It’s rich of the French to call Trump ‘vulgar’

There has always been a touch of snobbery in the way the French elite regard American politics. The word one reads and hears most often in the mainstream media is ‘vulgarity’. This is particularly true of Donald Trump, who is abhorred as much by the right-wing press as by the left. ‘Trump, vulgarity on the loose,’ was the headline in a recent article in the centre-right Le Figaro.

This snootiness is long-standing, but it became more acute two decades ago during the war in Iraq. France’s refusal – correct, as it turned out – to join George W. Bush’s ‘coalition of the willing’ led to a torrent of abuse in Washington. The French were labelled ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ and in some restaurants French fries were rechristened ‘Freedom Fries’.

The president of the Republic at the time was Jacques Chirac, and his foreign minister was Dominique de Villepin. Chirac’s passion was for indigenous art and cultures of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, and in 2006 he inaugurated the Quai Branly Museum in Paris to showcase artefacts from these civilisations.