Vive la Obama différence!

Why the French love Barack Obama -- even if he'd rather not be seen with them in public.

By Beth Arnold

Read more: France, Politics, News, John Kerry, Barack Obama, 2008 election

Reuters/Michael Dalder

Sen. Barack Obama arrives for his speech at the Victory Column (Siegessaeule) in Berlin July 24, 2008.

July 25, 2008 | PARIS -- The building is not far from the Place Vendôme and the Opéra Garnier and is closer still to the Bibliothèque Nationale. For those in the know, this area, the 2nd arrondissement, is where Napoleon Bonaparte once lived, where the Americans Robert Livingston and James Monroe signed the Louisiana Purchase into being, and where Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart debuted his "Magic Flute." This quartier is where the "Jewish question" was decided during the German occupation, and where Alexandre Dumas' three musketeers rode and fought their way into myth and history. This is the very heart of Paris.

On Wednesday, a good-looking young man wearing jeans and a Barack Obama/France T-shirt waves his visitor into a chic, but not fussy, light-filled conference room. With its sofas, its simple black chairs filed around an elegantly rustic table, the room could double as a gracious salon in someone's home -- someone who's a hard-core Barack Obama supporter, that is. Obama posters are tacked to the wall, and others lie on the big table. An Obama banner is unfurled around one of the fireplaces, and two flags are draped on a chair -- one American, the other French.

Twenty-two-year-old Samuel Solvit is the kind of guy you'd like your daughter to date -- smart, ambitious and clean-cut. He studies economics at ESCE (Ecole Supérieure de Commerce Extérieur), but his vocation these days is Barack Obama. While Obama's candidacy has engaged the imagination and hopes of the French in general, Solvit started the Comité français de soutien à Barack Obama (French Support Committee for Barack Obama) in January 2008. His growing organization has 3,500 members so far, and its glittering honorary committee includes such celebrities as Axel Poniatowski, a member of Parliament; Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris; fashion designer Sonia Rykiel; Pierre Bergé, the co-founder of Yves Saint-Laurent; the journalist and filmmaker Frédéric Mitterrand; former Prime Minister Edith Cresson; and the writer and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy.

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"I'm not an American ... It's your election first," Solvit says. "But I am a world citizen, and what you do will affect us ... If we see that the U.S. is changing, it's good for all of us." Solvit also believes it's a Republican thing to say that foreign support is bad. "Everything is moving. He [Obama] is a symbol of this new evolution."

Obama's Thursday speech in Berlin could be counted as a triumph. In a city chosen because Germany is Europe's economic heavyweight, and because Berlin is a living symbol of once-divided nation coming together, 200,000 turned out for Obama's evocation of JFK. But it is also interesting that Obama will not visit that other European capital, Paris, until Friday, at the end of the weekly news cycle, and then only for a brief meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy. A massive throng of cheering French people might have been an image more useful to McCain than the Obama campaign, given the way being "too French" was wielded as a cudgel against the previous Democrat to run for president. Because if anything, the crowds in Paris might have been larger than those in Berlin. In the July 23 Gallup Poll, Obama beat McCain as the preferred U.S. presidential candidate in Britain, France and Germany by lopsided margins. The highest numbers were in France -- a stunning 64 to 4 percent.

What is it about Obama that turns French heads? Some of the answers are idealistic. "People now feel that in America it's remarkable because of this ability to change," Solvit says. "From the time years ago that a black man could be lynched and now a black man could be president."

Obama backer Bernard-Henri Levy is effusive. "We French have the confused feeling that he is the living resurrection of the two greatest heroes, in our eyes, of modern America: Martin Luther King and John Kennedy. Yes, the reembodiment, in a single person, of King and JFK, that's how we perceive Obama.

From their culture-straddling perspective, Americans in Paris have a slightly different view of the French crush on Obama. Crystal Fleming, a 26-year-old Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Harvard University who is currently a traveling scholar at L'Institut d'Etudes Politiques at Paris, is often called upon to speak to the French media about Obama. "The French love him," she says, "for the same reasons that people around the world love him. There's such a level of disappointment and disgust with American policies and political arrogance. It didn't begin with the last administration, but it skyrocketed then."

But Fleming, an African-American who is studying how the history of the transatlantic slave trade is commemorated in France and the United States, has also noticed that the French affection for Obama helps them feel good about their own society. "They also see in him some of the aspects of their color-blind myths. The French esteem themselves as a color-blind society. They are, constitutionally, which is daily contradicted in racism and discrimination in France. But, regardless, they see him [Obama] as someone who wants to overcome communitaurisme" -- which basically refers to identity politics, the mobilization of minorities, and the fracturing of society along group lines -- "and to build bridges between groups and move beyond ethnic divisions. They like this."

Next page: "That makes Obama one of those idealized Americans that the French have always treasured"