2021年1月23日发(作者：magnitude)
Unit 6

A French Fourth
Charles Trueheart
1






Along about this time every year, as Independence Day approaches, I pull an old American flag
out
of
a
bottom
drawer
where
it
is
folded
away
－

folded
in
a
square,
I
admit,
not
the
regulation
triangle. I’ve had it a long time and have always flown it outside on July 4. Here in Paris it hangs from
a fourth-
floor balcony visible from the street. I’ve never seen anyone look up, but in my mind’s eye
an
American tourist may notice it and smile, and a French passerby may be reminded of the date and the
occasion that prompt its appearance. I hope so.
2






For my expatriated family, too, the flag is meaningful, in part because we don’t do anything else
to
celebrate the Fourth. People don’t have barbecues in Paris apartments, and most other Americans I
know who have settled here suppress such outward signs of their heritage
－

or they go back home
for the summer to refuel.
3






Our children think the flag-hanging is a cool thing, and I like it because it gives us a few moments
of family Q&A about our citizenship. My wife and I have been away from the United States for nine
years,
and
our
children
are
eleven
and
nine,
so
American
history
is
mostly
something
they
have
learned
－

or haven’t learned
－

from their parents. July 4 is one of the times when the American in
me feels a twinge of unease about the great lacunae in our children’s understanding of who they are
and is prompted to try to fill the gaps. It’s als
o a time, one among many, when my thoughts turn more
generally to the costs and benefits of raising children in a foreign culture.
4






Louise and Henry speak French fluently; they are taught in French at school, and most of their
friends are French. They move from language to language, seldom mixing them up, without effort or
even
awareness.
This
is
a
wonderful
thing,
of
course.
And
our
physical
separation
from
our
native
land is
not much of an
issue. My
wife and
I are grateful every day for all that
our children are
not
exposed to. American school shootings are a good object lesson for our children in the follies of the
society we hold at a distance.
5






Naturally, we also want to remind them of reasons to take pride in being American and to try to
convey to them what that means. It is a difficult thing to do from afar, and the distance seems more
than just a matter of miles. I sometimes think that the stories we tell them must seem like Aesop’s (or
La
Fontaine’s)
fables,
myths
with
no
fixed
place
in
space

or
time.
Still,
connections
can
be
made,
lessons learned.
6






Last
summer
we
spent
a
week
with
my
brother
and
his
family,
who
live
in
Concord,
Massachusetts, and we took the children to the North Bridge to give them a glimpse of the American
Revolution.
We happened
to run
across
a
reenactment of the skirmish that launched the war, with
everyone dressed up in three-cornered hats and cotton bonnets. This probably only confirmed to our
goggle-eyed kids the make-believe quality of American history.
7






Six months later, when we were recalling the experience at the family dinner table here, I asked
Louise what the Revolution had been about. She thought that it had something to do with the man
who rode his horse from town to town. “Ah”, I said, satisfaction swelling in my breast, “and what was
that
man’s
name?”
“Gulliver?”
Louise
replied.
Henry,
for
his
part,
knew
that
the
Revolution
was
between the British and the Americans, and thought that it was probably about slavery.
8






As we pursued this conversation, though, we learned what the children knew instead. Louise told
us
that the French
Revolution came at the end of the Enlightenment, when
people learned a
lot of
ideas, and one was that they didn’t need kings to tell them what to think or do. On another occas
ion,
when Henry asked what makes a person a “junior” or a “II” or a “III”, Louise helped me answer by
bringing up kings like Louis Quatorze and Quinze and Seize; Henry riposted with Henry VIII.
9






I can’t say I worry much about our children’s European fr
ame of reference. There will be plenty of
time
for
them
to
learn
America’s
pitifully
brief
history
and
to
find
out
who
Thomas
Jefferson
and
Franklin Roosevelt were. Already they know a great deal more than I would have wished about Bill
Clinton.
10






If all of this resonates with me, it may be because my family moved to Paris in 1954, when I was
three,
and
I
was
enrolled
in
French
schools
for
most
of
my
grade-
school
years.
I
don’t
remember
much instruction in American studies at school or at home. I do remember that my mother took me
out of school one afternoon to see the movie
Oklahoma
! I can recall what a faraway place it seemed:
all that sunshine and square dancing and surreys with fringe on top. The sinister Jud Fry personified
evil for quite some time
afterward. Cowboys and Indians were an American cliché
that had already
reached Paris through the movies, and I asked a grandparent to send me a Davy Crockett hat so that I
could live out that fairy tale against the backdrop of gray postwar Montparnasse.
11





Although
my
children
are
living
in
the
same
place
at
roughly
the
same
time
in
their
lives,
their
experience as expatriates is very different from mine. The particular narratives of American history
aside, American culture is not theirs alone but that of their French classmates, too. The music they
listen to is either “American” or “European,” but it is often hard to tell the difference. In my day little
French
kids
looked
like
nothing
other
than
little
French
kids;
but
Louise
and
Henry
and
their
classmat
es dress much as their peers in the United States do, though with perhaps less Lands’ End
fleeciness. When I returned to visit the United States in the 1950s, it was a five-day ocean crossing for
a month’s home leave every two years; now we fly over for a
week or two, although not very often.
Virtually
every
imaginable
product
available
to
my
children’s
American
cousins
is
now
obtainable
here.
12





If time and globalization have made France much more like the United States than it was in my
youth, then I can conclude a couple of things. On the one hand, our children are confronting a much
less
jarring
cultural
divide
than
I
did,
and
they
have
more
access
to
their
native
culture.
Re- entry,
when it comes, is likely to be smoother. On the other hand, they are less than fully immersed in a truly