Kesher Talk

Nos Amis Les Français. A reprinted 1945 manual for GIs is a best-seller in France.

Although some subjects — such as black market profiteering and the decrepit towns — hail from another age, the wartime GIs’ ideas about the French are as modern as the “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” of Francophobe America and Britain in 2003. “I will never like the French. I hate the French,” says one gripe. The answer to the soldier is: “No one is asking you to like the French . . . Try first of all to understand them.”

. . . Other gripes include: “The French are always cheating us”, “the French are always criticising, there is always something wrong”, “the French are cynics”, “the French don’t wash” and “the French are morally rotten”. Sometimes the author agrees with the complaint, such as “the French drive like madmen”, but most of the time he — or she — provides an explanation.

“The Metro is indeed overcrowded, hot, damp, dirty and nauseating. You can smell garlic because the French, who are extraordinary cooks, use it more than we do,” the manual says. The French wash less than Americans because they are poorer and the Germans deprived them of soap. French women are forced to mask their uncleanliness with scent, says the writer.

(via Sgt. Stryker comments)

posted by Judith @ 8/01/2003 04:47:15 PM