Pardon My French

What the Noise Left Behind after Memorial Day

The flags are folded, the speeches done. Now we can think.

I have been watching the ritual return of a particular American argument, one that tends to linger in more conservative discourse: that France is ungrateful. That without the United States, the French would be speaking German. It is the kind of thing said with confidence by people who believe history began in 1944. It did not.

In 1778, France entered the American War of Independence at a moment when the Revolution was faltering — when we were losing and the outcome was far from certain. Not reluctantly, not under pressure: France chose to intervene. More than 12,000 soldiers and a substantial fleet crossed the Atlantic. They bled on American soil — at Savannah, at Rhode Island, at Yorktown. French deaths at sea alone, including illness, may have reached 15,000. There are no cemeteries in Virginia or Georgia marked with their names. No Normandy for them.

On location | Bunker near the battle field in the Ardennes

And here is the distinction that never gets made: the Americans who landed at Normandy were drafted. The French who crossed the Atlantic in 1778 were, in large part, volunteers. Lafayette arrived at nineteen, defying a royal order to stay home. He was not sent. He chose to go.

France paid for that choice with its treasury and, eleven years later, with its monarchy. The financial collapse triggered by the cost of underwriting American independence was among the causes of the French Revolution. The crown that helped birth the United States did not survive the effort.

So yes — France owes much to America. The debt is real and was paid in full on the beaches of Normandy — and in the frozen Ardennes, where American soldiers like Private Milt Feldman fought and bled in the winter of 1944. I had the privilege of telling one such story in A Soldier's Dream. But the ledger has another side, and it is older.

As for the famous exchange: when de Gaulle demanded all American military personnel leave French soil, President Johnson reportedly instructed Secretary of State Dean Rusk to ask him whether that included the ones in the graveyards. Rusk claims in his memoirs he delivered the line to de Gaulle’s face. It lands. But consider what it omits: those soldiers are not buried in France. The land beneath every American military cemetery there was granted to the United States in perpetuity. Those graves already stand on American soil — given freely by France.

The argument defeats itself.

We can honor what America did in the twentieth century without erasing what France did in the eighteenth. Gratitude that runs in only one direction is not gratitude. It is accounting.