7:00 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2006
Webster Hall Auditorium
Admission: free

Le Divorce ou la Conciliation?
France and America in a Screwball Comedy of Remarriage

Even before the millennium, one could speculate about the impending spiritual divorce between the U.S. and France and this was before the profound disagreements between France and America and between the populations of “old,” or Western, Europe and President Bush’s constituencies in the red states regarding the War in Iraq. The latter looked to the Europeans like an imprudent Bonapartist adventure. To its American supporters it was a matter of national security or a bold strike for democracy. But now as then one sees signs of conciliation. The relationship of the two democracies, France and America, might suggest comparison to the remarriage pairs (Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night or Irene Dunne and Cary Grant in The Awful Truth) from the classic “screwball” film comedies of the 1930s. Or does the awful truth lie elsewhere? There may be something about the American and French peoples that defeats reconciliation, something in their different circumstances, an insularity from history that comes from having recently dominated it (U.S.) versus an over-exposure to the burdens of history (France); or something in their differences of spirit, for the Americans, “puritanism,” an excess of perfectionist idealism prone to delusion; for the French, in opposition to their high Cartesian ideals, a pessimism of worldliness that leaves them stuck on the ground of past experience. There is an argument for a reversal of roles. The country with all the power should avoid using it to excess by staying more in touch with the instruction of worldly experience, even if that might flirt with the French temptation of cynicism. The smaller country should regard its position as an opportunity, recover the idealism always available in its intellectual heritage, and take flight in experiments of renewal even if that runs the risk of an imprudence that threatens in the American case to end in a utopianism empty of content.

Dr. Michael Mosher teaches European politics (with a special emphasis on France) and as well the politics of Japan at the University of Tulsa where he is chair of the political science department. A visiting professor at Yale in 1995 and in 1999-2000, Dr. Mosher was also in 1998-99 a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton where he focused on the issue of globalization in France and Japan. Most recently he has been a visiting scholar at Centre d’Études et de Recherches Internationales (CERI), a research center which is part of the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (or “Sciences-Po” ) in Paris.

7:00 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2006
Webster Hall Auditorium
Admission: free

Why France Remains Influential

As a world power, France has undeniably been outpaced for the last two centuries. Yet somehow, the French have remained influential on the international stage. Canadian author Jean-Benoît Nadeau explains some of the reasons “France still matters,” from French diplomacy and their culture of rhetoric, to their attitude toward power, the lure of their language, the role of the State and their view of Europe. According to Nadeau, the French are the “Americans of Europe,” which explains the almost constant and false insistence on their decline.

Jean-Benoît Nadeau and his wife, Julie Barlow, are among the rare journalists who write for Canadian, American, and European publications in both English and French. They are award-winning contributors to Quebec’s national news magazine L’actualité, and their writing has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The International Herald Tribune, and the Courrier international. In 2003, Nadeau and Barlow published their critical and popular success, Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong (Sourcebooks), which the London Daily Telegraph’s Paris correspondent Philip Delves Broughton praised for explaining, “better than anything else I have read, why the French are as they are.” Since then, it has sold 150,000 copies in English, French, Dutch, and Chinese. Nadeau is also the author of a humorous travelogue, Les français aussi ont un accent (Payot, 2002) while Julie Barlow recently published a travel guide on Montreal and Quebec for the For Dummies series (John Wiley and Sons, 2004). Based in Montreal, the couple is about to publish their next book together, The Story of French (St. Martin’s Press, November 2006).