Francophile

Armenia

The Armenians of Cilicia welcomed the Frankish, or French, Crusaders of the Middle Ages as fellow Christians. There was much exchange, and the last dynasty to rule Armenian Cilicia, the Lusignans (who ruled Cyprus), was of French origin.

During the reign of Louis XIV, many Armenian manuscripts were taken into the National Library of France. Armenia and Armenian characters are featured in the works of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau. The first instance of Armenian studies began with the creation of an Armenian department in the School of Oriental languages, at the initiative of Napoleon.

An important figure of Armenian Francophilia was that of Stepan Vosganian (1825–1901). Arguably the first Armenian "intellectual" and literary critic, Vosganian "represents the prototype of a long line of Armenian intellectuals nurtured in and identified with European, and particularly French, culture". Educated in Paris, he was a champion of liberalism and the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte, and he took part in the French Revolution of 1848.^[1]

The French political classes were on the whole supportive of the Armenian national movement. The French–Armenian Agreement (1916) was a political and military accord to create the Armenian Legion in the French Army to fight on the Allied side of World War I, in return for promises of recognition of Armenian independence. The Armenian Legion engaged successfully in Anatolia and Palestine during World War I, particularly at the Battle of Arara and during the Franco-Turkish War.

Belgium

Francophilia or Rattachism is a marginal political ideology in some parts of Belgium. Rattachism would mean the incorporation of French-speaking Belgium, Wallonia (and sometimes Brussels; more rarely of entire Belgium) into France. This movement has existed since the Belgian state came into existence in 1830.

The Manifesto for Walloon culture of 1983^[2] relaunched in 2003,^[3] and a series of discussions witnessed a will of emancipation.

Cyprus

The establishment of the Crusader Kingdom of Cyprus, in 1192, was the beginning of intense French influence on the island for the next three centuries. That influence, which touched almost every aspect of life on the island, would endure even after the end of Lusignan domination. It survives as part of Cypriot culture. The Republic of Cyprus became an associate member of the Francophonie in 2006.

Germany

In the 18th century, French was the language of German elites. A notable Francophile was King Frederick the Great of Prussia or Frédéric as he preferred to call himself. Frederick spoke and wrote notably better French than he did German, and all of his books were written in French, a choice of language that was of considerable embarrassment to German nationalists in the 19th and 20th centuries when Frederick became the preeminent German national hero.^[4] One source noted: "Nor did Frederick have any time for German cultural chauvinism. As an ardent Francophile in matters literary and artistic, he took a low view of the German language, spoke it imperfectly himself, and once boasted that he had not read a book in German since his early youth. His preferences in music, art and architecture were overwhelmingly Italian and French".^[5] The French philosophe Voltaire when he visited Berlin to meet his admirer Frederick noted that everyone at the Prussian Court spoke the most exquisite French and German was only used when addressing servants and soldiers. Another German Francophile was King Ludwig II of Bavaria, a.k.a. "Mad King Ludwig". Ludwig felt a great deal of affinity for King Louis XIV of France, the "Sun King" and liked to call himself the "Moon King" to suggest a parallel between himself and his hero. Ludwig loved to collect memorabilia relating to Louis and his Linderhof Palace was modelled after the Palace of Trianon.^[6] An even more striking example of Ludwig's architectural Francophilia was the Palace of Herrenchiemsee, which was a copy of the Palace of Versailles.^[7]

Italy

The Norman conquest of southern Italy lasted from 999 to 1139.

• Joseph de Maistre was an Italian writer and an Francophile. He is more well known in France then in Italy, despite his opposition to the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars.
• Umberto Eco is another Italian writer who was a Francophile. He admired the French for their anti-fascism and role in the de-Nazification of Germany and Austria.

Romania

Romania has a long and deeply entrenched tradition of Francophilia beginning after the Enlightenment and Revolutionary periods.^[8][9] No doubt the most famous contemporary Romanian Francophile is Eugen Weber (1925–2007), a prodigious author and lecturer in Romania on French history. In his book "My France: politics, culture, myth", he writes: "Social relations, manners, attitudes that others had to learn from books, I lived in my early years. Romanian francophilia, Romanian francophony.... Many Romanians, in my day, dreamed of France; not many got there".^[10]

With the efforts to build Romania into a modern nation-state, with a national language and common national heritage, in the 19th century, the Romanian language was deliberately reoriented to its Latin heritage by a steady import of French neologisms suited to contemporary civilization and culture. "For ordinary Romanians, keen on the idea of the Latin roots of their language, 'Romance' meant 'French.'"^[11] An estimated 39% of Romanian vocabulary consists of borrowings from French, with an estimated 20% of "everyday" Romanian vocabulary.^[12]

Boia writes: "Once launched on the road of Westernization, the Romanian elite threw itself into the arms of France, the great Latin sister in the West. When we speak of the Western model, what is to be understood is first and foremost the French model, which comes far ahead of the other Western reference points."^[9] He quotes no less than the leading Romanian politician Dimitrie Drăghicescu, writing in 1907: "As the nations of Europe acquire their definitive borders and their social life becomes elaborated and crystallized within the precise limits of these borders, so their spiritual accomplishments will approach those of the French, and the immaterial substance of their souls will take on the luminous clarity, the smoothness and brilliance of the French mentality."^[9] Bucharest was rebuilt in the style of Paris in the 19th century, giving the city the nickname the "Paris of the East".^[13]

Other notable Romanian Francophiles include Georges Enesco, Constantin Brâncuși, Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade, Eugène Ionesco and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.

Russia

18th and 19th century Russian Francophilia is familiar to many from Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and his characters from the Russian aristocracy converse in French and give themselves French names. At the time, the language of diplomacy and higher education across much of Europe was French. Russia, recently "modernized", or "Westernized", by the rule of sovereigns from Peter the Great to Catherine the Great was no exception. The Russian elite, in the early 18th century, was educated in the French tradition and made a conscious effort to imitate the manners of France. Their descendants, a generation or two later, were no longer "imitating" French customs but grew up with them, and the strong impact of the French culture on Russian upper and even middle classes was evident, on a smaller scale than in the 18th century, until the Revolution of 1917.^[14]

Serbia

The oldest documented possible contact between the two sides was the marriage of Stephen Uroš I of Serbia and Helen of Anjou in the 13th century.

The first important contacts of French and Serbs came only in the 19th century, when the first French travel writers wrote about their travels to Serbia.^[15] At that time Karađorđe Petrović, the leader of the Serbian Revolution, sent a letter to Napoleon expressing his admiration. On the other hand, in the French parliament, Victor Hugo asked France to assist in protecting Serbia and the Serbian population from Ottoman crimes. Diplomatic relations with France were established on 18 January 1879.^[16] Rapid development of bilateral relations done that people in Serbia in "mighty France" seen great new friend that will protect them from the Ottomans and Habsburgs.^[15] Relations between Serbia and France would go upwards until the First World War, when the "common struggle" against a common enemy would reach its peak. Before the war, France would win sympathy of local population by building railways by opening of French schools and a consulate and a Bank. Several Serbian kings were at universities in Paris as well as a large part of the future diplomats.^[15] Serbs have built a sense of Francophilia because the activities moved them away from the Ottoman and Habsburg Empires.^[15] For Serbs until 1914, French have become major allies what were even a threat for traditional inclination towards Russia. The great humanitarian and military assistance that France sent to Serbia during First World War, assistance in the evacuation of children, civilians and military at the end, and the support of French newspaper headlines even today are deeply ingrained in the collective consciousness of large number of Serbs.^[15]

Notable Serbian Francophiles include Ilija Garašanin^[17] and Sava Šumanović.^[18]

Spain

Between 1700 and the mid 20th century, francophilia played a major role in Spain both culturally and politically, comparable to the Atlanticism-Americanophilia that emerged in the second half of the 20th century. Francophilia was closely linked both to a cultural appreciation for French civilisation, but also to a desire to see France (or a certain interpretation of France) as a political model. Often rival groups in Spain, clashing over their desired political vision, would each turn to a different French example to legitimise their arguments.

Francophilia in Spain can be documented from at least the establishment of the Bourbon monarchy in 1700, when the political model associated with Louis XIV, that of the centralised Catholic absolute monarchy, was developed under his grandson king Philip V of Spain. During this period France served as a model for the monarchy's political and administrative reforms, as well as cultural and intellectual inspiration: the Real Academia for instance, was founded on the model of the Académie Française.

During the second half of the 18th century, Spanish supporters of the Enlightenment were inspired by ideas from France earning them the name "Afrancesado" (lit. "turned-French"). These sought to remake Spanish institutions, society and culture on humanist, rationalist and constitutionalist grounds, drawing strongly from the example of the Philosophes. The term later acquired a political dimension following the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte's First French Empire, as reformers sought to implement their goals through two rival political models: a constitutional liberalism and Jacobinism inspired by the First French Republic, giving rise to the Constitution of Cádiz (1812) or a more Napoleonic Enlightenment monarchy during the French occupation of Iberia and the Constitution of Bayonne (1808). A third group, seeking to restore the absolute monarchy under Ferdinand VII, also looked to counterrevolutionary France for inspiration and encouragement, culminating in the military assistance of Louis XVIII and the Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis.

In the mid 19th century, francophiles such as Javier de Burgos introduced liberal administrative reforms of the restored Spanish monarchy, modelled on the French administrative reforms of Napoleon and of the July Monarchy. During the 19th century, Spanish political movements were also strongly inspired by ideologies popular in France, such as republicanism, radicalism, socialism and anarchism on the left, as well as right-wing ideologies such as doctrinaire liberalism, Constitutional monarchism, bonapartism and Carlism-Legitimism.

During the Second Republic the democratic regime's governing class were in general strongly francophile and inspired by French republicanism, with the cultural and political attachment of figures such as Manuel Azaña, Alejandro Lerroux or Niceto Alcalà-Zamora making Spain a close diplomatic ally of the French Third Republic.

Growing disappointments in French democrats' support and a sense of French political and cultural decline, during the period of the Spanish Civil War, Second World War and Francoism, meant that francophilia in Spain generally declined. Consequently, from the mid-20th-century Spanish elites were generally more likely to express political Atlanticism and cultural Americanophilia than francophilia.

United Kingdom

Iran

As with much of the Western world and the Middle East at the time, Francophilia was quite common in Iran in the 19th century, and even so more in the 20th century. In Iran, many key politicians and diplomats of the 20th century were French-educated or avid Francophiles. Among them Teymur Bakhtiar, the founder of the Iranian intelligence agency, SAVAK; Amir-Abbas Hoveida, Prime Minister of Iran from 1965 to 1977; Hassan Pakravan, a diplomat and intelligence figure; Nader Jahanbani, General under the last Shah; and Abdullah Entezam-Saltaneh, another famous diplomat to the West.

Japan

Prince Saionji Kinmochi, a genro (elder statesmen) was educated in France, where he received a law degree at the Sorbonne.^[40] In words of the Canadian historian Margaret Macmillan, Saionji "...loved the French, their culture and their liberal traditions. He even spoke French in his sleep. To the end of his life, he drank Vichy water and wore Houbigant cologne, which had to be imported specially for him".^[41] Prince Saionji was merely an extreme case of the Francophilia that characterized Meiji Japan. The Justice Minister, Etō Shimpei was an admirer of the French who modeled the legal and administrative systems together with the police force after that of France.^[42] A French lawyer Gustave Boissonade was recruited to draft the Japanese legal code, which is why the Japanese legal code today very closely resembles the Napoleonic Code.^[43] Another French lawyer, Prosper Gambet-Gross served as the special advisor to Kawaji Toshiyoshi who created a French-style police force for Japan.^[42] The Japanese educational system from 1872 onward was modeled after the French educational system and in the same year Japan was divided into prefectures as the French administrative system was considered by the Japanese to be the best in Europe.^[42] The Japanese received a French military mission in 1870 to train their army as the French Army was considered the best in the world. After France's defeat in the war of 1870–71, the Japanese sent the French military mission home, to be replaced by a German military mission.

The Japanese writer Kafū Nagai wrote after visiting France:

"No matter how much I wanted to sing Western songs, they were all very difficult. Had I, born in Japan, no choice but to sing Japanese songs? Was there a Japanese song that expressed my present sentiment -- a traveler who had immersed himself in love and the arts in France but was now going back to the extreme end of the Orient where only death would follow monotonous life? . . . I felt totally forsaken. I belonged to a nation that had no music to express swelling emotions and agonized feelings."^[44]

Lebanon

In Lebanon, Francophilia is very common among the Christian Maronites who have since the 19th century viewed the French as their "guardian angels", their special protectors and friends in their struggles against the Muslims.^[45] In 1860, the French intervened to put a stop to the massacres of the Maronites by the Muslims and the Druze which were being permitted by the Ottoman authorities, earning them the lasting thanks of the Maronites. Starting in the 19th century, much of the Maronite elite was educated at Jesuit schools in France, making the Maronites one of the most ardently Francophile groups in the Ottoman Empire.^[46] The Lebanese writer Charles Corm in a series of poems in French published after World War I portrayed the Lebanese as a "Phoenician" people whose Christianity and Francophilia made them part of the West and who had nothing to do either with the Arabs or Islam.^[46]

Ottoman Empire

Orientalism first arose in Early Modern France with Guillaume Postel and the French Embassy to the court of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent.^[47] Later, when Mehmed IV sent the ambassador Müteferrika Süleyman Ağa to the court of Louis XIV in 1669, it caused a sensation that triggered the Turquerie fashion craze in France and then the rest of Western Europe, which lasted until well into the 19th century.^[48][49]

The Ottoman Empire granted France special privileges on account of the Franco-Ottoman alliance. French mercantilism was protected, French subjects were exempt from the taxes and tributes normally required of Christian residents of the Empire, no French subjects could be taken into Ottoman slavery and French subjects were granted full freedom of worship. Thus, France became the unofficial protector of all Catholics in the East.^[50]

In the late 18th and 19th centuries, French influence increased in Anatolia and the Middle East, and the French language and customs penetrated deep into the Ottoman learned classes and aristocracy; French was the preferred second language, rich Ottomans sent their children to school and universities in France and the Western "Enlightenment" was associated with French culture.^[51] Modern Turkish continues to have many French loanwords that were adopted in this period, and 5,350 Turkish words are of French origin, according to the Turkish Language Society, one eighth of a standard dictionary^[52] (See List of replaced loanwords in Turkish#Loanwords of French origin.). Francophilia still exists to a rather limited extent in modern Turkey.^[52] Vestiges of the 19th and early 20th century Francophilia include the famous Pera Palace hotel in Istanbul.^[53]

The French Revolution and its ideals of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity" inspired many secular and progressive movements in Ottoman Turkey, including the Young Turk movement that would go on to create the Republic of Turkey.^[54] Napoleon's breaking of the age-old Franco-Ottoman alliance by conquering Ottoman-controlled Egypt also had an effect.^[55] Muhammad Ali the Great, who became the Ottoman vali (governor) of Egypt in 1805 and ruled as a de facto independent ruler until his death in 1848 had been strongly impressed with the Napoleon's Armée d'Orient, and imported French veterans of the Napoleonic wars to train his army.^[56] Egypt was very much in the French sphere of influence politically, economically and culturally in the 19th century, and French was the preferred language of Egypt's elites right up to the 1952 revolution.^[56] At the court of the Khedive Isma'il Pasha of Egypt, better known as Isma'il the Magnificent the languages used were French and Turkish.^[57] Reflecting his Francophilia, the French-educated Isma'il emulated Baron Haussmann by tearing down much of Cairo to rebuild it in the style of Paris.^[58] Even today, the architecture of downtown Cairo closely resembles that of downtown Paris.

Vietnam

Ho Chi Minh applied to work as a kitchen helper on a French merchant steamer in Saigon, the Amiral de Latouche-Tréville, using the alias Văn Ba. The ship departed on 5 June 1911 and arrived in Marseille, France on 5 July 1911. The ship then left for Le Havre and Dunkirk, returning to Marseille in mid-September. There, he applied for the French Colonial School but did not succeed. He instead decided to begin traveling the world by working on ships and visiting many countries from 1911 to 1917. While working as the French cook's helper on a ship in 1912, Ho Chi Minh traveled to the United States. From 1912 to 1913, he may have lived in Harlem, New York City and Boston, Massachusetts in New England where he claimed to have worked as a baker at the Parker House Hotel. He was also one of the founding members of the French Communist Party in Paris where he organized the Viet Minh independence movement in his homeland of French Indochina with Marxist-Leninist ideologies after it was mixed between Kingdom of Champa with its long history with India and China. He read the Declaration of Independence of Vietnam on 2 September 1945 after World War II came to an end with the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan which follows the August General Uprising throughout Vietnam led by the Communist Party of Indochina which will be later known as the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) after his death in 1969. On 2 July 1976, Vietnam was reunified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, with Hanoi as the capital of the entire region after the end of the Vietnam War and the Fall of Saigon in 1975. Vietnam was influenced by the Indian-origin religion Buddhism via the strong impact of culture of China as it also considered sacred by many native Vietnamese and Chinese influences with 50,000 ethnic Cham in the south-central coastal area practice a devotional form of Hinduism. Hinduism in Vietnam is associated with the Cham ethnic minority as the first religion of the Champa kingdom was a form of Shaivite Hinduism which is brought by sea from India.

Central African Republic

Colonel Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Army of the Central African Republic seized power in 1965 and ruled until he was deposed by French troops in 1979. Bokassa was a great Francophile who maintained extremely close relations with France, often going elephant hunting with the French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.^[59] In 1977, Bokassa in imitation of his hero Napoleon crowned himself Emperor and renamed his nation the Central African Empire.^[59] Bokassa was also notorious as one of Africa's most brutal dictators, engaging in cannibalism, becoming so vicious that even the French could not stand supporting his regime anymore and thus the French Foreign Legion deposed the Emperor in 1979.^[59] Bokassa once nonchalantly told a French diplomat after his overthrow about the banquets he used to organize with the French style cooking that: "You never noticed it, but you ate human flesh."^[59]

Democratic Republic of the Congo (Zaire)

Patrice Lumumba was also a great francophile as well as Joseph-Désiré Mobutu because of its relations between Belgium and the Democratic Republic of the Congo which was ruled by Leopold II, King of the Belgians when he claimed the Congo Free State before it was reconstituted as a new territory, the Belgian Congo in 1908. On 30 June 1960, after 75 years of Belgian colonial rule in Central Africa, The Congo achieved its independence from Belgium, which later renamed as Zaire in 1971, before returning to its original name in 1997 with the First Congo War, nicknamed as (Africa's First World War). About half of Kinshasa residents feel solidarity towards Francophone countries, and French is seen as important for education and relations with the government. French is the sole official language of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Gabon

Omar Bongo, the long time dictator of Gabon from 1967 until his death in 2009 was described by The Economist in 2016 as "every inch the Francophile" who was very close to successive governments in Paris from the time he came to power until his death.^[60] In 2012, the country declared an intention to add English as a second official language, as Ali Bongo who succeeded his father as president does not share his father's Francophilia.^[60] However, it was later clarified that the country intended to introduce English as a first foreign language in schools, while keeping French as the general medium of instruction and the sole official language.

Ivory Coast (Côte d'Ivoire)

President Félix Houphouët-Boigny of the Côte d'Ivoire was described as a "staunch Francophile" who maintained very close links with France, and successfully insisted that the French name for his country be used instead of the Ivory Coast.^[61] It was Houphouet-Boigny who coined the term France-Afrique (later shortened to Françafrique) to describe the "special relationship" between France and its former African colonies, in which Francophone African nations were in the French political, cultural, military and economic sphere of influence, something which Houphouet-Boigny welcomed, though France's influence in Africa has been highly controversial given that most of the African regimes the French supported have been dictatorships.

Senegal

Léopold Sédar Senghor was the first African to become the member of the Académie Française in Paris after he wrote the memoirs of his native country of Senegal as its leader of Francophone Africa since it was colonized by France in 1677 that has located the oldest colonial city of Saint-Louis as a trading post. Dakar became the capital of French West Africa in 1902, with Louis Faidherbe and his black soldiers that once recruited by the French have created Senegalese Tirailleurs and transforming the African populations within its sphere into French citizens. Following the end of both World War I and World War II which led the liberation of Paris from the Nazi regime in August 1944, Senghor became the first President of Senegal on 6 September after the country gained independence from France on 4 April 1960, with Dakar as its capital remain. Senghor wrote the national anthem of Le Lion rouge, meaning (The Red Lion). French is the sole official language of Senegal while Wolof became the most spoken language in the country, the RTS were broadcast in French and even the money of CFA franc which was created by France as its former colony that is located in Dakar being the sole capital of Francophone Africa as Senegal and France have become both friendships with the currency of West African CFA franc and Central African CFA franc remained.

Canada

In Canada, the term has two distinct meanings, that of "appreciation of, or support for, France" and, more commonly, "appreciation of, or support for, French as an official language of Canada". With the expansion of French immersion programs in many schools following the passage of Official Languages Act of 1969 which elevated French to an equal official language of the national bureaucracy, many Anglophone Canadians have developed a greater appreciation for the French culture that is a part of the Canadian identity. Graduates of such programs (and others who speak French as an additional language) are called francophiles in Canada, as opposed to francophones which is the term typically reserved for native speakers or near-native fluent speakers of French.

Haiti

The Republic of Haiti was once the French colony of Saint-Domingue until a successful slave revolt drove the French out. Despite this history, the Haitian elite was traditionally very Francophile to the point that the Haitian writer Jean Price-Mars published a book in 1928 Ainsi Parla l'Oncle (So Spoke the Uncle) accusing the elite of bovarysme, of intentionally neglecting and ignoring traditional Haitian folk culture as it had too many West African elements and was not French enough for the elite.^[62] About 10% of Haiti's population speak French as their first language while the other 90% speak Kréyol (a mixture of French and various West African languages) that has often been mocked by the Francophile Haitian elite as a bastardized French.^[63] In Haiti, the question of whatever one speaks French or Kréyol is racially charged as the elite tended to be of Afro-European ancestry while the masses are black.

Mexico

General Antonio López de Santa Anna liked to call himself the "Napoleon of the West", and during his rule, the Mexican Army wore uniforms that closely resembled the uniforms of Napoleon's Grande Armée.

United States

In the United States, there is great interest in French culture, including French food, art, philosophy, politics, as well as the French lifestyle in general. Historically, French style, particularly that of Paris, has long been considered the height of sophistication by Americans of all social classes.

Australia

Australia is tied to France through history: visit from Lapérouse and assistance during World War I. Australian also appreciate and look up to French culture and cuisine. Shops often try to make their name sound French^[86] and a trip to Paris is a common prize in games or often pictured in advertisements.

Bastille Day is celebrated in Sydney though a 4-days festival, drawing up to 500,000 people.^[87]

New Zealand