Often attributed to Mark Twain — perhaps mistakenly, since no historical source shows he actually made the statement — “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes” is a common and apt refrain when discussing the connection between historical perspectives and current events. By drawing on knowledge of what happened in the past, and why, we are better able to understand the flow and direction of the history collectively created in each new day.
“Past Rhymes With Present Times” is a series by Lloyd S. Kramer exploring historical context and frameworks, and how the foundations of the past affect the building of the future.
I just returned from a seventeen-day trip to France, where I participated in a Symposium on Lafayette’s role in the early history of French-American relations and gained new insights into how President Trump is destroying America’s reputation among Europeans who have long respected and supported democratic institutions in the United States.
Although I’ve often traveled and pursued historical research in France, I’ve never encountered such pervasive hostility for an American president or for the international actions of an American government.
I went to Paris to discuss transatlantic exchanges during and after the era of the American and French Revolutions and to visit an outstanding historical exhibition on “Lafayette Between France and America” at the French National Archives. I returned to North Carolina, however, with broader perspectives on how the Atlantic world is moving into a new historical era in which Europeans no longer view the United States as a reliable friend or as a leader of global movements for democracy and free trade.
A photo of the official catalog from the Lafayette exhibition. (photo via Lloyd Kramer)
European respect for America’s self-governing ideals began to develop 250 years ago when the “new nation” declared its political independence from Great Britain, but this enduring respect has evolved into European fears that American political leaders are abandoning the democratic values and the advocacy of human rights that previously spread American influence across the whole modern world.
Trumpism’s most destructive international actions (as viewed from Europe) include the demolition of NATO alliances, the threatened takeover of Greenland, the contempt for Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression, the disastrous attack on Iran, and the tariff-driven disruption of global commerce. But there are even wider European concerns about America’s alignment with autocratic regimes and its disorienting rejection of democratic values, scientific knowledge, and multicultural exchanges.
Recent polling data shows that 80% of the people in France have an unfavorable view of Donald Trump (versus 13% favorable), but the “unfavorable opinions” of Trump stand at 87% among Germans, 86% among both the British and Italians, and 94% among the Danes (versus 4% favorable).
Private Critiques of Trumpism
My most memorable French conversations about Trumpism took place far away from the National Archives. Traveling after the Symposium to cities in southern and southwestern France, I encountered a deep hostility for Trump by simply participating in the activities of daily life—which ranged from washing clothes to sharing ideas with friends over long, French-style lunches and dinners.
I vividly remember, for example, a spontaneous discussion with a woman in Montpellier who asked about my nationality after I struggled to start a washing machine in a small laundromat. I thus confirmed (as she suspected) that I had come from the United States, whereupon she asked, “why did Americans vote for Trump?” and “did you support his election?”
Questions about “why” Americans supported Trump emerged in multiple venues, but my laundromat interlocutor opened the discussion with impressive frankness. She suggested that Trump’s electoral victory showed how Americans had lost their political “good sense” because Trump is mentally unbalanced and because he encourages irrational people to own guns that endanger public or personal safety in every American town.
This conversation in a French laundromat led to unexpected political territory, but I found similar themes emerging in mealtime discussions with both old and new friends in each place I visited. One of my hosts at a delicious Provençal lunch wondered why Americans would support such a crass, incompetent president; and a tablemate at a different dinner party argued that Trump’s erratic behavior threatens everyone who values peace and stability, no matter where they live in Europe or the Americas.
His wife noted even more pointedly that Americans had long “represented” democratic values for reform-minded people in France, but this symbolic status had collapsed because of Trump’s support for authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban.
There was, in short, a constant lament about the loss of a long-friendly American nation that had led the struggle to re-establish European democracy after the defeat of Nazism and the collapse of eastern European communism. How could Europeans ever regain their trust in American stability, friendship, and democratic values, my French friends asked, when long-established alliances have been discarded on the whims of a president who cares nothing about European history, achievements, or cultures?
Meanwhile, Trumpism’s international violence and tariffs are disrupting European economic life as gasoline prices rise and as the owners of vineyards (whom I met in the Loire valley) transform their export strategies to cope with the volatile tariffs that destabilize American prices for all French wines.
Private conversations thus convey the fears and critiques that appear in the European polling data on Trumpism, but public commentaries expand these criticisms beyond laundromats and dining room tables into wider political debates about Europe’s future economic or military autonomy.
Public Critiques of Trumpism
My interest in French views of Trumpism pushed me toward frequent on-line reading of the venerable Parisian newspaper Le Monde. The French are facing their own anti-democratic threats from virulent, anti-immigrant “culture warriors” and far-right, nationalist politicians, but the writers at Le Monde regularly move from articles about these domestic dangers into other discussions of how Trump is destroying the NATO alliance or fracturing collaborations that protected the peace and prosperity of Europe over the last 80 years.
“The US president does not like Europe,” the columnist Sylvie Kauffmann wrote in April, “and the feeling is mutual. Worse, Trump does not understand Europe.”
Another analyst of international changes, Alain Frachon, argued that the NATO partnership had always rested on a mutual American-European trust, but “that trust has vanished” because of Trumpism’s incomprehensible eagerness to align American policies with Putin’s campaign to separate Europe from the United States.
This French view of America’s strange political realignment assumes that the destruction of trust (as in all friendships or marriages) leads inexorably to the collapse of relationships because trust can never be easily restored.
The introduction to another recent column–by Jean Pisani-Ferry–notes with dismay that “The United States is turning its back on democracy and freedom,” which suggests why the “United States has lost its moral authority for good.” This historical change marks what Pisani-Ferry calls a profound “rupture” rather than mere administrative transitions because “the rest of the world has lost confidence in America.” Trumpism, in short, is destroying the long-powerful American ascendance in Europe.
Lafayette and King Charles III at the US Congress
The Symposium at the French National Archives examined historical topics such as Lafayette’s role in the French-American alliance that defeated the British king’s army in 1781. This Parisian discussion of America’s anti-monarchical revolution, however, coincided almost exactly with King Charles III’s recent visit to the United States and (more broadly) with the bicentennial of Lafayette’s much-celebrated American tour in 1824-25.
Launching the historical pattern for later European visits to the US capitol, Lafayette became the first foreigner to address the US Congress, but King Charles III has now become the latest European to speak in that famous American chamber. Despite the obvious differences in their national identities and historical contexts, an important democratic theme connects Lafayette’s speech in 1824 with the British king’s speech in 2026.
Lafayette assured the assembled representatives that America’s victorious struggle against a European king had shown a “virtuous resistance to oppression” and a commitment to “institutions founded on the rights of man and on the republican principle of a government of the people.” The aristocratic Frenchman thus admired Americans for breaking from Europe’s system of monarchical governments and privileged noble elites.
Responding implicitly to Trumpism’s new version of self-referential monarchism in America, the current King of Great Britian (ironically?) encouraged members of the US Congress to defend the same principles that Lafayette had praised in his description of America’s Revolution against Charles III’s royal predecessor.
King Charles stressed that the “ideals” of liberty and equality shape democracies, bring economic prosperity, and establish stable political systems that are based on the “rule of law” and an “independent judiciary.”
Across two centuries of tumultuous Atlantic history, Lafayette and the King of Great Britain have proclaimed similar views of essential principles which undergirded the modern American-European alliance and which President Trump now ignores in his narcissistic desire to establish a kind of monarchical restoration.
The editors at Le Monde quickly noted the ironic position of a British king affirming the values of the Declaration of the Independence during a Congressional speech that held “symbolic importance—not only for the British, but for all Europeans committed to democracy.” The age of Trumpism, as French writers portrayed it, had forced a European king to deliver “a timely lesson in democracy, international cooperation and the environment” in a clear public statement that “stands out as one of the rare, somewhat uplifting moments in current affairs.”
My trip to France for historical conversations about Lafayette and the transatlantic struggle for democratic institutions therefore carried me into contemporary French critiques of Trumpism and the ongoing upheavals in America’s once-trusted relationships with Europeans.
Every foreign journey offers surprises, but I had never expected academic discussions of the American and French revolutions to become a prelude to French reflections on one of the strangest events in the Trumpian era of transatlantic conflicts: A British king celebrated the 250th anniversary of America’s anti-monarchical, revolutionary war by defending the principles of democratic self-government which shaped the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and sustained the pre-Trumpian American-European alliance for eighty years after 1945.
Photo via Lindsay Metivier
Lloyd Kramer is a professor emeritus of History at UNC, Chapel Hill, who believes the humanities provide essential knowledge for both personal and public lives. His most recent book is titled “Traveling to Unknown Places: Nineteenth-Century Journeys Toward French and American Selfhood,” but his historical interest in cross-cultural exchanges also shaped earlier books such as “Nationalism In Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities Since 1775” and “Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions.”
