i agree with onetime, but would go further...the relations france-us are quite copmliex and have been--i could go on and on about this topic but will try not to.
1.
france is not a single entity any more than the u.s. is--there is a complex a range of opinion there as there is in the states---politically france is more interesting to me than the state is because they have something closer to a real political spectrum, a much more developed Left culture (even still)---i find it useful to look at the american situation through a grid dervied from the french political scene--a vewipoint from which it becomes clear that the cliche that america is a single party state with two right wing is validated without effort.
2.
on the recent wave of anti-french sentiment: this one is simple--televised propaganda in the period that immediately followed the american defat in the unsc. the right figured they would blame the flimsiness of the case for going outside the un sanctions regime on france. many people bought it. many people watch too much television. i dont have much to add to what shakran said about this, above. well i might, but it would sound snarky.
3.
on the cultural imperialism question: there was a view in france, particularly on the left, that they were trading occupations after world war 2----german for american--one military, one cultural. probably the best single book on this perception is a short novel by margueritte duras called "the war".
the conflicts this generated were legion--the generator for it initially might have had something to do with the reconstruction but there are lots of them, really-----there were problems with the americans coldwar world, hostiliy from the americans as a function of the french communist party as a serious mass political organization---attempts to tamper with elections like you saw in italy in the late 1940s----the political effects of the cold war cannot be overstated...this paragraph is compressed/simplified almost beyond coherence---but there we are.
4.
world war 2: this one really irks me.
first off, the american history of ww2 routinely erases the role of the soviet army in defeating germany. the story usually goes like this:
Quote:
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Declare war on the US after Pearl Harbor, Stalingrad, Kursk, D-Day, etc. Hitler offs self, Germany surrenders, that's it folks.
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which is typical in that it skips the entire period after stalingrad, eliminates the various feints undertaken by the us to damage the soviets (following on truman's famous "let them bleed each other white" remark in congress) that prompted the americans to respond to stalin's pleas for a second front by invading first north africa, then italy...it is a hero-narrative that deconstextualizes d-day in an attempt to make the ending of ww2 the exclusive function of american actions--which it was not--the story is simply bullshit. it might make people feel--i dont know--something--but it is bullshit.
4a.
on the french resistance: well the american preferred to try to prop up degaulle and the "free french" because on the ground the vast majority of the resistants were pcf. on the other side, the pcf trafficked in its claims to *be* the resistance for years on its own, and tried to erase the fact that they did not organize much of anything until after hitler invaded russia. either way, the americna story about the french resistance, to the extent that there is one, is yet another cold war relic. the resistance was a big deal. that resistance was predominantly communist. so the americans erase it. instead, you get "the french are cowards". that is not history. but see the next paragraph.
4b.
on ww2 in general: this one gets complicated quickly---the story is pretty well known--too often you get a facile, idiotic set of interpretations derived mostly from world war 2 films in which the grizzled american gi enters some ww2 situation and kills faceless, ideology-less nazis in great number across the neutral backdrop of the french countryside---according to these films (not reality) the french were simply cowards.
i do not pretend to understand everything about what the french state was thinking in august 1940--they were wrong about the maginot line, they were leaning against the wrong door--they were flanked and they knew it, nothing really to be done---and they were haunted by ww1.
you want to think about what that last one meant, go to a french village, and french village, and look at the memeorial columns in the cnetre of town--the french recruited on the buddy system going into ww1--the americans did the same during the civil war--this maximized the trauma of war on local populations by wiping out entire swatches of the male population of a given town in maybe 30 seconds if they drew point on the wrong day, in the wrong place. i think the reality of massacre was more evident to the french state in august 1940, ww1 was a much bigger presence--because it was france and britian (and their colonies) that took ww1 full in the face--they did not walk in at the end the way the americans did--it was a different war there, a national trauma the effects of which had not faded by 1940.
what i do know is that much of the surrender was about trying to save paris, save the countryside in a situation where the french knew they were fucked strategically. they thought they might be able to work out a better deal for themselvces, and maybe just wait things out. it was a calculation. you might not agree with it. but one thing for sure is that the narrative dear to american conservatives in the period since the start of bushwar is simply wrong, a lie.
maybe the problem is that conservatives tend to have trouble imagining the american being flanked, being in a position where they a fucked militarily with nothing to be done, and the decision is to undertake a fight they know they will loose with great devastation to boot, or fold the cards. but then again, these same folk often cannot face what happened to the americans in vietnam.
there are other things, but i'll stop, this is already too long