The irony of the French calling Trump ‘vulgar’

There has always been a touch of snobbery in the way the French elite regard American politics. The word one reads and hears most often in the mainstream media is “vulgarity.” This is particularly true of Donald Trump, who is abhorred as much by the right-wing press as by the left. “Trump, vulgarity on the loose,” was the headline in a recent article in the center-right Le Figaro.

This snootiness is long-standing, but it became more acute two decades ago during the war in Iraq. France’s refusal — correct, as it turned out — to join George W. Bush’s “coalition of the willing” led to a torrent of abuse in Washington. The French were labelled “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” and in some restaurants French fries were rechristened “Freedom Fries.”

The president of the Republic at the time was Jacques Chirac, and his foreign minister was Dominique de Villepin. Chirac’s passion was for indigenous art and cultures of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, and in 2006 he inaugurated the Quai Branly Museum in Paris to showcase artifacts from these civilizations. De Villepin was an author of poetry and Napoleonic history in his spare time. The pair had their faults but they were cultivated men.

How times have changed. The eighth president of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, is very much a man of his generation: high culture for him are semi-naked dance bands, coarse comedians and YouTube influencers.

His predecessor in the Elysée, François Hollande, didn’t exactly embody sophistication either. He was nicknamed after a wobbly caramel custard, and is best remembered for hitching a lift on the back of a moped for an assignation with his mistress. Adieu, French élan.

Topping the book charts in France this week is Mémoricide by Philippe de Villiers, a former government minister who is now best known as the creator of the popular historical theme park, Le Puy du Fou. In an interview this week to promote his book, de Villiers reminisced about his time as secretary of state for culture in the 1980s: François Mitterrand was president, Chirac was prime minister and the National Assembly was full of intellectual heavyweights. And now? Now, sighed de Villiers, “the National Assembly has become the annex of the factory of digital moron.”.

Moronic behavior seems to have become synonymous with the French parliament. Only last week the Green MP, Sandrine Rousseau, was forced to apologize after she made an obscene gesture to an opponent; this is the same woman who in 2022 accused barbecues of promoting toxic masculinity.

It would be unfair to single out Rousseau. There is the far-left MP, Andy Kerbrat who was recently detained by police in Paris for buying drugs from a teenage dealer; then there is David Guiraud, who was filmed calling a Jewish MP a “pig,” and of course several of his colleagues who have taken to waving the Palestinian flag in parliament this year.

Vulgarity has become the hallmark of the far-left La France Insoumise in recent years, what has come to be known as their “bordélisation“— “roguery” in English. Last year they were rebuked by Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne, and by the center-left Socialists, one of whom said: “Go and put on a tie; continue your vitriol against Macron but change your behavior.” Despite the criticism, Borne and the Socialists were happy to ally with the LFI in the summer elections in order to prevent Marine Le Pen coming to power.

The LFI justify their vulgarity by blaming the president. “We were elected to express people’s anger, to oppose the pension reform and Emmanuel Macron’s policies”’ said their parliamentary president, Mathilde Panot.

The irony is that traditionally it is the left in France that has been most sniffy about America, deploring what they regard as their lack of cultural sophistication, not to mention Uncle Sam’s inedible cuisine. This prejudice took hold in the early 1980s under Mitterrand’s Socialist administration. In September 1981 the left-run Committee for National Identity raged against “the cultural colonization of France by American cinema and song.”

There is little prejudice against American culture among the working-class. On the contrary, they give their children American names, such as Jordan, Cindy, Kevin and Dylan (the president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is Jordan Bardella and there are a couple of Kevins — another reason that the left hate the party). They enjoy American TV series and you’d be surprised at the popularity of line dancing in the provinces.

In the decades since, the French left has overseen the shocking and precipitous decline in their own culture, a phenomenon that was first identified by Time magazine in 2007. “The death of French culture” ran their headline.

Some pushed back against the accusation. “Decline or mutation?” asked Le Monde in a riposte. If French culture has mutated, it’s transformed into vulgar trash. Witness the opening ceremony of the Olympics in July, what the Guardian described as “gaudy” and the New York Times as “just another bloated made-for-TV spectacle, like a halftime show or awards show.”

Some in France blame their education system, so poor that half of 13 and 14-year-olds can’t read properly. Science and mathematics are also disaster zones with French pupils ranking among the worst in Europe. Eight of the top ten universities are American and two are British. Even a French reader should be able to work out how many of their universities therefore make the top ten.

The French elite can no longer look down its Gallic nose at America and sneer at its vulgarity. If it does, the whiff in their nostrils will be that of hypocrisy.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.