There is romance to the relationship between France and the United States, the mutual fascination of two republics born of revolutions, and as in all affairs of the heart there are flare-ups. This is one such moment for the oldest American alliance.
France is bristling, provoked by President Trump’s tilt toward an autocratic Russia under President Vladimir V. Putin, his apparent contempt for European allies and his social media threat to impose 200 percent tariffs on “all WINES, CHAMPAGNES AND ALCOHOLIC PRODUCTS COMING OUT OF FRANCE.”
Mr. Trump has made Gaullism more fashionable than at any time since Gen. Charles de Gaulle, who as president regularly bridled at American dominance, died 55 years ago.
The current consensus in France is that de Gaulle was right to develop France’s own nuclear deterrent, right to take France out of NATO’s military command structure in 1966, right to insist that France remain an independent power and right to warn that the United States and the Soviet Union, both nuclear-armed, might “one day come to an agreement to divide up the world.”
“Putin and Trump have resuscitated de Gaulle,” said Alain Duhamel, a political scientist and author. “They have revived the Gaullist conviction that two big powers cannot be allowed to govern the world, and that France may have allies but must be autonomous.”
“Give us back the Statue of Liberty,” Raphaël Glucksmann, a prominent center-left politician, demanded at a Paris rally on Sunday, assuming a Gaullist mantle. He said the return of the statue — given by France in the 1880s and made by the French sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi — was justified in the face of “Americans who have chosen to switch to the side of the tyrants.”
