Bush, Chirac Will Skip Louisiana Purchase Celebration

Dashing Louisiana’s hopes that it would be the site of a public rapprochement between President Bush and French President Jacques Chirac, representatives for both men said this week that they will not attend a ceremony marking the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase.

Although officials said the ceremony will still take place and will include visiting dignitaries, the state’s grand plans appear to have fallen victim to the souring relationship between the United States and France, which opposes Bush’s decision to wage war in Iraq.

“The reality is that people were very concerned with the international policy related to the war,” Phyllis Mayo, a director of the Louisiana Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism, said Tuesday. “It’s tough. You want your friends to be with you. The reality is that sometimes your friends can’t be with you, for very good reasons. But they are still your friends.”

The ceremony is the culmination of three years of planning and a year’s worth of celebration in Louisiana. This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, when the United States bought 828,000 square miles of French-controlled territory from Napoleon Bonaparte in what many historians call history’s greatest real estate deal.

Louisiana plans to stage an elaborate ceremony Dec. 20 at the Cabildo, a historic building in the French Quarter of New Orleans that was once the seat of the Spanish government and is now part of the state museum complex. The ceremony will take place in the same room where representatives of France signed over the land on Dec. 20, 1803.

The yearlong celebration, which has included everything from museum exhibitions to a specially commissioned opera, will culminate with a lavish reenactment of the document transfer performed by scores of actors in period costumes.

The event took on greater importance in recent months, as diplomats staged a delicate dance in an effort to get both presidents to attend, and piece together a public reconciliation of sorts between the men and the two countries. Representatives have said Chirac, who lived in New Orleans twice in the 1950s and has fond memories of the city, would have liked to have attended.

The diplomatic effort got far enough that a tentative script had been proposed for a September exchange between the presidents in New York, in which Bush would have invited Chirac to join him in New Orleans. But the invitation never came.

French officials declined comment. At the White House, spokesman Ken Lisaius noted that Bush receives thousands of invitations each year; he said a busy schedule prevented the president from attending.

“We frequently have to turn down more invitations than we accept,” Lisaius said. “There are always difficult decisions to make.”

Asked whether a chilly relationship between Bush and Chirac contributed to the decision, Lisaius referred the question to the State Department, where a spokesman said the decision was made by the White House and declined further comment.

In Louisiana, the development is widely seen as another instance of the souring relationship between the two countries. Although bashing the French has become something of a sport in Washington, where French fries were renamed “freedom fries,” Louisiana has taken a financial hit.

Citing an inhospitable business climate in America, French companies, which hold $1.8 billion in assets in Louisiana, canceled several scouting trips for new business opportunities. More than 75,000 French tourists also visit Louisiana annually -- the second-highest number of any foreign country after England -- many of them to southern reaches of the state that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis once called “little France.” Those numbers are expected to drop too.

The cancellations came after Louisiana Gov. M.J. “Mike” Foster Jr. said on his radio show that Chirac had “gone off the deep end” in opposing the war. The Republican governor’s remark stunned some in Louisiana, which prizes its social and business relationships with France.

“I am disappointed for many reasons,” Damien Regnard, president of the French-American Chamber of Commerce in New Orleans, said of the presidents’ decisions not to attend the ceremony. “It would have been a great opportunity to see the two presidents side by side. It would have been a great opportunity to talk about 200 years of friendship.”

With typical Louisianan resilience, however, business leaders are trying hard to shrug off the loss.

Warren Perrin, president of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, pointed out that U.S. officials clearly did not think the issue through. After all, he said, what better way to rankle the French than to remind them that the United States once bought enough land for 15 new states for $18 a square mile?

“If anybody likes to embarrass France, what a great opportunity to remind them that they were the victims of the greatest land sale in the history of the world,” Perrin said. “But it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. Too much tension.”