The French Way (16 page)

Among his diverse historical and intellectual interests, Nora harbored a certain fascination with the United States. In 1963 he toured the country and wrote about its people and history. He found a dynamic society but one marred by racism, consumerism, inequality, and distrust of intellectuals. What dominated his thought about America was its distance or separation from France and Europe; he accepted the notion of American exceptionalism—or, at least, the American construction of its uniqueness. Persistent mutual incomprehension followed from this transatlantic gap. In 1966 he wrote about how American historians tried to escape the “weight of the past” or a European sense of history with its ruptures, ideologies, and conflicts and substitute a narrative of consensus and progress.
¹²²
At the core of their narrative was a faith in the universal anti-ideology of “Americanism.”

A decade later, writing in
Daedalus
, he firmly asserted that American and French intellectuals could not understand one another because they had different conceptions of social science and their own roles in society. American researchers thought their French colleagues sacrificed their objectivity by straying into politics, especially Marxism, while the French saw their American peers as “docile” and given to ratifying the status quo. Or, as Nora put it, American intellectuals invested themselves with a “function” while the French practiced a “ministry.” Even more important in accounting for their mutual incomprehension was their different conceptions of revolution. Where the American Revolution built a national consensus around the country's founding—“the national ideal absorbed the revolutionary ideal”—and marginalized the Left, the French Revolution destroyed consensus and made guarding the flame of revolution the
mater et magistra
of the Left's intelligentsia, lending it prestige as the counterforce to established power: “Revolution is the eternal future of a
country with a long memory, in America it is the eternal past of a nation which has no memory. It is this symmetry which makes for the incommunicability of the two cultures and sets the terms of the impossible dialogue.”
¹²³
Thus American intellectuals had trouble understanding why French youth preferred to be wrong with Sartre rather than right with Raymond Aron—that is, being anti-rather than pro-American.

There was a dismissive, if not condescending, tone in Nora's writing about America in the 1970s, as if American intellectuals were a conservative lot who sought refuge from reality in empiricism, parochialism, or an illusion of a happy past and a happier future. When they attempted to study France, they could not master the assumptions or intricacies of its cultural life. As for the French, except for a handful of brilliant exceptions who, in his eyes, never had much influence, “the United States has never occupied the central position in the mental geography of French intellectuals which England held in the eighteenth century, Germany in the nineteenth, or the Soviet Union and the Third World in the twentieth. A reflection, an offshoot of Europe: that is how America is always seen; the intelligentsia of the Old World has not yet discovered the New World.”
¹²⁴

During the 1980s Nora directly addressed the French public's view of America, but he shifted from condescension to detached analysis and concern. In his introduction to a special issue of the popular magazine
L'Histoire
devoted to “The American Adventure: From Lafayette to Reagan,” he continued to portray America as “incomprehensible” where common terms like
state, freedom
, or even
God
had different meanings so that “America is more foreign to us by being so close.” How, he asked, could the two societies understand one another when one nation was built on Catholicism, a peasantry, a monarchical and centralized past that entered modernity via a wrenching revolution while the other was a continent peopled with minorities, framed by a puritan and colonial background, a federalist structure, and a political consensus about its origin? Such a historical and cultural gap, Nora argued, was at the root of anti-and pro-American feelings: “Without
readily understanding [one another] people take refuge in passion. A deep rooted anti-Americanism lies dormant here alongside a flamboyant pro-Americanism.”
¹²⁵

Nora concluded both “-isms” were superficial because they expressed fantasies and circumstances like shifting appreciations of the international roles of the Soviet Union and the United States rather than true mutual understanding. He doubted that the facade of Americanization or the ease of travel and communication would enlighten the French about the American experience: “We do not willingly renounce the America of our mythology. Our natural rapport with the United States is not knowledge, but fascination. We only tolerate strong images, a spectacle on the big screen, the eternal other of old Europe. And we keep, for better or worse, this unreal America.”
¹²⁶
Nora the skeptic approved of serious historical research about America, but concluded that anti-Americanism, as well as pro-Americanism, were resistant to rational investigation because they expressed illusions and emotions.

A second figure standing at the center of Parisian intellectual life was Jean-Marie Domenach, the journalist turned public philosopher. The former editor of
Esprit
was a professor of humanities and social studies at the Ecole Polytechnique in the 1980s. Twenty years earlier he had provided an acerbic commentary on American consumer society from the perspective of the Catholic Left, denouncing it for debasing human beings and human relations, noting how the pursuit of material comfort begat a spiritual and moral crisis represented by covetousness, waste, crime, and drugs. But he admired the American universities that had been his hosts. To Domenach, the events of 1968 represented Europe's first counterattack against the consumerism and cultural flattening transmitted by America, though he later reflected that the upheaval failed to slow Americanization. Speaking to an American academic audience in 1979 he reminded them that one topic all French intellectuals, both on the right and the left, agreed on was that France was a model of a balanced, rational, happy civilization that could be destroyed
by an American inspired “technical frenzy. “ They also shared a horror of the United States as a country without memory, marred by “odious mechanization” and a mass society that crushed any hint of social hierarchy.
¹²⁷
Yet Domenach now distanced himself from his former anti-American vocabulary, muted his misgivings about American society, and focused on the failures of the French people at coping with the new age of the media. In his writings and talks from the late 1970s on, America became a laboratory or reference for the coming of mass culture rather than an external enemy.

Americanization, according to Domenach, had inspired some rather stupid commentary, especially that of anti-americanisme primaire. Even though he retained reservations about mass culture, he no longer held America responsible for its global reach, only for initiating and proselytizing it. If Americans introduced blue jeans, Coca-Cola, and reality TV shows, the world eagerly embraced them. (Though, in fact, Europeans originated reality TV.) Europeans had only themselves to blame, was Domenach's reproach. They had neglected their own national cultures, had lost their creativity, had accepted the superficial global culture, and allowed their collective imaginations to atrophy. “It's not the Americans who have prevented the French from writing good novels,” he wrote.
¹²⁸
The threat was not, as some held, from a media saturated with American images; it came from a collective passivity about culture that preferred inferior creations like insipid television programs or Disney's industrialized leisure. “Passivity is a determining element of our cultural life”: this, rather than some transatlantic imposition of a banal mass culture, was the source of
le malfrançais.
¹²⁹

To be sure, Americans, according to Domenach, had certain advantages in producing and spreading mass culture. Hollywood films, for example, profited from big budgets and America's special place in the European imagination—a dreamlike landscape that was both familiar and exotic. More profoundly, Americans, far more readily than the French, expressed the modern imagination. America, Domenach argued, was born in the age of democracy and large-scale industry, and its
artists and writers were at ease in inscribing the modern—for example, the megapolis or technology—in what they created. The French imagination, in contrast, dated from Joan of Arc or the court at Versailles, so that “a bulldozer in Touraine is a dangerous monster” for a French reader.
¹³⁰
Moreover, Domenach contended, Americans retained an Enlightenment confidence in human progress coupled with religious faith. These certainties provided them with sources of creativity that Europeans—the French, in particular—had abandoned.
¹³¹
“French intellectuals have difficulty in excusing Americans for maintaining a faith they have lost,” he noted.
¹³²
According to Domenach, the French could learn from Reagan's America, where “God is modern.”

What should be done about the flood of mass culture associated with America, he asked? After endorsing Jack Lang's efforts in principle, Domenach distanced himself from a nationalist or protectionist reflex. Although he had signed the petition of the Committee for National Identity, Domenach clarified his views, observing, “The worst service we can render our culture would be to defend it as ‘national

culture' French culture is grand because of its universal vocation; it

becomes impoverished when one treats it as an expression of a national particularity and it would accelerate its decline if one were to make it an instrument of anti-American nationalism….Let's stop ‘defending,' let's try to promote and assist. Let's stop denigrating other cultures, let's try to love and fortify our own….”
¹³³
In his studies of French and European cultural decline Domenach castigated his own people rather than the Americans. It was Gallic linguistic and cultural laziness that accounted for the success of the American media. The French needed to reacquaint themselves with their history and culture as well as learn about the art, literature, music, and cinema, of their fellow Europeans. He noted that, as a teacher in Paris, almost all his students had visited the United States, but a majority of them had not seen the nearby cathedral at Chartres. Domenach recommended that French elementary schools teach English because it was vital in fields like science, technology, and business, but that secondary schools should require a second

European language so that French children could have access to another European culture. Above all, the French, and the Europeans, had to recover their creativity and use it to enter the world of mass culture: “When our cinema and television are capable of producing a series like
Dallas
or films of the type that Americans made about the war in Vietnam, then the French will make a valuable contribution to European audiovisual production. French identity will be in step with Europe only if it begins to assert itself boldly and only if it agrees to enter the era of mass culture without hesitation.”
¹³⁴

The third figure in this trio who banished anti-americanisme primaire was Regis Debray. As Mitterrand's confidant and onetime companion of Che Guevara, Debray, in what he called his “confession,” provided a lively and candid account of his itinerary.
¹³⁵
Yes, he acknowledged before an audience at New York University, he had been anti-American and, in a certain sense—that of opposing American cultural imperialism—he still was; but he then proceeded to deny the label for himself by distinguishing his views from the partisans of anti-americanisme primaire and trying to convince his audience that his current stance was reasonable.

His anti-Americanism was generational, Debray declared. He came of age (b. 1940) when U.S. support of dictatorships in Latin America outraged a young radical. All that remained of his guerilla days was his moustache, he playfully added, and that facial hair would deny him a job at Euro Disney. In fact, he insisted, he opposed all forms of imperialism whether it was that of the French in Africa or the Soviets in Eastern Europe. The American empire emerged not, as some Marxists contended, because of capitalism or because of an evil conspiracy, but simply because the United States was unopposed by other countervailing forces. Today, according to Debray, the problem was still the fight against American imperialism—not trying to topple the
caudillos
, as in the 1960s, but stemming the flood of American culture: “I fight the present hegemony exercised by American power on consciences and peoples…” (206). The struggle was not between France and America,
but between “culture and subculture” (.
sous-culture
), and it was everyone's battle (212). The source of American power was the television set in everyone's living room that colonized imaginations. As a colleague of Jack Lang, he defended the minister's protectionist policies while at the same time explicitly condemning anti-americanisme primaire. The battle was against American kitsch, against the aesthetics of mass media that simplified life, reduced experience to sentimentality, and turned politics Manichean.
Homo americanus
, the creature of the mass media, could be found everywhere in Europe. As an antidote to this mentality Debray offered one suffused with ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty.

Anti-americanisme primaire, in his view, was beneath contempt; it was a kind of pathology or hysteria, an essentialism, an ahistorical stereotype that refused to try to understand either the complexities of America—citing Las Vegas, but not Harvard University—or what was facing France. It simply assigned all the sins of modernity to America. Such prejudice was common among old-fashioned intellectuals, but did not exist within the business community or the media. Debray refused to have his views identified as “anti-American” in the sense of this phobia (202). How, he asked, can you be anti-American when America makes us all dream, when it creates the imaginary? This was America's greatest triumph. One had to be a killjoy, or a Trappist monk, to be anti-American today. Debray affably reminded his audience of how much he liked Americans, how he envied their freedom and openness, their universities, museums, and libraries. If he had to go into exile, his choice, he revealed, would be between Italy and the United States. The other object of scorn, besides those who hated America, were those who idolized it. These philo-Americans, in his view, failed to understand America any better than those who deplored it. They ignored the widening gap between the American dream and the reality of shabby cities, high infant-mortality rates, disastrous pollution, low political participation, and ubiquitous religious practice.