Americaca: those fucking Frogs

Anti-Americanism has a long history in France. 'Consider Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte du Buffon, a leading 18th-century naturalist and man of science whose theories would prove influential on America's other critics in the 1700s. In works like ''Varieties in the Human Species'' (1749) and ''On the Degeneration of Animals'' (1766), Buffon concocted a set of bizarre taxonomies to demonstrate that the species of the New World were invariably shriveled and stunted. Of course, Buffon never actually visited the land he was writing about. Nevertheless, his claims so bothered Thomas Jefferson that he procured the carcass of a 7-foot Vermont moose to deliver to Buffon. Buffon - a petit homme who stood 5 feet tall - remained unimpressed, however, and refused to revise his opinions.' More garlic fumes here.