The French Way (54 page)

There is yet another aspect, besides Washington's unilateralism and divergent social and economic policies, that accounts for the more threatening posture of America in the 1990s. American domination extended beyond its military, economic, and technological prowess to encompass mass culture including the cinema, television, fashion, fast food, music, and language itself. There was a growing sense that France was being overrun by America, whether it was the mounting number of McDonald's franchises, the long lines at Disneyland Paris, the sale of American
clothes and music, the saturation of TV with American programs, or the triumph of Hollywood blockbusters. In 1998 Hollywood movies earned almost 70 percent of ticket sales in France. Of the top twenty films only three were French—the rest were American. As if this were insufficient, Microsoft and the Internet also arrived as the newest carriers of America. Worst of all, this surge of Americanization arrived when the French already thought of themselves as under siege by the bureaucrats in Brussels, by immigrants, and by globalization in general.

Americanization may have concerned all Europeans, but it antagonized the French more than it did others. It seemed to target many of the markers of French identity—more so than it did in Germany, Britain, or Italy. That is, to the extent that French national identity was defined by food, wine, agriculture, fashion, and a certain conception of high culture—one that featured literature, the fine arts, language, and the cinema—then America seemed to trample on these signifiers. In a country whose identity was heavily attached to
haute cuisine, la gastronomie, le terroir, haute couture, les beaux arts
, and
la langue franfaise
—then McDonald's, Tex-Mex food, GMOs, Ralph Lauren, Coca-Cola, movies like
American Pie
, rap music, television ads in American English, and television shows like
Baywatch
seemed aimed at the essence of Frenchness. American English in particular not only eclipsed French as the language of cultural and international communication but also corrupted the native tongue at home. While other Europeans passively accepted this linguistic invasion, Jacques Toubon as minister of culture in 1994—to the mirth of many Americans—tried to police the language. Food in particular caused trouble. Jose Bove responded to such worries by playing on the need to safeguard the small farmer, healthy food,
bon gout
, tradition, and diversity against (American) multinationals,
la malbouffe
, and GMOs. In other words, as the polls showed, many of the French wanted to draw a line against an Americanized, globalized, and homogenized culture. They may have waited in line to see
Titanic
and even eaten at the Golden Arches, but they refused to be overrun. Thus they told pollsters that they found much
of American popular culture “excessive.” Americanization in the 1990s struck at the heart of French identity—and it stirred resistance.

The French Malaise and American Triumphalism

An adequate explanation of negative French perceptions should look not just to transatlantic rivalries but to life within the Hexagon. It was commonly said in the early 1990s that the French were in a “funk”; they were, according to the experts, nostalgic about the past, worried about the present, and pessimistic about the future. The prestigious journal
Le Dibat
featured essays about the “French malaise,” and bookstores carried titles like
French Fears, French Blues
, and
Is France Going to Disappear?
Stanley Hoffmann wrote an article titled “France, Keeping the Demons at Bay”; and government planners worried about the disarray of French identity.
¹¹³

The French were in a defensive crouch and this defensiveness had its roots in what was often described at the time as the “French malaise,” referring to a loss of confidence, a feeling of decline, a sense of waning independence, and concern about a vanishing national identity. The causes of this malaise were numerous and some date back, as we have seen, to the 1970s or earlier with the exhaustion of two postwar identity narratives, Gaullism and communism, and the disintegrative effects of long-term socioeconomic change—especially consumer society—that generated nostalgia for a vanishing rural life and for much else, like Catholicism, that had traditionally defined Frenchness. The disappearance, or what some called the
desertification
, of the traditional countryside provoked a warning from one senator: “We are spoiling France, we are undermining its identity.”
¹¹⁴
The enthusiastic reception of Pierre Nora's multivolume, national history titled
Les Lieux de mimoire
(Realms of Memory) suggested that in a time of uncertainty the French sought refuge in the memories of the nation as they searched for anchors in the new fluid and diverse society that lacked
the old defining institutions, social classes, habits, and elite culture that once gave it its character.
¹¹⁵

The more immediate causes for national melancholy included concern about an immigrant Muslim population that seemed to resist assimilation; intolerance exposed by the presence of these same immigrants; a faltering economy, especially double digit unemployment; a loss of control to Brussels and the EU; looming crises in social programs like social security; doubts about the quality of the educational system; the retreat of French influence in world affairs; frustration with a political class that seemed closed and corrupt; and rising urban pathologies, especially crime. Urban disorder and the state's ineffectiveness prompted a distressed socialist deputy to exclaim that “postwar society is falling apart.”
¹¹⁶

Given the multiple sources for the national malaise, America could only be one contributing—though surely not the primary—factor in the psychodrama. None of three major challenges—immigration, globalization, or European integration—were principally about America, but they were frequently connected to it in an indirect way. Muslim immigrants and their alleged resistance to assimilation raised the possibility that the French republic, especially its educational system, was failing. But Americans seemed to mock assimilation with their advocacy of multiculturalism as the preferred approach to immigration. Both extreme right and Jacobin Republicans in turn rebuked American multiculturalism. And globalization, abetted by Brussels—or so it was argued—seemed to drain away national identity through porous borders, outsourced jobs, businesses lost to developing countries, and the arrival ofworkers from Eastern Europe. Here, too, one could detect the hand of Uncle Sam. Globalization, which the French more than other Europeans attached to the United States, was allegedly an American plot that primarily benefited the Americans just as the EU pried open the Hexagon to Anglo-American interests.

French national pride is a given. But the irritability and pessimism of the 1990s were extraordinary. The social, economic, and cultural
transformations of the postwar decades created a sense of national loss and vulnerability that accounts, at least in part, for the testiness. The vanishing peasant, immigration, open borders, and Americanization intersected, or clashed, with a collective memory of what France was and, many thought, should be. Rapid change struggled against a sentimental reluctance to accept it. As Pierre Birnbaum explained, “Our problem is that we have not found the way to modernize while preserving our imagined community.”
¹¹⁷
The French became uneasy about their inherited sense of collective identity, purpose, and direction. The malaise was both mental and sentimental—it derived from a sense of
diracinement
or uprootedness that was both real and imagined and that was expressed in several ways, ranging from nostalgia to paranoia. An easy way out was to blame America. A number of socialist deputies attributed France's malaise to its “progressive Americanization.”
¹¹⁸
Or, as it was said, “on s'anglo-saxonise de plus en plus.” As one expert writing about the morose mood of his compatriots in 1998 observed, “Today France is torn more than ever between the desire to be a modern, normal country and the reflex to cling to the belief that France is not like other nations. The first choice presupposes openness, flexibility, and a secure sense of one's identity. The second opposes globalization, is wary of a more unified Europe, and embraces anti-Americanism.”
¹¹⁹

The malaise surfaced when the Maastricht Treaty, which aimed at advancing European integration, faced a referendum in 1992 and almost half the electorate voted against it. Although the reasons for this opposition were numerous, a principal one was that many voters blamed the European Union for expediting the erosion of national identity—for example, by supposedly fostering immigration, globalization, and Americanization (e.g., American television programs). Analysis of the Maastricht referendum suggests opposition came largely from farmers, workers, and the unemployed; from the countryside and depressed industrial cities; and from those who felt most threatened by recent changes, whereas the electorate that approved was more highly educated,
held better jobs, had experience of international travel, and lived in major cities.
¹²⁰
Almost two out of three Parisians, for example, favored the accord.
Le Monde
observed that the vote divided France in two: “a France of fear, of preserving vested interests, of rejecting the other, of indifference to the world, and a France, open to the exterior, convinced that responses of the past will not do for the twenty-first century….”
¹²¹
The Maastricht referendum revealed the anxieties generated by the massive transformation of French economy, society, and culture since the war. The testy mood of the fin de siecle expressed the apprehension and defensiveness that came with recognition of the loss of an “Old France.”

Expressed in socioeconomic terms, France had chosen modernization during the 1950s and ‘60s, but not everyone accepted the consequences of this transformation and many felt disoriented by the 1990s. As Alain Duhamel wrote, “French fears do not prefigure the future, they reflect the difficulty of purging the past.”
¹²²
It may be useful to examine in more depth one of these social changes or ruptures that informed the malaise—that of the countryside.

One of the most striking ruptures was the disappearance of peasant society. The family farm and the rural life associated with farming receded or were so transformed that the way of life that historically defined Frenchness virtually vanished.
¹²³
The social class that still accounted for a third of the workforce at midcentury fell to less than 5 percent, and this social fragment bore no resemblance to the historic class called “peasants.” Since the Second World War, over half the farms—many of which were cherished family units—disappeared and large farms came to provide the bulk of total output. The family farm and diversified agriculture all but vanished because of the need for concentration and specialization.
Le terroir
(or “soil/climate”) was replaced by
le bassin
(“basin” or “field”), as in
bassin cerealier
(“grain field”). Those who remained in the rural setting were an aging population and many who did reside there were not farmers; they were retirees or farm wives who supplemented farm income by working outside agriculture. Even the link between land and agriculture was broken
with crops grown
hors-sol.
Surviving farmers, as Bertrand Hervieu has pointed out, lost their historic mission of providing food for their compatriots. When markets became global, when the French spent less and less on food, when farm products lost their local character and were sold by brand name, when farm commodities became raw material for prepared food, then the connection between food and farm was less tangible and more remote. Hervieu concluded, “In the decade [1980s] when France became the second agricultural exporting power [in the world] it ceased to be an agrarian society.”
¹²⁴

In this context Laurence Wylie's celebrated study
Village in the Vaucluse
is relevant. Wylie told how one Provencal village, the town of Roussillon, was transformed after his initial stay in 1950. Writing in 1987, Wylie explained how the old village, once marked by polyculture farms, isolation and fear of outsiders, a lack of amenities, and anxiety about the future had become a wealthy resort community with cosmopolitan residents, boutiques, and a sense of connection with the region, the nation, and the world.
¹²⁵
In other communes like Roussillon that have become tourist attractions, professional organizers have tried to re-create traditional festivals at which farmers play at using old farm tools. When farming becomes entertainment, then a way of life has been abandoned.

For a society that for a millennium defined itself by its peasantry and in modern times kept a larger portion of its population on the land longer than other industrialized nations, the transformation of the countryside diminished a social stratum that anchored the French to their past. The French of the fin de siecle had difficulty locating their identity in a vanishing way of life. What had been possible in 1900, or even in 1950, was no longer possible in 1990. In itself this vanished world would not mean a loss of identity because the French, like every other community, have multiple references for defining themselves. But some of these fundamental references—such as language or Catholicism—in addition to the peasantry were being challenged and thus the waning of
la Franceprofonde
was an important loss.