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1 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 2 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- 3 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.” # # # #