by ADAM KIRSCH
The Paradox of Love by Pascal Bruckner
“Obama Begs U.S. Not to Embarrass Him in Front of French,” read the Onion headline during last year’s state visit by Nicholas Sarkozy. Once again, the fake newspaper got the real story: Americans tend to feel that whatever we do, the French do it better, or at least cooler. French women, a popular weight loss guide has it, don’t get fat. A recent Wall Street Journal article caused a sensation by explaining why French children are better behaved and more self-sufficient than American children. And of course, when it comes to love and sex, the French are our touchstone for sophistication: just compare the Lewinsky affair to the funeral of François Mitterand, where his wife and mistress stood side by side.
The Paradox of Love, the latest book-length essay by the prominent French intellectual Pascal Bruckner, confirms most of these American assumptions about France. Among the many subjects of Bruckner’s highly readable meditation is a section titled “Europe, the United States: Different Taboos,” in which he marvels at the parade of American sex scandals — Clarence Thomas, Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer. All this “strikes French people as grotesque,” Bruckner writes; “on the moral level…one can only urge Americans to learn from the Old World how to be temperate.”