The New Republic

The most famous of American Francophiles has to be Jefferson (well, maybe Franklin, but only because of the ladies). With Jefferson, it came at the expense of our "special relationship" with the British: Jefferson loathed the British. Let's square this circle: Jefferson is the favorite founder among the conservatives, especially the tea partiers, yet he adored the French and loathed the British, while today's conservatives distrust everything French and accuse Obama of jeopardizing our "special relationship" with the British. Go figure.

- rayward

January 16, 2012 at 5:34pm

Two of my relatives have been fine linguists. My cousin (no longer alive) became fluent in French, Spanish, and Chinese. One of my brothers (still alive) became fluent in French, German, Wolof [language in Senegal], and I think he has picked up some Japanese as well. I am a linguistic nincompoop, studying without success first Spanish and then French. To engage in stereotypes (something I usually rail against), my French teachers were arrogant snots who regarded their American students as puerile ignoramuses. However, the worst of my French teachers in this regard was born and raised in Paraguay, and thus strove (successfully) to be even more obnoxious than the genuine French. As a footnote, my daughter attended for a while an international college in Canada where many of the students were Quebeqouis (French-speaking Canadian students). Two students from France were also attending the same school. The French students were appalled by the accents and dialects of the French-Canadian students, and generously offered to teach them how to speak "correct" French. The French-Canadian students were not amused (my daughter informed me.) If you read this comment and are now wondering, "Why did I read this?" that is a good question, though I am not sure of the reason for the original post, either. I think I will go read the Onion, which is sometimes (well, often) funnier than I am.

- skahn

January 16, 2012 at 7:36pm

Well, skahn can go read the Onion; I would like to go to Paris, even though Romney was there.

- Sophia

January 16, 2012 at 11:41pm

Rayward observes: "Jefferson is the favorite founder among the conservatives, especially the tea partiers, yet he adored the French and loathed the British...today's conservatives distrust everything French and accuse Obama of jeopardizing our "special relationship" with the British. Go figure." What I figure is these conservatives don't particularly know squat about what Jefferson really thought or believed in, nor are they particularly interested in contemplating the conficts & contradictions that are embodied in this person, one of unending complexity and contradiction. Mostly they don't get the whole Enlightenment thing - what it meant to Jefferson & his educated contemporaries who revered Classical learning, the Greek and Latin basis of our culture's science, law, government, and respect for rational discourse. That's all been forgotten. Nowadays arch conservatives want to believe that the founders were a bunch of bible-packin' fundamentalists, who didn't look much beyond the bible for inspiration or information. You don't hear many conservatives lauding, for instance, Jefferson's authorshipof the Virginia Statute for Religous Freedom ("....,our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions any more than our opinions in physics or geometry...."), which Jefferson proudly included among the most significant achievements of his life. Our modern day conservatives like a really simple story, told simply, by simpletons.

- Haole45

January 16, 2012 at 11:56pm

As I understand it (meaning I read it somewhere), Gingrich lived for a few years in France as a child and speaks some French, though I suspect he only knows the French words for frankly, dramatically, fundamentally, and, above all, I. He also sports a $25,000 Patek Philippe, "the Rolls Royce of wristwatches." (see, cover photo, New York Times Magazine, 1 March 2009). It's possible, though I will leave it to the forensic psychologists to pin down, that Gingrich's childhood sojourn among the Gallic people explains his Napoleonic complex. Dan

- dbuck1

January 17, 2012 at 7:59am

You left out "quite frankly", Gingrich's signal that he's about to tell a whopper. I've mentioned before that my late father in law, a southern barrister, loved to tell tall tales, the tallest tales he'd preface with "this is the truth". Jesus uses the same signal ("this is the truth") in the Gospels, though I believe He really meant it is the truth. Now that Gingrich is an evangelical Catholic (two words that don't seem to belong together), maybe soon he will replace "quite frankly" with "this is the truth".

- rayward

January 17, 2012 at 9:52am