The marginally literate White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week that the French should be "grateful" to the United States that they are "not speaking German."
It is a plain fact that the United States exists as an independent nation because of support from France during the Revolution. People who read books* may be aware from Stacy Schiff's A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America that American diplomats, principally Benjamin Franklin, kept alive the flow of money and, ultimately, military power that secured our independence. It was, in further fact, that this enormous support bankrupted the French crown, a factor leading to their own revolution.
Yes, the French collapsed as the Germans invaded in 1940, and yes, it was Americans among the Allied forces that liberated the country in 1944, but the French decorate the graves of U.S. soldiers in Normandy every year.
France is our oldest ally, and it does not merit cheap slurs from the White House briefing room.
*I realize that this excludes the bulk of the current administration.
