Word: frenchness
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Franco-American relations began with a marriage of convenience and a blaze of emotion. When the U.S. declared independence, France was still smarting from its defeat by Britain in the Seven Years' War, which ended in 1763. France wanted to even the score; the U.S. wanted French money, supplies and military help. Together they beat Britain (there were more French soldiers than Americans at the battle of Yorktown). Their hardheaded transactions were sweetened by personal alliances. America's most important diplomat in Paris was the scientist and wit Benjamin Franklin, who became such a celebrity in France that his image...
...self-interest quickly drove the two countries apart. In 1800 Napoléon Bonaparte compelled Spain to give him the Louisiana Territory, which he planned to make the hub of a New World empire. President Thomas Jefferson was so alarmed, he considered making an alliance with Britain to drive the French out. But when the French troops en route to occupying Louisiana died of yellow fever in Haiti, Napoléon decided to cut his losses and sold the territory to the U.S. for the bargain price of $15 million. By 1861, however, Napoléon's nephew Napoléon III was ready...
...France fought together again in both world wars of the early 20th century, but national interests and personalities always complicated the picture. At the Versailles Conference after World War I, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau scorned U.S. President Woodrow Wilson for his reluctance to punish defeated Germany; in the early years of World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt worried that the Free French leader Charles de Gaulle had "all the attributes of a dictator." The past 60 years have had several rocky patches. The low points were 1966, when De Gaulle took France out of NATO'S military command...
...separate firms, the combined company reached a deal in late October with Gazprom, Russia's state-owned energy company, to help it develop Shtokman, a vast gas field in the Barents Sea. StatoilHydro secured a 24% share of a specially created company that will own the project's infrastructure. French rival Total earlier this year secured a similar stake...
...Then came new French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the crafty political operator known for exploiting his opponents' weaknesses in ways they don't expect. A social dinner Tuesday night at the White House was followed by a trip Wednesday to Mount Vernon set the collegial tone. And Bush laid it on thick at a joint press conference at Washington's home Wednesday, saying Sarkozy had "impressed a lot of people here on your journey," and telling the French leader that he has "a strong set of universal values in your heart...