“… does its job marvelously well.  After reading it, you may still think the French arrogant, aloof and high-handed, but you will know why.”
The Wall Street Journal

From our old apartment in Paris, I used to walk our dog down the Boulevard Saint Germain past the once bohemian, now touristy, Cafe des Deux Magots. At around 7.30am, while Paris slept, lined up in the windows of the cafe, each at their own individual table, would be four or five American men peering over their coffee cups into the street. You could tell they were not French from their books, their baseball caps and the fact they were up that early. Read more »

In 1831, 66 years before Edmond Rostand created the Gascon character Cyrano de Bergerac, a little-known German correspondent was writing a series of letters home to his newspaper, the Augsburger Allgemeine. His name was Heinrich Heine and he was in Paris.

“France,” wrote Heine, “is the Gascon of Europe.” Read more »

It is hard to imagine a better moment for trying to understand the French, so recently the enemies of American foreign policy and still the butt of American jokes. With perfect timing, Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow, a Canadian couple, have produced Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong. One imagines a corresponding book titled “But 60 Million Americans Want to Spit in Their Eye.” Read more »