Francophile

A Francophile (Gallophile) is a person who has a strong affinity towards any or all of the French language, French history, French culture or French people. That affinity may include France itself or its history, language, cuisine, literature, etc. The term 'Francophile' can be contrasted with Francophobe (or Gallophobe), someone who dislikes all that is French.And if there was one thing that characterized the Shah and the ancien regime of Hoveydas and Tabatabais, it was francophilia, French education, the French language. The Shah himself had attended Le Rosey in Switzerland. French lycees flourished in Teheran. The Shahbanou herself was part of the francophilia that in Iran was as notable a feature as it had been of pre-Revolutionary Russia. England was always, in Iranian eyes, the suspect, the enemy. England was the country of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. But France offered the 'perfected civilisation' of Chamfort.'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.' A Francophile (Gallophile) is a person who has a strong affinity towards any or all of the French language, French history, French culture or French people. That affinity may include France itself or its history, language, cuisine, literature, etc. The term 'Francophile' can be contrasted with Francophobe (or Gallophobe), someone who dislikes all that is French. Francophilia often arises in former French colonies, where the elite spoke French and adopted many French habits. In other European countries such as Romania and Russia, French culture has also long been popular among the upper class. Historically, Francophilia has been associated with supporters of the philosophy of Enlightenment during and after the French Revolution, where democratic uprisings challenged the autocratic regimes of Europe. Romania has a long and deeply entrenched tradition of Francophilia beginning after the Enlightenment and Revolutionary periods. No doubt the most famous contemporary Romanian Francophile is Eugen Weber (1925–2007), a prodigious author and lecturer in both English and French 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'. 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.'' An estimated 39% of Romanian vocabulary consists of borrowings from French, with an estimated 20% of 'everyday' Romanian vocabulary. 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.' 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.' Bucharest was rebuilt in the style of Paris in the 19th century, giving the city the nickname the 'Paris of the East'. Other notable Romanian Francophiles include Georges Enesco, Constantin Brâncuși, Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade, Eugène Ionesco and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel. 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, were 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. 'Afrancesado' (lit. 'turned-French') was the term used for Spanish and Portuguese partisans of Enlightenment ideas, liberalism or the French Revolution. It also denoted supporters of the French occupation of Iberia and of the First French Empire.