For Dominique Pipier, avoiding American foods came easily. She lives surrounded by fresh produce in the south of France and wouldn’t darken the door of a McDonald’s.

The real challenge in Ms. Pipier’s decision to join “Le Boycott” – as the French movement to avoid everything American is colloquially known – is to wean herself off the ubiquitous U.S. internet giants. To show her anger at U.S. President Donald Trump’s policies, the 73-year-old stopped ordering packages from Amazon and cancelled her subscriptions to the Seattle-based giant’s video streaming and music services.

Ms. Pipier is a member of a French group that ironically uses Facebook to call for a boycott of all things American, and for members to buy local instead. Conversation in the group routinely points to Canada – and the “Buy Canadian” movement that has emerged since Mr. Trump launched his trade war against the country – as inspiration for their own actions. The group, which is trying to shift its followers to Mastodon, a social-media platform created by a German developer, has accumulated more than 28,000 members in the five weeks since its creation.

Ms. Pipier already used Germany’s Ecosia, rather than Google or Bing, as her main search engine. But, she acknowledges, replacing other U.S.-based online services she’d grown to rely on – such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Google Translate – will take more time.

“It’s slow and tedious, but I want to make the effort,” she said in an interview from her home in the southern French city of Aix-en-Provence. After watching Mr. Trump threaten Canada, Greenland and Panama with annexation, Ms. Pipier said she wished to do something “to feel less powerless.”

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Édouard Roussez, a 33-year-old hops farmer from the north of France who created the “Boycott USA: Buy French and European!” group. “Every time we hear a new phrase from Donald Trump or Elon Musk, we gain more followers.”

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Mr. Roussez said he started the group after watching what he saw as Mr. Trump’s “humiliation” of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during the leaders’ Oval Office meeting on Feb. 28. That day, Mr. Trump and U.S. Vice-President JD Vance berated Mr. Zelensky to accept a ceasefire that would allow Russia to keep the territory it has gained since invading Ukraine in 2022.

“I had the impression that day that the future of Europe was being decided between Moscow and Washington – and I didn’t vote for these people,” Mr. Roussez said. “We have to show Trump that we’re not in accordance with his politics, and to do it in a way that Donald Trump will understand, that Americans will understand.”

While not yet a mass movement, “Le Boycott” appears to have widespread support in France. A poll conducted last month by the Paris-based Ifop group found that 62 per cent of respondents among the 1,000 French who were surveyed supported a boycott of American companies in response to Mr. Trump’s policies, with Mr. Musk’s Tesla and X brands, along with Jeep, topping the list of ones they wanted to avoid. Thirty-two per cent said they were already boycotting American businesses.

The boycott campaign was growing even before Wednesday, when Mr. Trump slapped 20-per-cent tariffs on most goods from the European Union while unveiling various levels of tariffs on most U.S. trading partners.

In the aftermath, French President Emmanuel Macron called the tariffs “brutal and unfounded” and called for European companies to suspend all investment in the U.S. “until things are clarified with the United States.” A headline in Le Monde announced: “Trump declares commercial war on the rest of the world.”

Within 24 hours of Mr. Trump’s speech, 2,000 new members had joined the Facebook boycott group.

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Ronald Hatto, a lecturer on political science at Sciences Po university in Paris, said that while France was once famous for its reflexive anti-Americanism, that sentiment had largely faded in recent years as younger generations grew up learning English and absorbing U.S. culture.

Mr. Trump appears to be undoing much of that goodwill. In addition to the boycott movement, France has seen a series of arson attacks targeting Tesla cars and charging stations.

The Ifop poll found that just 25 per cent of French felt more sympathy than antipathy for the U.S. That’s down from a high of 65 per cent while Barack Obama was president. Affection for the United States is lower now than even during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which France opposed and which previously marked a low point in U.S.-French relations, with some American restaurants renaming their French fries “freedom fries” in a show of anger.

The poll results also showed “a phenomenon of substitution in favour of the USA’s neighbours, first and foremost Canada.” The poll, which was conducted for nyc.eu, an online guide for tourists considering visiting New York, found 72 per cent of respondents were interested in visiting Canada, compared with 51 per cent who would consider visiting the United States. No margin of error was given for the poll, which was conducted online.

Mr. Roussez said sympathy for Canada was strong in his country because Canadians were seen as being in the lead of what was becoming a shared struggle.

“The kind of popular mobilization in Canada, we’re not yet seeing that in France or in Europe,” he said. “Canadians are the ones on the front line. Actually, we’re all on the front line, but we’re not yet talking about the annexation of France.”