Paris – American au revoir. Bonjour, Tristesse, France. If it is exaggerated, it is not an excess.
I found that the rain hadn’t changed much this past April, where I fell in love with the moon and rain, but I had the “love” part.
If my random, unscientific survey of French opinions represents the whole country, Donald Trump’s American debut left France’s Triste.
That coincided with a brutal poll from Institut Elabe, a research firm for French broadcaster BFMTV. About three in four French people believe that the US is no longer on their own.
Seeing how President Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, manipulated Ukrainian President Voldimi Zelensky in his oval office, most French citizens fear that Russian war against Ukraine will flow across Ukrainian boundaries and perhaps even to France itself.
They also paid attention to Vance’s boring remarks about Europe regarding its infamous signal chat before hitting Yemeni Houtis.
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And they were repelled by a high hand letter from the US Embassy in March, and addressed to French companies, if they wanted to do business with the US government, they had to play by Trump’s rules banning Day’s practices, and asked within five days to return a form proof that they were.
So I walked through Paris and asked some people, strangers, a few French friends, what they thought of this new “America” and how their attitude towards this country has changed.
Most people didn’t want to use their last name – and you can barely blame them.
140 years after the French presented us with a lovely monument to our shared spirit, how sad it came to say goodbye this way.
Sousville, a 24-year-old student, sat in the thin sun outside the Picasso Museum, saying that her fellow student friend had short-term work onboard as a Utah nanny. She flew to Boston first. There, Sville said that Ice had detained her, passed through her social media accounts, found several anti-Trump posts, and denied her entry into the country.
“They created fear. I feel it. [Trump’s] The government has produced a merely surreal response. The United States is extremely influential worldwide. They also fear that France will follow Trump’s example. Racist and anti-immigrant. ”
The protesters hold posters against Elon Musk and President Donald Trump on the left at the May Day demonstration in Paris on Thursday, May 1, 2025.
(Thibault Camus/Applications)
Bernard was in the same museum. He was 71 years old from a town near Bordeaux and was visiting his daughter in Paris.
“It’s a betrayal,” he said, even before the betrayal of the alliance and friends, it is a betrayal of the United States and its values. “I ask myself how people can elect him twice. He has a vision of military power and sees nothing but benefits him. Maga, Maga – totally narcissistic.”
“It’s more than a disappointment. It’s strong – a nightmare. The United States represents freedom, and now Trump supports Putin, what’s going on now?…I’ve always had faith in Americans, in the country I respect, but to see what happened, it makes you sad. [national] suicide. “
The United States would not be the United States if there were no France. The American Revolution was an opportunity for still loyalist France to cause trouble for the diminished British, and French money and military personnel made a significant difference.
That’s not something many Americans know (and the image manipulators choose to ignore), but the French have not forgotten. Every year around July 4th, the French perform a ritual of dignity, changing the American flag at the tomb of Marquis de Lafayette in the historic cemetery of Pippus.
General Marquis Lafayette and his wife, the gravestones in the historical cemetery of Paris, show the American flag: the Revolutionary War.
(Joe Sohm/Universal Images group via Getty Images)
But the French nobles had more than a strategic love for this future country. He praised the American fight for independence, became friends with George Washington and came to command the Continental Army in the decisive battle in Yorktown. Here in Paris, he is technically buried in American soil: Earth from the Battle of Bunker Hill.
It was this grave that on July 4, 1917, American Colonel Charles Stanton marched with the troops arriving to join France in World War I, fighting against the grave on the long alliances of the two countries and the debts of the United States.
“When America was struggling for its existence, we cannot forget that your country was our friend. A handful of brave and patriotic people have decided to support the rights their Creator gave them. The French of the Lafayette men came to our help and deeds. He ended with the declaration, “Lafayette, we are here.”
That’s when a long alliance began – often tense, but not completely bursting.
so far.
I worked on Roman and Justin with a woman in her 20s having a late lunch at the sidewalk table at the third arrondisment. For Romanee, for many Europeans who dreamed of touring America, “Now, I didn’t want to go to the US before, I wanted to go to New York for the rest of my life. Not now.”
And Trump’s hostility towards Ukraine makes her uneasy. “How he is allied with Russia and his position on women, [human] right…”
Justin, a black woman, picked up the thread. “Women’s rights are still at risk in the US, but I’m not here yet, Trump, he’s a lot of model. I didn’t want to go there because it’s not the history I admire, it’s not what they’ve done to Native Americans. And I’m afraid of racism. [Americans] We have lost justice and human ideals. ”
Aside from these feelings, it’s dollars and cents. International tourism has contributed to the United States over $2 trillion per year. Tourism executives have been told that summer travel bookings from France have been declining slightly in an already wobbling economy.
The demonstrators held the sign that reads “Trump’s Oligarchy battle, save American democracy” during a gathering on President Trump’s policies in Lyon, France on April 5, 2025.
(Matthieu Delaty / Getty Images)
My friend cooked lunch with me and his friend Olivier Desgeorges. He retired as an engineer in the French Ministry of Ecology.
“All Changes – Brexit, the outlook for war with China – everything is changing everywhere, [Trump] It feels like a betrayal. France didn’t think the United States could treat us as our enemy. ”
Like some of the other people I spoke to, he hinted at a long ago warning from the legendary French president and wartime general Charles de Gaulle. “Europe was castrated after the war, and it developed the economy, but not force, and not so. [an] The idea of Europe as an easy paradise: the economy isn’t that good, but we have good food and chocolate. 70 years of peace is exceptional, but they don’t recognize it. ”
Europeans “we are well educated to distinguish between Trump and Americans. They don’t understand stupidity. And they think it will be a collapse of American power. The respect and bargaining power that America had is diminishing.”
Europe will respond accordingly: “Civic nationalism that we thought was bad will come back,” he said.
After lunch I left the deggiores and headed to the Jardine des Plantes, the site of the city’s natural history museum, and at that moment I had a huge flower of spring flowers.
There, sitting on a bench facing the sun, reading the newspaper, as he does every day he enjoys, originally an Ingo from Berlin, teaching university courses in the US in European law for several years.
So he knows the country well and cleverly analyzes the internal political nuances as if CNN is talking. GOP has become “their own tool of destruction,” he says.
“Trump says what he wants, the world is at his feet. If inflation rises and GDP falls, Americans don’t want Republicans and won’t allow Trump to openly violate the third term’s constitution.”
Despite his many friends and colleagues in the United States, he will not visit for Trump anymore. And he knows a French friend who has lived in the United States for years, now selling a house there and returning to France.
Regarding the outcome of Trumpism on this side of the Atlantic, he said it was “hard to reaffirm the authority of America’s French and Europeans. We said in the 1960s that Europe was dependent on Europe when it took 10 years. Their national security and prosperity.”
The next day it was chilly so I stopped by with my old friends Joshua and Rene for lunch with homemade vegetable soup, pears and cheese. Joshua has lived here for over 40 years and is still a US citizen. He understands the distinction between the American masses and Trump, but he has gained “mainly empathy and sympathy” from his French friends who are “worried by much of what’s happening in the state right now.”
Rene was 87 years old and clearly remembers in August 1944 when her mother took him onto the street and lifted him into her arms amidst a crowd of Parisians.
Thus, Lane has long memories of tensions and ruptures in relations between the US and France, like the French protests in the 1960s in Vietnam, which was lost by French colonial forces in 1954.
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