Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese

Nearly twelve years ago, in an effort to gather French public support for the Maastricht Treaty, President François Mitterrand famously said, “We are at war with America.” And America, along with the rest of the world, laughed but otherwise paid little attention to this comment at the time. More recently, however, French anti-Americanism has gotten our attention and caused an equal and opposite reaction. As Denis Boyles writes in the introduction to Vile France, “What we mistakenly see as a craven, anti-Semitic, hypocritical, hysterically anti-American, selfish, overtaxed, culturally exhausted country bereft of ideas, fearful of its own capitulation to fundamentalist Islam, headed for a demographic cul de sac, corrupted by lame ideologies, crippled by a spirit-stomping social elite and up to its neck in a cheesy soufflé of multilayered bureaucracy is actually worse than all that. It’s vile.”

In this bitingly funny and insightful polemic, Boyles, who has lived and worked in France for several years, examines the internal crises—a falling birthrate, an expanding Muslim minority, economic stagnation, a lessening of international prestige—that have changed the personality of what was once “La Belle France,” transforming it into a nation afflicted with status anxiety. He explains how a country that endlessly repeats its credentials as America's oldest ally has become one of our most resolute enemies, wielding the biggest weapon in its arsenal—the European Union—against the interests of an America that it fears and envies.

Vile France is a work that will gratify Francophobes everywhere and cause even the most committed defender of the Jacques Chirac worldview to crack an occasional smile.

Denis Boyles is the author of African Lives, Man Eaters Motel and A Man's Life: The Complete Instructions, among other books. His work has appeared in Esquire, Playboy, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. He currently writes the European Press Review column for National Review Online and contributes to various magazines and journals.