or study a film director’s oeuvre or watch Gene Kelly pirouette in “An American in Paris,” we’re not just borrowing French terminology: We’re reveling in Gallic cultural traditions.
But a feisty, comparatively young country such as the United States — which sees itself as a renegade child of England — does not quickly acknowledge cultural debts to Old Europe. And when the benefactor is France, a nation that understandably exults in its enormous cultural contributions, it’s not always easy to say merci.
Even so, an America without Cajun music, chocolate mousse, the auteur theory, Impressionism, Mardi Gras, le jazz hot and, of course, the American Revolution wouldn’t be quite the same, as the following examples suggest.
FOOD
We learned we, too, could master a classic cuisine
If it weren’t for the French, Americans probably still would be eating like the Brits. (They’ve made their own culinary progress in the last 25 years, it’s true, but they continue to eat marmite and suet.)
It was not some kind of Gallic invasion that hastened our transformation from a country of Rice-A-Roni eaters into chef-worshipping, Wolf Stove-owning, Food Network addicts who use the word “foodie” without the tiniest glint of self-mockery.
Actually it was an America in love with French cooking, the universally revered Julia Child, who was the real revolutionary. With the advent in 1963 of her seminal Boston public television cooking show, “The French Chef,” Child virtually took Americans by the hand and led us through the enticing but daunting forest of classic French cuisine.
Somehow, before she came along to walk us through each recipe, we couldn’t imagine making such dishes as boeuf bourguignon or Coquilles Saint-Jacques Sautees a la Provencale, much less pronouncing them. But they turned out to be nothing more than a simple and wonderful beef stew and sauteed scallops with herbs!
Child made it clear from the beginning that everyone not only could, but should learn to cook the French way. She pointed out in the introduction to “The French Chef Cookbook,” “Good French cooking is careful cooking, and a question of technique,” but one of her most important mottoes was: “Above all — have a good time.”
And so we did. Having taken our first steps, it was only a matter of time before we had entered the world of international cuisine.
— Emily Nunn
LITERARY CRITICISM
City of Literary Lights
Fans of “The Addams Family,” the TV series based on Charles Addams’ gloriously morbid cartoons, will recall that when Morticia uttered an especially delectable bon mot in the original French, her husband Gomez would immediately begin kissing her forearm, murmuring rhapsodically, “Tish — that’s French!”
That’s French, and that’s that: Paris, as Ernest Hemingway once noted and others quickly echoed, is where the 20th Century happened. Paris was the city to which young writers from all nations flocked, from Americans such as Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald to Irishmen such as Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. There they found the freedom and intellectual ferment they craved — along with the peculiar slant of sunlight on the Left Bank that got the imagination cranking, and the smoky cafes in which great novels, plays and poems were hatched.
Given the world-changing literature that emerged from France, it’s not surprising that the same nation revolutionized the way we look at that literature. Before French intellectuals — somehow, the phrase sounds redundant — got their hands on it, literary criticism was literary criticism. Afterward, literary criticism was philosophy, history, psychology, linguistics, anthropology and popular culture. Concepts such as existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction and postmodernism sprang fully formed from the foreheads of French thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. Concepts that had long been taken for granted — that writers write books, and that readers read them; that a book has a specific meaning that readers can figure out — suddenly were undermined, upended, discarded. Literary criticism wasn’t about literature, it was about the nature of reality.
From Barthes’ proclamation of the death of the author to Kristeva’s notion that gender is not a biological category but a creation of language, French thinkers have repeatedly upset the intellectual apple cart. You could make a strong case that, when it comes to the world of ideas, everybody who’s anybody is French.
— Julia Keller
FILM
Cinema was transformed into a serious art
It was in France that the camera projector was invented and where the first movies were shown publicly — by the Lumiere brothers in 1895 Paris — and it has been French critics and filmmakers throughout cinema history who have led the way in taking movies seriously, as art.
Never mind the many great filmmakers and films they’ve sent us: Jean Renoir, Francois Truffaut, “Children of Paradise,” “Three Colors: Red, White, Blue,” “Z” and hundreds of others. The French influence on the way we see our own movies and the ways our best filmmakers make them is incalculable.
The great critics at the magazine Cahiers du Cinema in the ’50s and ’60s loved and celebrated Hollywood and independent American cinema at a time when most American highbrow critics dismissed their own country’s films nearly en masse. It was through those Parisian enthusiasts (and such like-minded Yanks as film critic Andrew Sarris) that many learned to love the work of great American studio directors such as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and dozens of others, and to treasure hundreds of movie classics once dismissed here as trash: among them, “Singin’ in the Rain,” “The Searchers,” “Vertigo” and “Touch of Evil.”
Even more, it was the once controversial French practice of treating film directors as artists with personal viewpoints that directly affected several generations of Yank moviemakers, beginning with the whole Spielberg-Scorsese-Lucas-Coppola group.
The two major streams of film academic theory in our universities — one primarily aesthetic (“auteurism”) and one more political (structuralism) — originated in France. And nearly every film festival in the world follows the French model at Cannes.
In recent years, the French government has erected some economic barriers against Hollywood, if only to keep their own cinema from being overwhelmed. But that doesn’t erase the cultural debt we owe the French. It is largely due to them that we Americans take our movies so seriously — and so passionately, as well.
— Michael Wilmington
JAZZ
All-American music actually a cultural mix
Listeners often think of jazz as a uniquely American creation, and it is — in the sense that it was invented in this country and could not have been conceived anywhere else. An art form as democratic as jazz, which welcomes anyone with a horn to step forth and take part in the musical conversation, surely is as American as the Constitution itself.
Yet it took the confluence of several cultures — including the French — to make possible the creation of the new art form. For if New Orleans’ self-taught black musicians of the late 19th Century had not met up with their formally trained Creole counterparts (who were of mixed black and French descent), jazz might never have developed as the signature music of the Crescent City and, later, the rest of the country.
The two groups encountered each other in the saloons, brothels and street parades of America’s most unmistakably French city, New Orleans, each bringing to the equation a distinct approach to musicmaking. The black players, who typically could not read music, developed a phenomenal ability to improvise on anything they heard, while the Louisiana Creoles offered the instrumental techniques and musical forms of French classical music.
As the 20th Century dawned, these musicians traded ideas, the profoundly expressive blues tunes of the black players absorbing the delicate trills, intricate melodies and rarefied harmonies that were at the core of the Creole players’ vocabulary. Without the influence of pivotal Creole artists such as Jelly Roll Morton, who was born Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe and grew up savoring the music of New Orleans’ famed French Opera, the music might never have developed beyond the rough-hewn parade music of Louis Armstrong’s youth.
Perhaps that’s why the French always have been among the most ardent champions of jazz: They hear in jazz the sounds of their own past, as well as ours.
— Howard Reich
ART
A thousand years of enlightenment
The proper name of Frederic Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty is “Liberty Enlightening the World” — which pretty much describes what the French have been up to in artistic matters for more than 1,000 years.
From the early 7th Century, when they introduced the ambulatory (sheltered walking place for pilgrims) into churches, to the late 20th Century, when they provided new theoretical approaches to art, French artists’ innovation and influence have been felt everywhere in the Western world.
They led the way in exploring architectural ideas that came to be known as Romanesque. Then they created the Gothic style of architecture that gave expression to the philosophical aspirations of the age. That led to achievements in miniature painting, stained glass and book illustration — which turned Paris into an international art center as early as the 14th Century.
When Paris eventually replaced Rome as the artistic center of Europe, Versailles — the center of Parisian culture — dictated taste in everything from architecture to gardening and even the ideas we have ever after associated with artistic academies. By the time Jean-Antoine Houdon visited America (in 1785) to fulfill a commission for a statue of George Washington, the French also had prompted a Western taste for boudoir art and the fashionable portrait.
Napoleon introduced the chaise longue and long mirror into interior decoration. Henri Murger gave a defining view of artists in “Scenes from Bohemian Life.” Napoleon III’s exhibition for artists who had been refused by the official show created the idea of an artistic avant garde. Charles Baudelaire first used the word “modern.” Then there came the unprecedented aesthetic ferment of the 20th Century, which the French began with such movements as Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism.
— Alan G. Artner
DANCE
Provided much of ballet’s style, content, technical terms
Though invented by Italians and perfected by Russians, ballet wouldn’t be ballet without the French, who gave the art much of its style and content and virtually all of its technical vocabulary.
Originating in the Italian Renaissance of the 15th Century, an early form of ballet called ballet de cour flourished in 16th Century Paris and reached a pinnacle a century later under Louis XIV. The king was a talented dancer in his youth and owes his Sun King sobriquet to an acclaimed performance in which he danced the role of Apollo. Louis founded a royal academy of dance, staffed it with professional ballet masters, and moved the art from the court to the public realm.
By the 18th Century, the Paris Opera Ballet, the world’s oldest ballet company, began to exert an influence on the art form that survives to this day. Dazzling show dancers and gifted choreographers came to Paris from all over Europe. By the next century, the Paris Opera premiered “La Sylphide” (1832) and “Giselle” (1841), introducing the Romantic movement with two works still in major company repertoires. “Coppelia” premiered there in 1870.
Even as the art spread, the French influence on ballet never really flagged. Denmark’s August Bournonville studied in Paris, and it was a Frenchman, Marius Petipa, who gave the Imperial Ballet in Russia its legendary classics “Swan Lake” and “The Sleeping Beauty.”
Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev opened his Ballets Russes in Paris and premiered Nijinsky’s controversial “Rite of Spring” (1913) there.
Later forces crucial to dance range from innovative choreographer Maurice Bejart to the ultra-contemporary Compagnie Kafig, the Lyon-based troupe run by a Frenchman of Algerian descent and acclaimed for its blend of dance, multimedia and hip-hop.
— Sid Smith
