Download THE GREAT HISTORICAL CIRCLE: 1066 to 1944 THE NORMAN

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THE GREAT HISTORICAL CIRCLE: 1066 to 1944
THE NORMAN INVASION OF ENGLAND
TO THE ANGLO-AMERICAN INVASION OF NORMANDY
Thomas M. Hatfield
Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial
Colleville-sur-Mer
Memorial Day:::May 24, 1992
When the great feudal state of Normandy invaded England in 1066, it began a
historical process that would result in the end of feudalism and the advent of democracy.
The end of this process can be seen in France's liberation from Nazi rule. This
perspective allows us to draw a great historical circle from the Norman invasion of
England in 1066 to the Allied invasion of Normandy in 1944, a circle that illustrates the
shared cultural heritage of France, the United States, and Great Britain.
After William the Conqueror invaded England, England became deeply defined by
French language and culture. The English language acquired grammar and about 40
percent of its words from the French. French influence pervaded the political structure of
English society. English legal philosophy, for instance, developed along French lines,
and many English legal documents were written in French until the late seventeenth
century. Some French legal terms coined by the administration of Henry II remain in
use.
When the Normanized English established colonial dominance in North America
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they laid cultural foundations in the New
World largely inherited from twelfth-century France. America's independence from
England could not have occurred without generous help from France. Thomas Jefferson,
Benjamin Franklin, and Silas Dean, who were culturally indebted to France, and drew on
that debt to help them win French support for the American revolutionary cause.
Jefferson said, “Every man has two countries, his own and France.” Franklin used his
appreciation of French culture as a diplomat in Paris, behaving like the imaginary
American “noble savage” embraced by the romantic intellectuals of France even as he
displayed French-style finesse in his political dealings.
Three French admirals participated in the American Revolution: De Grasse, De
Barras, and D'Estaing. Two land commanders also served: Rochambeau and Lafayette.
Lafayette was diplomatic and military liaison between America and France. The
surprising and earth-shaking defeat of English sea power by the French fleet under
DeGrasse off the shores of Yorktown, Virginia, turned the world upside-down. The
English were compelled to accept the reality of American independence. At Yorktown,
in the final battle of the American Revolution, French forces outweighed the Americans
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in both numbers and prestige. Rochambeau, the French commander, could have accepted
the English surrender, but he allowed Washington that signal honor. During the
American Revolution, the French hosted the swashbuckling founder of the United States
Navy; John Paul Jones sailed from French bases to harass the English on their home
waters.
After the French helped Americans gain independence from England in 1781, the
Americans helped the French define the principles of the French Revolution. When the
American war ended, Lafayette returned to France and took a seat in the Estates-General
in 1789. With the aid of Thomas Jefferson, and borrowing heavily from the American
Declaration of Independence and the constitutions of several American states, Lafayette
wrote the first draft of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. His draft
profoundly influenced the final version of that momentous document.
During the nineteenth century, two of the most astute observers of the United
States were Frenchmen of Norman origin who studied America's growth to better
understand democracy's potential for France and the rest of Europe. Jean Crèvecoeur,
who was born in Caen, portrayed an America of vast opportunity and human freedom in
his Letters From an American Farmer, a book that crystallized the young nation's highest
ideals in terms that many in the Old World embraced. Alexis de Tocqueville, a Norman
aristocrat and prominent intellectual, complemented Crèvecoeur's optimistic picture of
American life by interpreting the new American democracy.
Despite France's diplomatic distance from the U. S. during the American Civil
War (1861-1865), the complexity of Franco-American relations found a mirror in the
great struggle of social systems and values that caused the conflict. Two French-born
generals, Trobriand and Duffié, fought for the North. Two others, Polignac and
Blanchard, fought for the South. (A descendent of the Union general Duffié lives in
California. As a U. S. fighter pilot in England during WW II, he earned a Croix de
Guerre from France).
The great historical circle began to close during the First World War. After the
Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), Great Britain and France brought centuries of mutual
antagonism to an official close when Britain agreed to come to the aid of France if war
began between France and Germany. (The treaty was the Entente Cordiale signed in
1904.) In 1914, when Germany invaded Belgium and swept into France, a British
expeditionary force joined the French. Later, the United States also joined on the side of
France and Britain. When the American Commander, General Pershing, arrived in
France, the idea of a historical circle was invoked again when his aide proclaimed,
“Lafayette, we are here.” The meaning was that as France had helped the United States
obtain its independence, the U.S. would now help France maintain its independence. A
similar sentiment is expressed by the inscription over the British Memorial to the 1939-
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1945 war in Bayeux. The inscription reads (translated from Latin): “We who were
conquered by William came to liberate our conquerors.”
On June 6, 1944, the U. S. and Britain invaded Normandy in order to free France
and Western Europe from Nazi oppression. The Second World War was not simply a
vast clash of autonomous, willful nations. It was also an important part of a process of
social and cultural change that took place over several centuries –– change reflected in
the shared history of France, Britain, and the United States. Out of this shared history,
much that we know as democracy emerged.
In the 1941 American film “Casablanca,” a cynical French police commissioner
named Louis, played by Claude Rains, and a cynical American expatriate named Rick,
played by Humphrey Bogart, slowly join the fight for democracy against the Nazis in
North Africa. The moral position of French collaborators and American neutralists is
challenged. The film's turning point comes when a Czech freedom fighter urges the band
in Rick's cafe to play the “Marseillaise,” and an international crowd of war exiles sings it
in the presence of German soldiers. The ideal of democracy, threatened so seriously
during the war, thus finds a voice in Rick's cafe, to the bloody strains of the French
Revolution. The great historical circle from the Norman invasion to the Normandy
invasion began in the darkness of feudalism and came back around as the re-birth of
human freedom. In defense of that freedom, the Allies during World War II achieved
what Rick offers Louis at the end of “Casablanca.” The two of them, one French and one
American, go off to fight the Nazis, having achieved what the American calls “a beautiful
friendship.”
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