The French et Nous: Via A&L Daily, Richard Brookhiser on the long and troubled history of Franco-American relations. It's a fine piece, written breezily (despite Brookhiser's academic bona fides), and containing a number of gem observations. This one, for instance:

Sometimes the influences failed to take root. For years American kitchens copied high French cuisine, sometimes brilliantly. But the liberation of American cooking came not because of this tutelage but because of James Beard’s discovery of American regionalism. On the other side of the ocean, French rock ’n’ roll does, and will always, stink.

And:

Voltaire famously scorned French Canada as a few acres of snow. In the late eighteenth century the United States was a few acres of snow and swamp. Its population, at the time of independence, was less than three million. France, by contrast, with a population of 26 million, was one of the world’s superpowers. If the famous Americans who visited France between the two revolutions sometimes gaped like rubes, they had reason. They were rubes, in one of the focal points of the earth.

Finally, this anecdote of Lafayette's arrival and Washington's response:

Gen. George Washington, who had to deal with the resultant bad blood, warily (and wearily) greeted the [Marquis]. "We are rather embarrassed to show ourselves to an officer who has just left the army of France,” he said. The young marquis said the perfect thing in reply: “I am here, sir, to learn, not to teach."

If Britain and the U.S. are forever brothers, France and the U.S. are forever sparring lovers.