The French Way (10 page)

Most intellectuals dismissed the supposed American threat and distanced themselves from Lang's aggressive policies. Claude-Jean Bertrand, writing in
Esprit
, systematically dissected the errors of the cultural imperialist school, such as assuming that importing cultures passively received American products or that they were so fragile that they were easily overwhelmed. Bertrand also noted that much of so-called Americanization was superficial: “jeans on the backside of a young Russian don't make him Americanized.”
¹⁹
Another newsweekly ran an inquiry among the cognoscenti asking who thought Mickey Mouse was “a danger” to French culture.
²⁰
None of those surveyed liked Disney's cultural merchandise, yet no one thought it was a serious threat.

A few reproached the socialists as frauds. They singled out Serge Moati, a friend of Lang and Mitterrand, who had once declared, “We don't want to be the audiovisual garbage can for the United States,” but as director of FR-3 Moati won an award for broadcasting the Disney Channel as the best “French” TV program for children.
²¹
Journalist Jacques Julliard attacked the socialists as hypocrites who complained about the new barbarians from across the Atlantic yet feted the invader and courted Disney. The selection of France for Euro Disney was a symbol of capitulation—or worse, of powerlessness—according to Julliard, exposing the lack of creativity among the producers of French culture. What is the contemporary French equivalent of Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse, he asked? The animals of La Fontaine? Of Buffalo Bill? D'Artagnan? But they date from the distant past. “Today,” he asked, “where is our Rambo ?” The fault lay not entirely with the socialist government, he concluded, because French creativity seemed to be waning. Citing Umberto Eco's position that Disney was the kingdom of illusion, the triumph of the fake, “we will soon have in France a copy of the fake.”
²²

Still other intellectuals thought Lang was playing into the hands of the communists because he neglected Soviet imperialism—which
Lang stoutly denied. Pierre Daix took exception to the minister's failure to mention the “cultural genocide” facing Eastern European nations like Czechoslovakia and Poland, and omitting any mention of the physical and moral destruction of artists in the Soviet empire.
²³
Bernard-Henri Levy chided Lang for his “natural sympathy” for Cuba, “the tropical gulag,” and asked why he had ignored how the United States offered a safe haven for hundreds of intellectuals escaping totalitarianism. Levy found the Mexico address “comical” with its musty Marxism and “reactionary” in its evocation of cultural protectionism. He asked how a government that flattered itself with its “youthfulness” thought it could block American culture from generations “who learned to read, think, and feel with Warhol, Cunningham or even the Rolling Stones.”
²⁴

Lang's efforts in Deauville and Mexico City not only failed to win an endorsement from the intellectual community but prompted a good deal of dissent and mockery. This reception was consistent with how left-wing intellectuals had failed to rally to the socialists after their victory.
²⁵
The cool response awarded Lang was an expression of this distancing of intellectuals from socialist political practice.

Under siege Lang protested that he was neither anti-American nor a protectionist. He admired much about American culture, especially its vitality and relevance to contemporary life, and insisted that he had personally “discovered” many American artists.
²⁶
As minister he welcomed talented Americans to France, awarded honors to some, and refused to engage in protectionism, although France, he insisted, was justified in defending its cultural independence from American multinationals in any way it could. His Mexico City speech, he complained, had been distorted by the media as anti-American, when its aim had been to appeal to all UNESCO nations to stimulate their creative forces and resist the multinationals who would suffocate diversity. Lang denounced the charge that the socialists engaged in “poujadistchauvinist policies, when our ambition is to attract artists from all over the world.” Posing as a responsible minister against irresponsible
detractors, he explained that the socialist government—facing an economic crisis—had to mobilize all the nation's productive forces, including culture, to “reconquer the domestic market.” Why, for example, he asked, should France, which was once the principal exporter of musical instruments, now import them? Today's economic wars were fought with innovation and creativity, so “France and Europe would only sustain their vitality and their independence if they were up to the mark, for example, in winning the battle over audiovisual programming.”

There was, to be sure, an apparent contradiction between a minister who made American popular culture his adversary yet claimed he admired much of it, attended rock concerts, and gave awards to the likes of Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone. Lang thought there was a distinction. As he explained in an interview in New York, “There should be no confusion between living culture and…standardized
products, [which] are invading the media….Instead of choosing an easy solution and disseminating ordinary products we should disseminate living products.”
²⁷
The distinction between which American exports were “living” or creative and which were “standardized” or commercialized pap may not have been obvious to Americans, or even to the French—the television host Bernard Pivot, for example, said Stallone represented the worst of American movies.

Figure 2. Jack Lang awards Sylvester Stallone the honor of Chevalier des Arts et Lettres, 1992. Courtesy James Andanson/Corbis.

Ignoring his critics, Lang proceeded to stage a lavish international colloquium at the Sorbonne in February 1983 inviting hundreds of celebrities from all over the world. In attendance were economists, artists, intellectuals, scholars, and movie directors including the Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco and the film actress Sophia Loren. Lang rewarded many Americans, including William Styron, John Kenneth Galbraith, Francis Ford Coppola, Susan Sontag, and Norman Mailer, with a flight on the Concorde to Paris. Their collective task was to examine the relationship between creativity and current economic and social problems. Since the government under the premiership of Pierre Mauroy (1981-84) had made economic recovery its priority, Lang adapted. He articulated an expansive conception of culture that encompassed a wide range of creative tasks like industrial design and advertising, allowing him to present culture as relevant to the economic crisis. He spoke specifically about how industries like publishing, cinema, television, design, or haute couture could bring benefits in international trade. Other speakers offered less practical suggestions: Norman Mailer made an obtuse recommendation of taxing all plastic products because they symbolized consumer society. The popularity of
Dallas
, invoked by several participants, was offered as evidence for the danger posed by American television. Francois Mitterrand gave the closing address at the Sorbonne extravaganza, which seemed, for a moment, to make Paris once again the cultural center of the globe. But some of the attendees were not thrilled when the president asked his audience to assist in problem solving. The philosopher of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, worried about being co-opted while Umbert
Eco asserted that the task of artists like himself was “not to cure crises”; rather, he said, “I instigate them.”
²⁸

The French press was unimpressed with the notion of treating economic problems as an issue of creativity. It was rather implausible to argue that invigorating creativity would energize the economy and spur innovation and enterprise. Commentators ridiculed Lang's expansive definition of culture as
le tout-culturel.
And what Lang meant when he declaimed at the Sorbonne colloquium that “culture is poets plus electricity” seemed like flim-flam.
²⁹
Some journalists dismissed the colloquium as little more than daydreaming, while others demeaned it as a socialist effort at employing culture to burnish Mitterrand's reputation.
³⁰

In the midst of this Parisian cultural festival the
Wall Street Journal
ignited a fire storm when its arts editor Raymond Sokolov intruded, writing, “Instead of worrying about
Dallas
, Jack Lang should spend his time wondering why France is a nullity in contemporary, active world culture. Instead of posing as the savior of planet wide culture, he should ask himself why France has produced no novelists of real importance in twenty years, except Michel Tournier, why France has slipped out of view in the visual arts….”
³¹
Attacking
Dallas
, according to Sokolov, was “a perfect example of classic anti-Americanism, that mixture of envy and scapegoating, that anti-Semitism of the Left.”

The Left responded by disparaging the
Wall Street Journal
article as a Reaganite assault on the socialists. As a rebuttal
Le Matin
ran a special dossier in which Lang said he was astonished by the “childishness” of the “provocation,” adding sarcastically that it came from an American newspaper not known for being “very cultural.” Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, the historian, called Sokolov “ignorant” and noted the prestige of French luminaries like Michel Foucault and Claude Levi-Strauss among American academics. Others refuted Sokolov by citing contemporary French notables like Nathalie Sarraute and Marguerite Duras, by mocking the culture of
Dallas
and its central character J. R. Ewing, and scorning American pretensions—“since Vladimir Nabokov,”
who was a Russian emigre with an American passport, “whom do you have in the Pantheon of letters?”
³²

What fueled the Sokolov controversy was French pride and anxiety about cultural status. It also exposed doubts about Lang's grand strategy of reasserting French and European culture at the expense of America. Sokolov expressed, as Diana Pinto has explained, what many Frenchmen actually thought in private, that “French culture now existed mainly as a beacon for a desperate Third World and as an opposition to American cultural imperialism. Politicized cultural voluntarism was replacing genuine cultural creativity.”
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Not everyone was pleased with the socialists ostentatiously parading national culture for political ends and exciting anti-Americanism.

Resisting American commercial pap and assisting the culture industries were central to Lang's ministry, but they were not his only aims. The frenetic minister wanted, among other goals, to democratize culture, help President Mitterrand complete his
grands projets
like building a new opera house and the new national library, guard the national
patrimoine
, and, foster creativity of all sorts at all levels. Such an agenda forced him to fight continuous political, budgetary, and bureaucratic battles while his flamboyant showmanship, courtship of celebrities, and gaudy festivals caused a stir. The media joked about “Disneylang” and
la gauchecaviar.
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His programs extended over the entire decade despite the brief turn to the right in 1986-88 because the conservatives did not succeed in overturning his initiatives and Lang returned to direct cultural affairs for a second term from 1988 to 1993.

His most aggressive efforts at curbing Americanization focused on the audiovisual industry. The French cinema, which had been suffering from declining admissions, had nevertheless managed to retain a respectable 45 percent of box office receipts well into the 1970s before it fell victim to a more youthful audience and a wave of Hollywood blockbusters like
Star Wars.
Spectators stayed away from theaters and the American share of the domestic market soared; by the mid-1980s Hollywood films were selling as many tickets as were French movies.

Facing similar trends Italian filmmakers like Bernardo Bertolucci and Federico Fellini warned that European cinema faced “cultural genocide” and asked the French to take the lead in seeking redress through the European Community (EC). Lang took the issue to Brussels in 1984 and persuaded the European Commission to investigate the growing power of American films; eventually, as we shall see, it took action.

The socialist government also assisted the industry at home in 1982-83. Lang raised subsidies to the cinema, paid for in part by new taxes on television stations, and introduced tax incentives to private investors for financing the audiovisual industry.
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Every branch of the industry—producers, distributors, and theater owners—benefited from his largesse. The Ministry of Culture, along with several other ministries, also tried to protect the cinema by obstructing the use of videocassettes. In 1982, Lang, to the satisfaction of filmmakers and theater owners, required a one-year delay after its initial showing before a film could be sold as a video. Meanwhile Michel Jobert, the minister for foreign trade, invoked the trade deficit to block the entry of imported VCRs, mainly from Japan, by making them pass through customs at the tiny office in Poitiers, thus reducing the import flow to a trickle. Jobert, a notorious critic of America, justified his ruling with the wacky claim that “[t]he French really don't need VCRs.”
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The Ministry of Finance did its part by adding a stiff annual fee to owners of VCRs and raising the value-added tax on prerecorded videocassettes. Lang further helped by tightening regulations on television stations so that they favored local over foreign (i.e., American) materials.