Interview with Pierre Vimont, French Ambassador to the United States

Shortly after Christine Lagarde was apointed France’s finance minister by President Nicholas Sarkozy, she announced to the National Assembly that the French need to talk less and act more. The uproar on the floor of the Assembly on the Quai d’Orsay could be heard all the way across the Atlantic where Pierre Vimont, recently appointed as France’s ambassador to the United States, listened with delight. The idea that Madame Lagarde was advancing, he says, is what makes him like Americans so much. Usually for better, if sometimes for worse, Americans get things done.

In the course of an hour-long interview with Bonjour Paris, this was a theme that Ambassador Vimont returned to several times. He recalled traveling in the Midwest and the Great Plains—areas ambassadors don’t frequently visit—and being both moved and informed by talking with the people he met. It is one thing to read books about America’s westward expansion. It is very different to hear people talk about their great-grandparents coming out to farm in Nebraska in the late nineteenth century or about their grandparents weathering the Depression. The kinds of crops they planted, the livestock they raised, and the weather they endured seemed to him the “live testimony” of the ancestors as well as those alive and speaking in the present.

For Pierre Vimont, this explains a great deal about American character and culture—more specifically, that Americans are good at moving out, rebounding when something goes amiss, and moving ahead again. Less talk and more action. Yet at the same time, Vimont sees Americans as more sophisticated and knowledgeable than we seemed to him when he had his first posting in America at the Institute for East-West Security in New York in 1985. Unsure of the reasons for this change, he suggests that perhaps Americans have become more European—or perhaps more like Europeans. Of course the opposite is possible too, considering President Nicholas Sarkozy’s call for more work in addition to Minister Lagarde’s call for more action. Few answers could be more diplomatic.

Whatever the reason, the Ambassador’s observation comes from the vantage point of someone who has not been living here permanently and thus is more likely to spot changes—which may have come about slowly—than those who have been living here all along and barely have noticed the little increments here and there.

For the same reason, he made some good observations about the American primary campaigns. Their length and intensity he characterizes as “amazing,” but he notes, for example, that he saw Hillary Clinton twice, first in New Hampshire, later in the Midwest, and was taken with how much she had changed, how different she was in her presentation, her tone, and her message. Once again, it is a “capacity” he admires and sees as American. But he added a bit of a surprise. A number of American political consultants followed Sarkozy’s campaign for president and came away with one of Sarko’s favorite techniques, which is to use repeatedly certain messengers for certain messages.

While he does not make the connection, or comparison, directly, there are facts of contemporary French society that quite clearly concern him and seem to be founded on a resistance to change. He points out that the Grandes Écoles (or Polytechniques) are doing a first-rate job of preparing engineers and civil servants for their professions; he himself is an Énarque, a graduate of the École Normale d’Administration. But the universities, beginning with the Sorbonne, are not preparing their graduates well at all for work, nor are they encouraging them to study in fields where they might actually find employment. When unemployment among the young is high, it would make better sense, as he sees it, to look at opportunities rather than a traditional curriculum that, as the Bonjour Paris interviewers understood his observations, prepare the young to be café intellectuals.

He also believes that France could be more accommodating and attract even more foreign direct investment (it is now third behind Great Britain and the United States) with a more relaxed labor policy that would, among other things, delay if only slightly retirement and expand the work week if only by a few hours. On the other hand, he points with satisfaction to France’s nationwide high-speed Internet network, which is astonishingly fast and quite secure, and a labor force that is ever more productive and efficient.

What is striking in the course of the interview is that Pierre Vimont, a fairly tall and robust man, is so soft-spoken that one might at first think he’s shy. But perhaps it is rather a matter of being very composed and simply an equal with his guests, whom he does not rush, but to whom he gives ample time for questions. The same composure is reflected in his beautifully fitted black suit and his handsome but understated office without the usual Embassy Important furniture. No mahogany, no crystal, no polished brass, but plain angular furniture in black and ordinary water glasses, which the Ambassador hands to his guests, with a napkin, himself.

The single elegant touch is a marble bust of President Lincoln, acquired by one of his predecessors. He is the president the Ambassador and the French admire the most because he confronted the domestic problems of slavery and secession so forthrightly and successfully, and he’s pleased to have learned that Americans consistently think he was the best president we ever had.

Perhaps the most difficult French domestic problem he discusses resonates with Americans: immigration. There is no significant political pressure to deport illegal immigrants as there is in America, and since migrants, legal or not, make up eight percent of the French population, such a move would be as socially foolish and politically suicidal as it would be in America. The policy he sees is to reverse the kind of immigration that France experiences. As it is today, he says, ninety percent of immigrants come for family reasons or are economic refugees: families naturally want to reunite and even a low-end job in France, or any developed country, is better than unemployment in a developing nation. But that leaves only ten percent of migrants who come for professional reasons and have skills that can be put to work for personal and social benefit. He would like to see that number rise to fifty percent.

The problems in immigrant communities are a separate question, but just as pressing. The French government forbids the wearing of the veil by law for a reason. A woman, or especially a young girl, who does not want to wear the veil has an ally against the more radical Muslims who insist on it. The ally is the law which thus gives her an option. But the ambassador is quick to observe that the immigrant communities themselves have to rid themselves of the radicals or at least offer their friends and neighbors more attractive options. The government is helping by pumping money into the poorest banlieues inhabited by immigrants of all nationalities and religions in order to create more jobs and by improving the education in the public schools in those neighborhoods.

Getting back to America, he is asked what his greatest pleasure is here. “Being a consumer” is the answer without hesitation. He likes stores open around the clock and on Sundays, sales when the retailer wants them, and the accommodating ways of American retailers. They want you to be happy, and that is not always the case in France. Another pleasure is the safety of Washington which allows him to wander around wherever he wants to without security. Yet a third pleasure, or so it seems at first, is that Washington has more parties and dinners at embassies, think tanks, and private residences than any other city to which he has been posted, and that includes London, Paris, and New York. But sometimes, he says a little ruefully, that means “two breakfasts, two lunches, two dinners.”