This summer, Paris was beset by tens of thousands of French citizens braving the risk of Covid-19 to demonstrate under the banners of the American Black Lives Matter movement, carrying portraits of George Floyd like a martyr’s icons. Far from Minneapolis, these demonstrators belonged to all the ethnic communities that now constitute our societies, both French and American. This incursion...
Adrien de Chaisemartin was a Young Leader with the French-American Foundation in 2016 and is currently the director of strategy, funding, and performance at Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. This public-private partnership, launched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000, strives to increase access to vaccines in poor countries and has helped save more than seven million lives since...
The United States is one of the rare countries to include the right to happiness in its national constitution. But what happens when the machine breaks down and the dream dissipates, fractured by racial discrimination? The United States is founded on a widely shared myth drawn from the Declaration of Independence: the right to the “pursuit of happiness,” an expression...
Foreign language programs are in danger in the United States. The number of language classes at the elementary and middle school levels have been decreasing. Recent restrictions on work visas have made difficult for immersion programs to recruit qualified native teachers. And according to the Modern Language Association, 651 college and university foreign language programs were eliminated between 2013 and...
Independence Day (July 4) and Bastille Day (July 14) share more than a month. From the beginning, our two revolutions were linked by a diplomatic and military alliance, by personal friendships, and a common philosophy. On July 2, 1776, John Adams wrote to his wife Abigail: “This day will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the Day of Deliverance by...
Why do the French and American flags share the same colors? Is it a coincidence? No one knows who designed these two flags, but there are a few clues. For the thirteen original colonies marked by British culture, and whose officers, most notably George Washington, had served in the occupying army, blue, white and red were already familiar shades used...
In the run up to America’s 2020 presidential elections, will the coronavirus pandemic put the nail in the coffin of U.S. leadership and its democratic model? While Donald Trump may not have started this decline, he has helped amplify it during the current healthcare and economic crisis, according to Dominique Moïsi, a renowned international relations expert in France and the...
In the wake of George Floyd's death, protests in support of the Black Lives Matter movement have reignited the debate over controversial statues. In this opinion piece published in 2017, France-Amérique explored the complex connection between remembrance and history through an American example, Robert E. Lee, and a French one, Marshal Pétain. The French will not be surprised by the...
Robert Sebbag is a doctor working with the infectious and tropical diseases department of the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, and has devoted his career to fighting pandemics such as SARS, Ebola, and now the coronavirus. He has also worked with the French-American humanitarian aid organization Action Against Hunger, the International Red Cross, and French pharmaceutical laboratory Sanofi. He believes that...
Must we save lives by confining citizens and thus bring the economy to a halt (the French stance), or would it be better to restart the economy at the risk of prolonging and aggravating the pandemic (Donald Trump’s approach)? Both, writes Guy Sorman. Here we are, all on the same level, all nations and social classes alike, exposed to the...
No one could have predicted the global swell of emotion inspired by the fire in the Paris cathedral, a year ago today. The French are generally so divided and there are few regular churchgoers. And yet they suddenly found themselves united in collective mourning. Condolences flooded in from all over the world as if every French person had lost a...
The Covid-19 pandemic will transform the economic map of the world, writes Guy Sorman. "We will see a reindustrialization of the West, a retreat by China, and a certain degree of economic deglobalization." History may not repeat itself, but it sometimes stutters. Exactly nine years ago, a tsunami in Japan destroyed Fukushima’s nuclear plant and disabled the core of Japanese...
According to a report on anti-semitism in Europe ordered by Ronald S. Lauder, former U.S. ambassador to Austria and president of the World Jewish Congress, France is the most dangerous place to be Jewish today. In fact, responds Guy Sorman, there is in this regard a strange back-and-forth between France and the United States. The oldest recorded antisemitic slurs date from Ancient...
The U.S. Senate has acquitted Donald Trump on Wednesday after a long impeachment trial, a little-known process in France. For the third time in about fifty years, the French are discovering the American procedure of the impeachment of the president of the United States: Richard Nixon in 1974, Bill Clinton in 1998, and now Donald Trump. One Democrat, two Republicans. As...
France has taken longer than North America to address the sexual misconduct of its artists. Revered in France but boycotted and subjected to legal attacks in the United States for the 1977 rape of an underage girl, Roman Polanski had never had cause for concern in the country where he fled. However, this is no longer the case. While his latest...
French scholar Benjamin Haddad heads up the Future Europe initiative for Washington-based think tank Atlantic Council, specialized in U.S. foreign policy. He is the author of Paradise Lost: Europe in the World of Trump. France-Amérique: The French often place responsibility for American isolationism on Donald Trump, but your book explains that the movement began with Barack Obama… Benjamin Haddad: The positions...
The French cultural world has been shaken to its core by the sexual misdemeanors of director Roman Polanski and the admissions of pedophilia by writer Gabriel Matzneff. Both men considered that their talent put them above the law and the common norms of decency in our societies. Victims are now speaking out. While their predators saw them as muses, they...
The French-American relationship is passionate, whatever the subject, writes Guy Sorman. There is love and hatred on both sides, without nuance and sometimes without understanding. I will begin with a personal reminiscence. In 1985, I was teaching economics at Stanford University in California. Occupying the office next to mine was none other than Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate, preeminent spokesman for...
America has clearly reverted to its original isolationist doctrine. NATO has fallen; Europe must now learn to fend for itself. The United States is no longer the protector of the world order, and this global retreat is not just down to Donald Trump. He certainly accelerated the phenomenon by allowing Russia and Syria to annex neighboring territories, by withdrawing from...
Many U.S. states have legalized marijuana, while France is timidly preparing to authorize its medicinal use. But is this cautiousness justified? Marijuana is a perfect illustration of the radical difference and rivalry between French and American societies. It should be noted that the very idea of prohibition comes to us from the United States, beginning with the prohibition of alcohol,...
Two days before Bastille Day, the French national day, I was prompted to do a Google search for “bastille day celebrations usa,” which returned over 248,000 results. A 2018 map revealed some 200 celebrations taking place from California to Maine and Florida, and at many points in between. As an educator with a lifelong affection for French language and culture,...
