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The actual document in pdf format seems to be here: http://www.marshallfoundation.org/library/wp-content/uploads...
> (...) tensions began to rise between the French and the U.S. military personnel stationed in the country, with the former seeing the latter as arrogant and wanting to flaunt their wealth, and the latter seeing the former as proud and resentful.
Well. I mean...
Joking aside, the text is amazingly blunt and honest, in a rather refreshing way.
"The French don't bathe."
The French don't bathe often enough. They can't. They don't have real soap. (...) The Germans took the soap.I like the fact that the French didn't like American presence on their sole and had offensive feelings towards that, while at the same time, they were forcefully present all over Africa with totalitarian and oppressive military administrations.
In Algeria, many fought in WW2 as part of the French Expeditionary Corps (e.g; my great-grandfather) with the hope that in case the allies win, Algerians could possibly negotiate some sort of self-governance. on the 8th of May 45, thousands of Algerians protested for independence. The civilians faced an immediate annihilation by the French military [1], resulting in up to 30,000 dead civilians. And who can believe this happened in the aftermath of ending NAZI Germany?!!!! I mean that's very ironic but well ...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9tif_and_Guelma_massacre
It's true. Europeans of that era did not bathe everyday. My stepfather escaped nazi Germany, and moved to the us in the 40s. He grudgingly adapted to daily bathing (my mother's insistence), but remarked how very American that is. He was very 20th century European, for sure.
Some cultural asymmetries have swung the other way since. For example:
41. "At the Folies Bergers or the Casino de Paris, even the usher girls demand tips! What a racket!"
> the text is amazingly blunt and honest
It would likely have been written to be comprehensible to people with a fairly low reading level.
Imagine the first one being written today:
*We came to Europe twice in twenty-fee years to save the French*
We didn't come to Europe to save the French, either in 1917 or in 1944. We didn't come to Europe to do anyone any favors. (...) In this war, France fell in June of 1940, We didn't invade Europe until June of 1944. We didn't even think of "saving the French" through military action until after Pearl Harbor -- after the Germans declared war on us.
This would not even pass the lowest paid PR lackey at the DoD in 2021.
Yeah I kept thinking you'd never get away with talking that way now.
Number 48. seems related, both about cleanliness and being blunt. I was glancing through the text and I was very surprised when I found it.
> "I'd like the French a lot better if they were cleaner."
> That's perfectly understandable.
Also, page 35:
> The French haven’t had paint for a long time.
Fantastic read!
Via the French Wikipedia page about this booklet [0], I learned that the probable author is Leo Rosten, author of “The Joys of Yiddish” [1]..!
That makes sense as “Joys” is an incredibly funny and witty read on the interplays between Yiddish and English in the US. Much recommended
From Rosten’s Wikipedia page [2]:
—
In his book, The Joys of Yiddish, he defines the word chutzpah as "that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan."
—-
[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nos_amis_les_Français
(Funnily, the booklet’s title was translated to “Our friends the French”)
Wonderful. I found that book in my mother's library--love it!
As a french, it reminds me very much of the FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency manual: a pragmatic and clear book that tries to make approachable what seems an impossible topic to handle.
That's really a side of the american culture I'd like we promote more.
Also a proof militaries are not devoid of humanism.
In case anyone is interested in a link: https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf
It's indeed an interesting read.
What's the copyright situation of this book?
Say I want to restore it, clean it up, and publish a nice epub (using as source the PDF already linked in a comment here). Is it copyright infringement, or is its copyright expired now?
"112 gripes" was published in 1945, thus sites like https://www.biblio.com/blog/2010/07/how-to-determine-if-a-bo... suggest it's expired . But also, it was republished in the US in 2004 (ISBN 1-4191-6512-7). Does this make it "freshly-re-copyrighted until 2004 + 70 years?", or is the year that counts for copyright the original publishing date?
--
(More general question: how can I check if a book is still copyrighted? Webpages like the one I linked above aren't very precise and leave room for interpretation; is there something easier / more canonical to use?)
> For the right to speak involves the duty to listen. The right to criticize involves the responsibility of giving
"the other side" a fair chance to make its point.
I wish this could be chiseled in rock somewhere prominent
I find this an embarrassingly entertaining read! I particularly like this bit:
“The French are not up-to-date. They’re not modern. They’re living in the past."
“… The World Almanac for 1945 concludes that as far as social legislation is concerned, "France is in the vanguard" .. The French were certainly up-to-date in establishing old age pensions, compulsory insurance against illness, disability and death, maternity insurance, and so on. It was France that introduced the forty-hour work week.”
Clearly the author views theses social policies positively. I wander if that was what the average American thought back in 45.
The opening paragraphs are lovely and absolutely not what I'd expected based on the name. This is the America we want to live in.
"We insist upon the right to express our own opinions. But we also believe in the right of others to express their opinions. For the right to speak involves the duty to listen...We know that the truth can only be found through open and honest discussion, and that the common good is served through common attempts to reach common understanding".
The answers to each gripe are simple, straightforward and convincing. I love how it's written.
Does anyone know whether this had any impact on relations?
My experience with seeing discussions online doesn't give me much confidence in the persuasive ability of "here are logical reasons why what you're feeling is wrong".
This whole thing is amazing. It still reads really well today, like there's no tone of racism and nothing seems inappropriate (which is a hard thing to achieve with time).
I wish we had such a book currently on how arabs and the muslim world are different, but not so different than us.
> We didn't come to Europe to save the French, either in 1917 or in 1944. We didn't come to Europe to do anyone any favors. We came to Europe because we in America were threatened by a hostile, aggressive and very dangerous power.
> In this war, France fell in June of 1940, We didn't invade Europe until June of 1944. We didn't even think of "saving the French" through military action until after Peary Harbor -- after the Germans declared war on us
I can't stop reading, this is so interesting, this is really a lesson on racism and discrimination. I'm curious about who wrote this.
> It was inevitable that some Frenchmen would rub some Americans the wrong ray=. City people often rub country folk the wrong «ay the same goes for a Pittsburgher in New Orleans or Texan on Fifth Avenue. We Americans believe in the value of differences -- if basic political beliefs and goals rest on a common foundation. "Unless you bear with the faults of a friend you betray your own."
another one:
> You don't have to love the French. You don't have to hate them either. You might try to understand them, The more important point is not to let your feeling blin d you to the fact that they were and are our allies. They were in 1917, too. The most important question any people can ask itself is this: "Who fights with us? Who fights against us ?"
This one could apply to our relationship with China maybe?
> Yes, we quarrel with the French. The members of a family argue pretty freely inside the home ; We quarrel with our allies, We don't quarrel with our enemies -- we fight them.
I like how this one is phrased so that it sounds like France gave more money. I also really thought that France gave the statue to the US entirely.
> In France, 180 French cities, forty general councils, and thousands of anonymous Frenchmen contributed a quarter of a million dollars (not francs) towards the statue, (The United States raised $280,000.)
that's how much a cocktail was back then:
> A. G.I., comes out of a night club in the States and says, "A buck and half for a Scotch and soda".
that one can apply to the homeless crisis in the US:
> Some of the French are scroungers. Hungry people lose their pride. An empty stomach does not worry about losing face.
France sounded like a muslim country back then:
> Most French girls before the war had far less freedom than our girls back home. A great many were not permitted to go out without a chaperone. France is dominantly Catholic in religion and in morals. The immoral Frenchwomen are, of course, the easiest women for us to meet. That's why we meet so many of them.
this one is hilarious:
> This always startles Americans - at first . Kissing on both cheeks is the traditional French greeting between old friends. For their love making, the French prefer privacy, if available, just as we do.
It's interesting how the second part goes into "germans are so much nicer than french people".
PS: holy shit I can copy/paste from an old picture of a book O_o
As Steve Martin once said, “Those French have a different word for everything!”
I kind of wonder why it's always acceptable to have general critics about the Frenchs, but take exactly the same discours and replace it replace it with Jews or Blacks, and sundenly, it becomes completely racist and unacceptable.
Question 78: A 73% casualty rate for the French in WWI seemed bonkers to me at first glance, but it probably makes sense for the kind of war it was
Ref: https://www.facinghistory.org/weimar-republic-fragility-demo...
As an outsider who speaks both french and english, and has been to both countries, it always stuck me how similar Americans and French people are. Both sides would rather die than admit they are so similar in terms of spirit an attitude, and this brotherly hate is the main reason they are so similar. It's pretty funny.
The actual text: http://www.marshallfoundation.org/library/wp-content/uploads...
The questions in the chapter entitled "the French and the Germans" paint a picture that despite defeating the Nazis and witnessing their atrocities, many American servicemen harbored deeper sympathies to German culture than to French, and this pamphlet was intended in part to fix that. Examples of questions in that section:
"The French aren't our kind of people . The Germans are"
"The French are not as clean as the Germans"
"The Germans are easier to get along with than the French, because the Germans are law abiding"
This is reminder that despite the US being at war with the Nazis in WWII, the heinous beliefs behind the Nazi agenda had a lot of resonance in many other countries, including the United States. In fact, in recent years, it's become better understood how Nazism was inspired in part by the Jim Crow laws and culture in the US.
https://www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/nazism-and-th...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-r...
https://www.history.com/news/how-the-nazis-were-inspired-by-...
Delightful. Plus ça change:
> 49 "Why do they knock of work for two to three hours every day?"
> They keep their stores open two to three hours later than we do. (They did when there were things to sell; there's no point in keeping a store open if the shelves are bare.)
> The long lunch hour is a custom which is not confined to France. It is found in Italy, Spain, the Balkans and many parts of Germany. It is a custom we find annoying because it interferes with our comfort (as tourists) and because it differs from our way of doing things.
> The average Frenchman maintains that a lunch eaten at leisure is a lot better than a chicken-salad-on-toast gobbled down at a drugstore counter. "We take time to live as well as work," one Frenchman said.
ETA: It does take a more sombre turn in the chapters about France vs. Germany (Questions 69 etc.), which appears to indicate that many soldiers felt that they should have sided with the Germans rather than the French.
"Our friends the French" (the book's title in France) is a much softer title.
What strikes me me as amazing is that straightforward answers are viewed as "omg". We live in a society where its viewed as shocking that people shared their thoughts.
Amazing read, to get a glimpse of 'gripes' of Americans back in the day. Reminds me of the whole "Freedom Fries' fiasco. Times may change. Some gripes stay.
Same thing in the UK during the years long wait for D-Day.
Americans were very well paid relative to their UK peers and of course didn't have the existential angst of broken nation facing uncomfortable odds. American GI's would be jovial and upbeat while having definitely enough money to spend at the pub, which caused problems.
Left out my favorite from Steve Martin. "The French have their own word for practically everything!"
But seriously, left out from the list of great of Frenchmen Laplace, Lagrange, Galois, DeLambert etc. But I guess the list of mathematicians would have made the book too thick.
Thank you for adding this. It’s faded/hard to read. Anyone got an OCRed or retyped version?
I'm intrigued by the choice to conclude with this:
"France is a decadent nation"
How does one measure decadence? The Germans said, "Democracies are decadent".
I like the French translation, Our Friends the French
Interesting.
I always had the impression, the US citizens and french citizen where buddies. Because of the independence war and the statue and everything.
It is a great read. Thanks for the link!
Impressive honesty in the first pages
Question 74 is kind of astonishing in a modern context. I mean, I suppose maybe the average soldier in the 40s didn't understand what the Nazis _were_ in the way they would now, but I'm surprised it needed to be addressed.
> France sounded like a muslim country back then:
>> Most French girls before the war had far less freedom than our girls back home. A great many were not permitted to go out without a chaperone. France is dominantly Catholic in religion and in morals...
Can you imagine: from that to disallowing fathers to do a DNA test in less than 100 years!
I've never heard of this. I'm reading the original right now -- it's amazing.
Did the book address the topic of rapes by US soldiers? This was a big issue after liberation, and still is a major issue near US bases nowadays (in particular Okinawa).
I'm guessing such a book exists in south korea at the moment? I've heard that there's a lot of tension between the US army and the locals. One soldier even raped some local girl back in 2011.
The problem is that people in the army are not the most educated people, and thus they're not the best ambassadors when abroad.
The original is a delight to read. Sadly, I can't help but wonder how many would be "triggered" by the answers today.
How do we, as a society, start accepting rational self-criticism again?
The France of 75 years ago sounds like a paradise compared to the France today, which I don't feel particularly safe in--at least in Paris.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_21st-century_F...
and the fact that murder is not prosecuted:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/17/world/europe/sarah-halimi...