Relationships between France and the USA have always been full of ambiguity and contradictions. France has never been at war with the USA, unlike England, Spain, and Italy. Nonetheless, it is in France that American intellectuals and journalists find the strongest anti-American sentiment in Europe. The Americans case is backed up by three hundred years of French criticism of her transatlantic cousin as Philippe Roger uncovers in his L'Ennemi américain: Généalogie de l'antiamericanisme français. The ideas of the Enlightenment notwithstanding, Buffon found North America to be the noxious land of syphilis. According to the eminent naturalist, the American wilds, her animals, her natives, and the emigrants to America were worth nothing. Later, Talleyrand, one of France's own emigrants to the USA, albeit an unwilling one, would write to Mme de Stael, "si je reste ici un an, je meurs." The nineteenth century saw its share of anti-American sentiment too. Baudelaire, for example, accused the Americans of abusing Edgar Poe, while Tocqueville, despite his favorable work on America, wrote that he did not know of a country where there was less independent spirit and less real freedom of expression. The twentieth century was no less antagonistic. Though the French fought on the same side as the Americans in two world wars, and though the Marshall plan brought much needed aid to a devastated France in the 1940s and 1950s, the Americans were accused of joining the World Wars too late, and of using the Marshall aid as a way of subjugating French economic policy. More recently, French intellectuals and activists have railed against the American-led globalization of the planet: MacDonald's, Hollywood, Disney have all been hammered by the French intelligentsia. At the same time, French youth have made, for instance, their own versions of rap, and created their own New York/LA dress styles. These phenomena often began in the multi-ethnic suburbs and tough neighborhoods of the inner cities, but they quickly took a central place in mainstream TV, radio, and shopping centers. The terrorist hijackings and suicide crashes that killed thousands of people in New York and Washington DC, and which brought the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center crashing down gave many pause for thought on both sides of the Atlantic. President Chirac made a moving statement of compassion and solidarity with Americans on the day of the attack. He reiterated those sentiments on his visit to the USA in September of 2002. The one-year anniversary of the collapse of the Towers was approaching and meanwhile French-US wrangling intensified over the policy to be pursued on Iraq. Chirac said in an interview with the NY Times (9/9/02):

I want to say that my first thoughts when that tragedy struck were for the victims and their families…. Something inside the French people was touched, and that hasn't changed … It demonstrates once again that when the chips are down, the French and Americans have always stood together and have never failed to be there for one another.

The president's feelings were indeed shared by many in France. Jean-Marie Colombani of Le Monde, entitled his first article in response to the 9/11 attacks: " Nous sommes tous Américains ". Jean Baudrillard wrote a moving and probing short essay "L''esprit du terrorisme", and followed this with an equally poignant but inquiring speech, "Requiem for the Twin Towers." In both pieces, Baudrillard continues his investigation into the real and the simulated, but his analysis goes deeper touching a vital nerve connecting ordinary everyday existence and the wider world of international policy, war, and strategies for combating terrorism. He says, for example, that the fact that the hijackers emerged from an existence camouflaged in the ordinary life of suburban America, took regular flights, and used banal weapons to control the planes puts all of our lives under suspicion:

If they could pass unnoticed then each of us is a criminal going unnoticed (every plane also becomes suspect),.. So the event ramifies down to the smallest detail the source of an even more subtle mental terrorism. (Spirit of Terrorism, (2002), p.20)

Despite these analytical rather than confrontational writings, American journalists, radio and TV reporters would pick up other anti-US rumblings in France. The American media noted French opposition to the war in Iraq, both in the streets, and as permanent member of the UN security council. They also highlighted Thierry Meyssan's book "L'Effroyable Imposture". In this 235-page treatise, Meyssan alleges that the September 11th attacks were part of a right-wing conspiracy to overthrow the government unless President Bush increased military spending. However, while this book caught the attention of the media, other more in-depth and stirring works of art have gone mostly unnoticed. As I am writing this, however, today's New York Times' Arts section (September 3, 2003) carries a headline, "French Feel the Anguish In Books Inspired by 9/11". The focus of my proposed presentation at the 20th/21st Century French Studies Conference will be two works not mentioned by Alan Riding in his article. They are: 11 septembre 2001 - 11 September 2000, a play by Michel Vinaver; and 11 septembre, 11 nouvelles a collection of short stories by Perez Damien with art work by Frédéric Vignale. Michel Vinaver's text was written in the weeks following the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York. Written first in English, undoubtedly due to the location of the event and to the fact that it is the language used in the newspaper quotes, it was then adapted into French by the playwright. The form is similar to that of a cantata. It unfolds in an international space on September 11, 2001. Voices, snatches of conversation and fragments of human experience overlap and spill into one another. Pilots, terrorists, passengers are heard some trying to reach airports or loved ones. After the crashes into the towers, we hear the voices of Bush and Ben Laden, and that of a journalist whose role it is to narrate, comment on and interview survivors of the collapse of the towers. The two leaders voices parallel and seem to telescope into one another, but the clever staging leaves a verbal space for the human, the everyday. Though the play has a definite "engagement", it refrains from Brechtian didactics and Beckettian despair. Vinaver's finely ironic libretto jars our sensibilities but leaves it up to us as spectators to take the next step: understanding, action?

Equally compelling is the work of Damien Perez and Frédéric Vignale. This small book printed entirely in quadrichrome, which gives us the chance to fully appreciate the collages of Frédéric Vignale, gives a singular reading of the 11th of September, 2003. The book begins with a powerful statement:

11 septembre 2001 : on a fauché les deux jambes du capitalisme à coups d'avions de ligne. L'Amérique se réveille cul-de-jatte sur son tas de gravats. C'est à Manhattan qu'il fallait être pour prendre rendez-vous avec l'histoire ce jour-là.

11 septembre, 11 nouvelles gives us 11 different stories that take place at the periphery of the drama of that day. There are 11 characters men and women, in France and in the US, who are more or less disturbed by the events. They discover history in the making on TV. The actions and inactions of these 11 characters give us different perspectives of 9/11. The tragic elements in their own lives, for example, sometimes force the characters to adopt a selfish outlook with the suffering in New York as a backdrop. This short collection of fictitious and non-fictitious snapshots illustrated by the 11 collages arranged like a literary photo album wants to be both an historic document and to confront each reader with her/his own detachment in the face of the suffering of others. Both of these works show that art can say the unsayable without complacency, it can describe suffering without smugness, and guide without patronizing. The works also bring to light original perspectives on the everyday of Franco-American relations.