La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (33 page)

I’m convinced that there would have been a crisis in relations with France over Iraq no matter how sweetly the French said no to war. But the French negotiating style made things worse. Chirac, his foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, and much of the French elite looked at the prospect of war with Iraq through two prisms, history and Cartesian logic, not as an issue where their opposition should be framed in an
opération séduction
.

In an interview in the fall of 2003, Chirac told my editor Roger Cohen and me that his experience as a young lieutenant wounded in Algeria’s war of independence had helped shape his thinking on Iraq. “In Algeria we began with a sizable army and huge resources, and the fighters for independence were only a handful of people,” he said. “But they won. That’s how it is.” Algeria proved to him that a vast and powerful army could be defeated by a small group of determined adversaries convinced of their right to run their own country. “We know from experience that imposing a law on people from the outside hasn’t worked for a long time,” he said.

Chirac also constructed a logical argument: there was no hard evidence that Iraq was linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, or was developing weapons of mass destruction. When Chirac delivered a similar message privately to President George W. Bush at the United Nations just days later, Bush replied, “Jacques, I couldn’t disagree more.”

There was another, unstated reason why France was opposed to war: its citizens, including its large Muslim and ethnic Arab population, were overwhelmingly against it.

The American side was responding emotionally: someone had to be punished for September 11. And any ally who did not join the effort was no longer considered a friend.

Many French officials and diplomats understand that saving face for the other side, especially an adversary, is crucial to the success of the seduction. “It’s better to seduce than to fight when you want to conquer an enemy,” said Claude de Kemoularia, a former French ambassador to the United Nations. “You don’t show your strength immediately. You have to create an atmosphere in which you’ve won your point but your opponent doesn’t think he’s been defeated. That’s the best seduction.”

During his time at the UN in the 1980s, Kemoularia had launched his own
opération séduction
as a means of reinforcing French influence there. He managed to fly himself and the other fourteen ambassadors of the Security Council on an all-expenses-paid trip via the Concorde to celebrate the annual grape harvest at the Château du Clos de Vougeot, one of the greatest vineyards in Burgundy. He raised private money to pay for it; it did not cost the French state a cent.

However, seduction is sometimes outweighed by the French love for romantic audacity in diplomacy and war. As Charles Cogan wrote in his book
French Negotiating Behavior
, slogans like “
Toujours de l’audace
” (Always Be Bold) and “
Impossible n’est pas français
” (Impossible Is Not French) feed into a taste for action and daring beyond common sense. The French have a tendency to use panache and bravura in the face of certain defeat. Such was the case in February 2003, during the Iraq crisis, when foreign minister Dominique de Villepin delivered the speech of a lifetime to the United Nations Security Council. Villepin is tall, elegant, handsome, and brilliant. Many of my women friends find him drop-dead gorgeous. But in this speech he failed the basic test of seduction: instead of finding common ground, he erected barriers.

Using the forum to slam the United States, he told the audience—and the world—that military action in Iraq was not justified. Essentially, he was telling the United States that France was right and the United States was wrong. On one level, Villepin played to the worst stereotype of the French diplomat: arrogant, self-righteous, narcissistic, and effete. He sounded as if he were talking down to the United States when he said, “This message comes to you today from an old [translation: wise] country, France.” He won the applause of the chamber, but he humiliated and insulted the world’s only superpower. As Alain Minc, the writer and unofficial political counselor to Sarkozy, said, “It was a magnificent gesture; it was stupid.”

Years later, in retrospect, it was widely acknowledged that Villepin’s message had been right. One after another, respected members of the American foreign policy establishment who had lined up to support the war effort came forward to confess that they had been wrong. Villepin had been one of the only opponents of the war to speak so clearly and passionately before the invasion of Iraq. “Dominique’s speech was one of the most moving and strongest moments of my career,” Gérard Araud told me. “The United States had lost its moral compass. He was saying what was right and what was wrong at a moment when nobody else in the world dared to do so. Sure, he delivered the message with his own style, as a
beau geste
. But he was right. And that is what matters.” Yet Villepin’s style had clearly done nothing to help influence the course of events, and for several years France’s relationship with the United States suffered. Whether it was worth this sacrifice to take a principled stand is the kind of moral question that cuts close to the heart of all diplomacy.

There is irony that the diplomatic break between France and the United States happened during the Chirac presidency. Unlike Charles de Gaulle and François Mitterrand, who distrusted America, Chirac actually liked the United States. He also knew how to seduce by finding common ground with his partner or adversary. He was a man of the people—any people—and derived energy from plunging into crowds and sampling every sort of local food and drink.

Years before the war in Iraq, I traveled with Chirac from Washington to Chicago in the middle of a raging snowstorm. He was so eager to get there that when snow threatened to close down Andrews Air Force Base and prevent his departure the next morning, he decided to leave at midnight the night before. Our French Air Force jet bobbed and weaved through the stormy sky, and we arrived at our Chicago hotel at dawn. Chirac used slang-tinged English to sell himself and his country to America. He was praised for having received a special honor in his youth: a certificate from Howard Johnson’s “for artistry in making banana splits.” (He had worked as a part-time counterman to help support himself while attending Harvard summer school in 1953.) Chirac boasted another talent. Howard Johnson’s “also had a very good turkey sandwich, which I did very, very well,” he said. The audience applauded. He was down-to-earth, the Midwest’s kind of French president.

He told American audiences the same stories over and over: how he worked as a forklift operator in an Anheuser-Busch factory in St. Louis and wrote a front-page article for the New Orleans
Times-Picayune
; how he hitchhiked across the United States; how he fell in love and was briefly engaged to a Southern belle named Florence Herlihy, who drove a white Cadillac convertible and called him “Honey Child.” He wrote in his memoirs that he never contacted her after he returned to Paris, preferring to preserve the “delicious memory” of their romance.

I had also seen Chirac reach out effectively to more historically hostile audiences. He received a jubilant reception when he traveled to Algeria in 2003, the first state visit by a French president since the former colony won its independence in 1962. Hundreds of thousands of well-wishers turned out to shower him with confetti and flowers, to cheer and applaud him like a hero. Chirac was supposed to wave from his limousine, but instead he plunged into the crowd, zigzagging back and forth along the main boulevard like a driven man. Hungry for contact, he grabbed the hands of Algerians who had been kept back by iron railings. The policemen in white spats and gloves couldn’t stop him. It didn’t matter that the crowd was shouting “
Visa! Visa! Visa!
” and not “
Vive Chirac!
” That day, the failure of France’s civilizing mission in Algeria, the violence and betrayal that seared the relationship was set aside. The Algerians seemed to be saying, “I want a visa to come to France and a chance to be like you.” For Chirac, that was enough.

The French-American conflict over Iraq came to be about national identity. For both the United States and France, it underscored what the other was not. In the United States, Villepin was branded as “oleaginous” by one columnist and “diplomacy lite” by another. Instead of giving him pause, the criticism gave him more energy. He told me during one of our many conversations, “You grow with criticism; you are diminished with praise.”

As foreign minister and then prime minister, Villepin saw himself as a modern-day Napoléon, a politician-warrior with a strong ego, a belief in the grandeur of France, and a conviction that he alone owned the truth. Even some of his closest aides considered him a bit mad and nicknamed him “Zorro.” Following a champagne-filled dinner after midnight on an air force plane heading home from Afghanistan several years ago, he woke his aides for a meeting. “I like to kill one of them a day!” he joked. Villepin convinced himself that words could replace strategy.

I discovered clues to Villepin’s thinking and temperament in his black leather Gucci briefcase, which he opened during a conversation in 2003, at the height of the break with the United States. Out came a thick, ecru-colored dossier tied in a ribbon that contained the still-to-be-published manuscript of the second part of his four-volume biography of Napoléon; a plastic folder containing a collection of his own poems that he was editing; the manuscript of a friend’s book for which he was writing an introduction; a blue folder on painting; and finally, his official papers. “You see, I like to do many things at the same time,” he said. “That’s the only way to stay awake. At three in the morning you need to do something different than at two in the morning, because if not, you fall asleep.”

Just the day before, Villepin said, he had written a poem. Its title was “Fire.” He read it to me in French. It called on the living and the dead to preserve memory by letting the dead blend with life, holding high the banner of poetry, forcing open the locks and not burning the inventory. I’m not much of a poetry expert, and the poem sailed swiftly over my head. I praised it anyway. (Villepin would later become the inspiration for a satirical comic book that described life in the Foreign Ministry in his era. The tall, silver-haired, aristocratic minister, “Alexandre Taillard de Vorms,” is permanently in motion, while musing about Greek philosophy, French poetry, and Stabilo marker pens. “The art of diplomacy is not to stay in your armchair,” he tells his young aide. “You mustn’t be scared of the flame. I leap into the flame. I become the flame.”)

Villepin toyed with the idea of seeking the presidency in 2007, but he didn’t have much of a chance. He had never held an elective office, did not have the apparatus of the conservative UMP party behind him, and, frankly, did not seem to enjoy mingling with ordinary French people. But he refused to abandon the political arena. He created his own political party, became one of the most articulate critics of Nicolas Sarkozy on the right, and launched a grassroots campaign to visit the rural areas and the troubled suburbs. He listened to the woes of his countrymen and vowed to help them. He was beginning to learn how to seduce.

Even in the darkest days of the French-American split over the war with Iraq, Jean-David Levitte, as France’s ambassador to the United States, struggled hard to restore a positive image of his country.

Levitte turned his embassy into a communications war room. He gave dozens of speeches across the United States explaining why France opposed the American decision to wage war against Saddam Hussein. He appeared on late-night television talk shows and local call-in radio programs. He tasked his embassy with answering the hundreds of thousands of protest letters and e-mails that poured in. Diplomatic politesse and Cartesian logic were his only weapons against the onslaught of insults and obscenities. He invited Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, a neighbor, to dinner. (Rumsfeld refused.)

Most of his work went nowhere. The most brutal attacks came from Fox News, which night after night drove home the point that America had saved France from tyranny in World War II and that the French were traitorous ingrates and supporters of terrorism. At one point former secretary of state Henry Kissinger tried to mend fences by arranging a dinner at his home for Levitte and Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox. “I asked Murdoch to stop the French bashing,” Levitte claimed. “He looked at me coldly and said, ‘As long as it sells, I will continue.’ I spent the rest of the evening charming his lovely wife, Wendy.”

Such a strategy was necessary but only defensive. Even when the invasion of Iraq turned into a messy occupation and questions were raised on the American side about the wisdom of the war, there was a refusal in the United States to admit that France might have been right.

So Levitte also launched an unusual
opération séduction
, which he called a “reconquering of the heart.” Traveling across the United States, he said, “I had come to understand perfectly what Americans reproached us the most for: our ingratitude as a people,” he continued. The message was always the same: we liberated you French, so how could you not support us when we were attacked?

If Levitte was going to woo America, he needed to find a message that answered that question. The goal was to figure out what would bring pleasure to the Americans, what would make them feel appreciated and honored for the sacrifices of the past. He chose two solid-gold symbols: the Legion of Honor and the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day in 2004.

Levitte came up with the idea of marking the anniversary by giving Legion of Honor medals to one hundred American veterans who had participated in the D-Day landings. Two veterans from each of the fifty states would be chosen. They would have to be in good enough physical condition to travel, and they would be allowed to bring their families.