ABSTRACT
France and the United States have enjoyed a set of complex relationships since the founding of the American and French republics. Sometimes the Franco-American relationship has taken on the character of rival siblings: each has claimed that its revolutionary heritage best embodies the verities of the Enlightenment. At other times, the Franco-American relationship has been characterized by mutual admiration sustained by an American infatuation with French culture into the early twentieth century and by French paternalism first found in the writings of de Tocqueville. The relationship deteriorated after World War II, as the contours of the Yalta settlement solidified. The United States refused to support French ambitions during the 1956 Suez crisis and its efforts to retain Algeria as an integral part of France. Similarly, France chafed under the institutional and material hegemony that the United States enjoyed in Europe after 1945, and was unwilling to support American foreign policy when it violated French interests, particularly in the Middle East, in Vietnam after 1954, and increasingly in Europe after 1958.
