It is becoming clearer by the day that the US intends to make France pay dearly for opposing the war in Iraq, writes Lara Marlowe from Paris.
Politicians have a great capacity for self-delusion, and President Jacques Chirac of France is no exception. Back in March, just 11 days before the US attacked Iraq, Chirac announced he would veto a UN resolution authorising war "whatever the circumstances". But the French felt anxious about angering their US ally, a television interviewer said to him; wouldn't they be made to suffer for it? High on his record popularity, Chirac asserted confidently: "There is no danger that the US and France, that the American and French people, will quarrel or get angry with each other."
If the US tried to punish France economically, the World Trade Organisation would intervene, he promised. "We live in a globalised world, which has international institutions. If the Americans want to take measures with regard to France, they must apply them in the same way to the whole of Europe, including England. All of that is just not serious."
But three months after the war started, the euphoria of defying the US has given way to the political equivalent of a hangover - and the realisation that the Bush administration will neither forgive nor forget Chirac's stand. Without even mentioning official sanctions, the US is hitting France where it hurts: in the wallet.
In a recent interview with Le Figaro, the US ambassador to France, a businessman from California named Howard H. Leach, said it was "unthinkable" that Franco- American trade would not be affected by tension between the two countries.
"It would be unrealistic to think that you could make an air-tight separation between politics and economics," he said.
As shown by this week's airshow at Le Bourget, US officials and business people are freezing the French out. At the peak of US military power, at a time when the Pentagon is spending $43 million every hour, the US Air Force was virtually absent from the world's biggest aeronautics fair. For the first time in the 50-year history of Le Bourget, not a single US military aircraft flew. Only 183 US companies are attending the show, which ends tomorrow - compared to 350 in 2001.
A Paris meeting of the prestigious French-American Business Council during the second week of June was also spurned by the Americans. Although 32 French chief executives, the governor of the Banque de France and the French finance minister attended two days of meetings and lavish dinners with the French president and prime minister, only five American CEOs and the US secretary of commerce made the journey. The prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, tried to charm them with a replica of a letter by Benjamin Franklin and the reminder that France was the first country to recognise US independence.
Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon chose the symbolic May 8th anniversary of the Allied victory over Germany to notify the French defence ministry that France has been "disinvited" from "red flag" military manoeuvres in Nevada, which were postponed until March 2004 because of the Iraq war. The French Air Force has also been excluded from the "Cape Thunder" war games in Alaska, to take place in July 2004.
Tourism is France's biggest earner, until now generating €15 billion in annual profits. It has been hard-hit by US anger.
"Without any doubt, the tensions that came out during the debate at the UN played a role in the decrease in tourism," ambassador Leach told Le Figaro.
André Daguin, the president of the hotel industry association says the French tourism industry "is sick but not dying". Occupancy in French luxury and tour group hotels is down 25 per cent because of the American absence, he said. To some extent, small hotels in the country compensate with increased French and European custom.
"We'll save the 2003 season," Daguin said, trying to sound optimistic. "Then 2004 will be the problem. It's not easy to replace American clientele; the average American spends 12 times more than the average Dutchman. We'll have to do something . . . We have to let time pass. You can't make people fly if they don't want to. The Americans won't fly any more; they're frightened."
The slump in tourism began with the slowdown in the US economy before September 11th, Daguin notes. The effect of the atrocities was compounded by other al-Qaeda attacks around the world, the Iraq war, the SARS virus, and the weak dollar.
French tourism to the US is also down by about 25 per cent. On both sides of the Atlantic, would-be travellers fear ill- treatment, though there have been no flagrant demonstrations of anti-US sentiment in France. Last month, six French journalists bound for an entertainment trade fair in Los Angeles were handcuffed, interrogated and detained overnight before being deported on a visa technicality.
"You're victims of French-bashing," the consul in Los Angeles told them.
The boycott of French goods in the US is also taking a toll on the French economy.
"The Americans realise it's not in their interest to launch official reprisals," says Christian de Boissieu, a professor of political economics at the Sorbonne. "There is a boycott, but it's decentralised, individual initiatives."
Echoing the official French optimism, de Boissieu adds: "It has a very short-term effect, far less than the consequences of the fall of the dollar."
The French parliamentary deputy, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, the spokesman for President Chirac's UMP party, admits "an electrical, nervous atmosphere" has infected Franco-American trade, but he insists it is based on the Americans' false belief that Saddam Hussein was in league with Osama bin Laden in destroying the World Trade Centre. In the eyes of Americans, France tried to stop them taking revenge for September 11th.
"The presentation of the French position to the US public was grossly simplified," Donnedieu says. "We served as scapegoats; we were fingered for public revenge."
Whatever the causes, the effects are clear: polls last month showed that at least 20 per cent, and as many as 60 per cent, of Americans now boycott French goods. A survey by the Webber Shandwick public relations company showed that while 43 per cent of Americans said they were less likely to buy French products since the Iraq war, only 17 per cent of French people said they were less inclined to buy American.
The French reaction to the crisis has given a new meaning to the old cliché "don't mention the war". Few officials or business people discuss the US boycott; to do so is to confirm its existence, and feed it, The Irish Times was told. Among those who refused to comment were the haughty French employers' association, MEDEF. But in late April, Ernest-Antoine Seilliere, the president of MEDEF, said resentment against France in the US was "much stronger than we want to admit, and that worries our companies". If Americans didn't like French policy, they should complain to the embassy, not penalise French business.
One exception to the prevalent mood of denial is Let's Fall in Love Again, a video made by the French Tourist Board for broadcast in the US, starring Woody Allen.
"Recently there has been a lot of controversy between the two countries, and I hope that now the two countries can put all that behind them and start to build on what has really been a great, great friendship," the 67-year-old director says in the film. But the tourist board may have made a Franco-centric error: Allen is more popular in France than in the US, where he is seen as a neurotic New York intellectual.
On both sides of the Atlantic, companies with French or US ties try to go unnoticed. Fortunately for the Dannon yoghurt company (the Americanised version of Danone), most of its US customers believe it's American. The Accor hotel group has removed tricolour flags from its advertising in the US. In France, Harry's US-style sandwich bread has transformed the stars on its red, white and blue packaging to sheaves of wheat. Press information now stresses that Harry's is a French company.
Guillaume Touton, a French wine exporter living in New York, went to great lengths to distance himself from France's Iraq policy.
"The boycott made us lose close to $600,000 in March," he complained to Le Journal du dimanche. "For years, I wore myself out promoting French wines. In one week, Chirac destroyed everything."
While the war was on, Touton's sales staff were thrown out of shops and restaurants. He removed the French flag from his catalogue and replaced it with the words: "We are American," against a star-spangled background. Touton became the darling of US media when he promised to give a dollar to the Pentagon for every case of French wine sold. The Pentagon used his first $20,000 instalment to send sweets to soldiers in the Gulf.
Touton then wrote to the French ambassador in Washington, pleading for Chirac to "make a gesture of reconciliation". But seen from this side of the Atlantic, it's the US's turn to make a gesture.
France and the US the damage done
There are no precise statistics available for the punishment France is enduring for having opposed the Iraq war. But Washington's cold shoulder and a US consumer boycott of French goods signify a substantial decline in the $42 billion of annual bilateral trade that is the norm between the two countries.
Le Bourget Air Show:
At the world's largest aeronautics fair, which ends tomorrow, the number of US stands has dropped from 350 to 183. For the first time in Le Bourget's 50-year history, no US military aircraft are flying at the show.
Tourism:
France's biggest money-earner, tourism, used to generate 15 billion in annual profits. But occupancy of luxury and tour group hotels is down 25 per cent. Likewise, the number of French people travelling to the US has dropped by as much as 25 per cent. Fear of terrorism, the SARS virus and the weak dollar have contributed to the fall in travel volumes.
French products:
Opinion polls show that between 20 per cent and 60 per cent of US consumers now avoid buying French products, while only 17 per cent of French people said they would not buy US goods. Businesses on both sides of the Atlantic are hiding French or US connections.
Wine
The French Wine and Spirits Exporters Federation says Americans purchased
17.6 per cent less French wine in March and 9.6 per cent less in the first quarter.
Other losses
US pension funds have been the largest foreign investors on the French Bourse (stock market). Repatriation of US money could deprive French companies of capital. French sales to Iraq in 2001 totalled $650 million and Saddam Hussein's regime owed France €3.66 billion which is unlikely to be repaid now. The US is unlikely to share billions of dollars in Iraqi reconstruction contracts with Paris.