The French Way (56 page)

Yet another difference in contemporary anti-Americanism was the displacement of the “other.” The space once monopolized by the Americans became rather crowded at the fin de siecle, and this had the effect of diffusing phobias about outsiders. The American menace became diluted by the emergence of alleged dangers mounted by new “others”—the domestic Muslim population, EU commissioners, East European workers, and cheap labor in developing countries. In the 1950s America offered a convenient, catchall target for critics like the communists, who could attack Uncle Sam as the scapegoat for everything from German rearmament and the loss of colonies to the adulteration of literature (i.e., comic books and the
Reader's Digest)
that ailed the Fourth Republic. But by the 1990s Americans, despite their hyperpower status, could not convincingly be blamed for all the country's troubles: there were other culprits.

A final end-of-the-century distinction was the retreat of the dystopians or partisans of
anti-americanismeprimaire
and the corresponding advance of their rivals, the anti-anti-Americans. The former no longer represented the voice of St. Germain des Pres as they had during the early postwar decades. The fin-de-siecle polemics of the likes of Jean Baudrillard and Alain de Benoist met counterattacks from intellectuals like Jean-Francois Revel, Andre Glucksmann, Jacques Julliard, Bernard-Henri Levy, Guy Sorman, and Pascal Bruckner, some of whom insisted that demonizing Uncle Sam only served to confirm the perception of national decline and blind the French to learn from the New World.
¹³⁴
Nor did it seem that the dystopians had the same status they once enjoyed. If the anti-American monthly
Le Monde diplomatique
had a large circulation, it was less prestigious than either
Esprit
or
Les Temps modernes
were in the days ofJean-Marie Domenach and Jean-Paul Sartre.
¹³⁵

“Primary anti-Americanism,” furthermore, lacked the bite of the Cold War because it was no longer informed by a coherent alternative. Once there was the Soviet dream, or the social democratic model, or Gaullist grandeur. By the end of the century it was not apparent what the alternative to American-led globalization was—other than nostalgia for tradition, or a revival of Republican solidarity, or a new European identity, or construction of French modernity that was not American.

This chapter began with a paradox: anti-Americanism seemed more illogical at the fin de siecle than it did in the postwar period because Americanization and globalization had transformed France. Transatlantic interdependence had advanced so far that complaints often seemed incongruous and anachronistic. When French investments poured into the United States in the 1990s and when Vivendi, the French communications and utilities giant, bought Universal Studios and the publisher Houghton-Mifflin and bid for control of the American water service industry, worrying about the investment of American pension funds in France seemed unreasonable. Legislating against American English seemed silly when it was commonly used by business leaders, scientists, academics, and others and permeated French popular culture. And certain actions aimed against American business were just amusing, such as when the government, in order to maintain a competitive market for soft drinks, blocked the expansion of Coca-Cola—at the request of Pepsi-Cola.

Yet the growth of anti-Americanism made sense if one looked behind the polls and the posturing for the reasons why the French displayed growing apprehension. Above all there was the
hyperpuissance
, American triumphalism, and intrusive American-led globalization—all of which challenged a society plagued with self-doubt about its identity and prone to defensiveness. In 1999, at the end of his tenure in Paris as U.S. ambassador, Felix Rohatyn spoke of the enormous weight of the United States in world affairs, mentioning the pressure of its financial institutions on the French stock market, for example; he
warned that the United States must avoid appearing like a bully.
¹³⁶
The Yankee bully aroused Gallic anxiety and prompted retaliation.

Anxiety generated a complicated reaction from the French. First, they directed criticism at the United States. The public reproached the United States for its domineering posture in world affairs, censured its socioeconomic policies, and expressed ambivalence about American popular culture. The self-congratulatory mood across the Atlantic provoked the French to expose the hollowness of American claims to social and economic progress. Second, there was self-defense: the French tried to protect what was deemed essential from the grasp of its friend. The French complained that they wanted fewer American movies and television programs. They rallied behind government efforts at maintaining “the cultural exception” and subsidizing the cinema and agriculture. They made Jose Bove a national hero and sent their children to special classes that instructed them about bon gofit so that they would be less tempted by fast food. In short, the French rebuffed America and asserted that they could chart their own way to modernity—without imitating their transatlantic cousins.

France was facing disruptive change, and it was easy to indict the United States for it. But contemporary anti-Americanism was not mere scapegoating—in the sense of blaming America for some imagined threat. Rather, the transformation the French faced was distressing and America was one of its agents. Globalization, and its partner Americanization, challenged a traditional self-image of “Frenchness” and America promoted and benefited from it. Whether it was food, the national cinema, or language, America usurped these signifiers of identity. And Americans sometimes browbeat their friends. The tormenters were not just officials in Washington; corporate America often misbehaved. Take, for example, the imperious conduct of Disney in building its theme park or the Coca-Cola Company's marketing abuses that earned the company fines from the French government. America was in part responsible for the troubles associated with late-twentieth-century globalization.

To be sure, this fin-de-siecle anti-Americanism seemed unfair and misguided in some respects. It was unfair, for example, to pretend, as the dystopians believed, that American leadership in fields like global security, mass entertainment, or genetically modified seeds brought no benefits, only loss. It was misguided to blame what was wrought by various forces, including globalization, solely on the United States and to omit French complicity. A majority of the French wanted to globalize, modernize, Americanize, and expand European integration. Suburban sprawl made France look more and more like America, but this was not the fault of Americans. What seemed like duplicity to anti-French critics in the United States represented a nation trying to adapt to change and finding some solace in assailing the hegemonic power and champion of market-based globalization.

Following an international conference sponsored by the United States advancing worldwide democracy, Madeleine Albright sparred with Hubert Vedrine. Only France had refused to sign the manifesto. The U.S. secretary of state admonished the French foreign minister for failing to lead an effort at improving solidarity among democracies, reminding him that France had sent the Marquis de Lafayette to assist America's fight for freedom. Vedrine supposedly smiled and replied, “Ah, but you see
chere
Madeleine, Lafayette did not go to help the Americans, he went to defeat the British.”
¹
Franco-American misunderstandings have a long history, and it is the purpose of this book to help Americans understand France—in particular, to clarify how the French, in recent decades, have viewed America and transatlantic relations.

To the French at the fin de siècle America appeared in two forms, real and imaginary. There was first the palpable, inescapable presence of the United States. Its military might guaranteed French and European security during and after the Cold War and its power proved essential to ending violence in the Balkans and defending Europeans from dangers generated outside the continent like Iraqi ambitions in the Persian Gulf. The United States doubled as the diplomatic hegemon, safely steering the potentially dangerous process of German reunification and forcing a settlement on the combatants in Bosnia. It was, at the same time, a financial, economic, and technological colossus
that commanded the attention of the French. The dollar exchange rate; American investors like Calpers; trade in products like hormone-treated beef; companies like Microsoft and Proctor and Gamble; the science and technology represented by the Internet, the Strategic Defense Initiative , AIDS therapies, and Silicon Valley—all impinged on them. So did American mass culture in the form of Euro Disney, McDonald's outlets, films like
Titanic
, television series like
Baywatch
, the sounds and images of Michael Jackson and Mariah Carey, fashions by Ralph Lauren, and advertisements in American English. The character and magnitude of this outside presence gave the French reason to both welcome and worry about America—to be ambivalent.

Enveloping the reality of America and informing the French response to it was the image of the New World. This fantasized America was both a model and a threat, an “other” to be both emulated and rejected. Here was a second source of Gallic ambivalence constructed around binaries of perception. Americans were simultaneously viewed as individualists and conformists, craven materialists and religious zealots, humanitarians and racists. The United States was either isolationist or imperialist, an ally or a rival. And American prosperity represented either the coming globalized economy symbolized by Silicon Valley or “jungle capitalism” associated with urban homelessness. Accordingly, most discourse about the New World was mixed in a normative sense. Contradictory expressions were the rule so that perceptions were usually compounds combining philo-and anti-American attitudes—except at the political extremes where derision was uninhibited. This “America” of Gallic fantasies emerged from stereotypes, an inherited discourse, media images, and misinformation as well as collective hopes and anxieties. It was often a caricature that simplified complexities and omitted diversity. This imagined America had been created by elites; spread by the press, education, and the electronic media; manipulated by politicians, intellectuals, and interest groups; and stored in the psyche of the populace. This discourse of ambivalence served as a lens, a magnifier through which the French perceived developments
and it intensified their response. A TV report of an incident of mayhem in Detroit could evoke the stereotype “More violence! Americans are like that.”

Attitudes toward America were volatile even within the relatively short span of the last two decades of the twentieth century. Oscillation resulted from the interplay of the imagined and the real, from the constant and the variables. The fantasized America—which mixed promise with peril—was fixed, or at least slow to evolve. It could be awakened by events, developments, and policies that engaged France with the United States. The “real” America—that is, its domestic presence—was diverse and unstable. U.S. policies, for example, might alarm the French at one moment and comfort them the next while American investors might come and go. Thus, an adequate explanation for the shifting pattern of attitudes requires historians to focus on how policies and developments on both sides of the Atlantic interacted with the latent image,—the binaries—of America and Americans. For example, the celebrity of Henry Ford and the isolationist foreign policies of the U.S. government in the 1920s fed French assumptions about American conformity and parochialism, just as the late 1940s, the moment of the Marshall Plan and NATO, activated tropes of American fraternal concern about Europe. During the 1980s Ronald Reagan's maladroit handling of disarmament and Iran confirmed suspicions that amateurs once again ran the White House and his seemingly heartless social policies fueled latent anxieties about the New World's worship of “hard capitalism.” Conversely, the success of George H. W. Bush in ending the Cold War, guiding the peaceful reunification of Germany, and the quick victory of the American-led coalition against Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War confirmed widespread admiration for American power making both the president and the American people popular.

If anti-Americanism, the negative polarity of the love-hate binary, continued to filter French perceptions and responses, it also evolved during the fin de siècle.
Anti-amiricanisme primaire
, the dystopian version of the phobia—despite its persistence among those on the political
extremes—receded. It lost its former status for the intelligentsia and disappeared among other elites like globalized business managers. The anti-anti-Americans became so aggressive that Regis Debray complained that the way to discredit an intellectual was to label him or her as “anti-American.” At the same time the popular version of anti-Americanism adjusted its language and content. At midcentury the American menace had been external and it had assumed the form of a standardized, technologically driven modernity, a mass culture represented by movies and television, and a lifestyle dominated by consumerism and suburbia. Such a specter did not altogether disappear, but it altered its shape during the fin de siècle largely because what had been contingent and distant in 1930, or even 1950, was flourishing within the Hexagon by the 1970s. It was difficult to blame the Americans for what the French were doing to themselves. Even President Mitterrand watched the
Dallas
TV series. What began to replace the midcentury phobia about modernity was an anti-Americanism based on resistance to American international and domestic policies and its commercialized culture. Disagreements over security, like the architecture of the Atlantic Alliance; disputes over trade, like agriculture subsidies and the cultural exception; and differences over reform of the welfare state, like the programs of presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton provoked anti-Americanism. There was also the threat of “American-led globalization” that represented new practices like unimpeded foreign investment and global labor markets, as well as an escalation of the danger posed by the pseudoculture of America. Protecting national independence and identity remained at the heart of the phobia. If resisting modernity itself had once been the issue, the question at the fin de siècle was how to design an alternative French, or European, modernity that was not American.

While anti-Americanism evolved, it could still be exploited because it formed part of the Gallic national psyche. For the political class it functioned as a way to camouflage economic liberalization, disparage opponents, rally support for foreign policy, cover scandals, and
pander to the extremes. Similarly, economic interests—in particular, those that feared American competition whether it be in the form of farmers or film directors—played the anti-American card to rouse the crowd and shape policy. Anti-Americanism lived on, if in a contemporary form, and could be excited for political, economic, and cultural advantage.

The fascination with America combined rejection with admiration. At its worst it translated into anti-Americanism, which not only survived, if modified in character, but in its popular form darkened during the 1990s. At its best it prompted respect for American achievements and selective imitation.

From a comparative perspective one might ask, Why were the French more eager to confront America than other Europeans? The answer is, to be sure, a matter of degree or intensity because, as we have seen, Germans, Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, and even the British also expressed strong reservations during these two decades. Yet the French often, though not in all instances, led the opposition. They did so for two reasons. First, more than other Europeans, the French aspired to, and had the means to exercise, international leadership. If they conceded that they lagged behind the hyperpower, they were still persuaded that they were an elite nation with the power, both hard and soft, as well as the experience and self-confidence, to merit a commanding position in Europe and beyond. More keenly than others the French also distrusted American hegemony, found it unreliable and self-serving, and linked the United States with the invasive process of globalization. The United States became the villain of the drama because its government punctured Gallic pretensions more emphatically than those of Europeans who aspired to less conspicuous roles on the international stage. Second, American practices and values targeted signifiers of identity more closely in France than they did those of its neighbors. Free-market liberalism and the harsh social policies associated with Ronald Reagan and his successors, for example, appeared as direct and unwanted challenges to
dirigisme
and a Gallic sense of social solidarity. And American social values—for example, esteem for work, ostentatious religiosity, and frenetic lifestyle—appeared more misguided to the French than to other Europeans. Similarly, Americanization seemed to collide with cultural ideals in France more noisily than it did elsewhere. French identity at the fin de siècle encompassed numerous elements, but among them were the small farm, food, wine, and, by extension,
bon gout;
culture defined as the fine arts, fashion, and the cinema; and, especially,
la langue française.
All of these signifiers seemed endangered by the advance of Americanization. Thus France mounted efforts at keeping America at bay, such as harassing Hollywood and American television networks with the “cultural exception”; educating children's tastes to inoculate them against fast food; and imposing official regulations to curb the use of American English. Compared to other Europeans the French contested the American model more aggressively. Germans, for example, may have also regretted the loss of their traditional landscape, expressed a certain pride in German
Kultur
and language, and preferred their movies, but they did not invest protection of these signifiers, except perhaps their forests, with the same existential meaning as the French. The French, more than other Europeans, thought of their identity as a potential victim of Americanization. They were distinctive, but not unique, in their resistance.

The premise of this study is that the French measured themselves against an American standard at the fin de siècle. Invoking the New World functioned as both an incentive to change and as an excuse to maintain the status quo. In the latter case, censuring America could conceal motives and interests and serve as a reason to avoid renovation and adaptation. Marc Bloch, in his account of the French military debacle of 1940, which he had witnessed, indicted his own people for, among other failings, denouncing Americanization or the age of machines and material progress in the name of the quiet pleasures of the countryside. Such thinking, this great historian observed, led to the defeat by a dynamic Germany that had adjusted to the new age. If France were to survive the national catastrophe of 1940, Bloch insisted,
it too would have to adjust because “[t]he donkey cart may be a friendly and a charming means of transport, but if we refuse to replace it by the motor-car, where the motor-car is desirable, we shall find ourselves stripped of everything—including the donkey.”
²
In other words, rejecting Americanization was a way of suffocating adaptation and a recipe for national disaster. In 2004 in the wake of another war and the “shocking” reelection of George W. Bush, Jean-Marie Colombani, the editor of
Le Monde
, reiterated Bloch's point: given America's dynamism—that is, its defense spending, assimilation of immigrants, research and development, and high-tech sector—if Europeans were to be able to conduct themselves on a more equal basis with the United States in world affairs, they could not crouch safely behind an insular “European model” but must learn to compete with their transatlantic ally.
³
During the 1980s and ‘90s the American example was often cited in order to evade change. Governments evoked it to dodge market-oriented reform: socialist officials, for example, condemned temporary work and modifications in the labor code as
precarite
or the way of Americans. And trade unions, instead of accommodating needed social reforms like reducing pensions, took to the streets in the name of combating an Anglo-Saxon way of life. But, in general, the French during these decades heeded Bloch's admonition and used America as a reference for change rather than as an alibi for avoiding it.

The question of meeting the American challenge was hardly new, but it became more pressing over the course of the century. In 1930, as Georges Duhamel in
America the Menace
graphically warned, the threat to French humanistic culture from across the Atlantic was potential. By the late 1950s Jean-Marie Domenach in
Esprit
lamented the arrival of Americanization and the flattening of French life. A decade later Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber in
The American Challenge
issued a grave, if specific, warning about a coming takeover of the European economy by American subsidiaries. By the 1980s and ‘90s the anxiety had mounted to the point that the French feared they were losing the contest with America in virtually every forum: diplomacy, the military,
economics, finance, technology, medicine, science, language, and culture. Responding to America became mandatory. Admittedly, the Gallic infatuation was intermittent, capricious, and diluted with a dollop of indifference. Nevertheless, the question was, How could France match the Americans without copying them? How could it catch up without sacrificing its independence, traditions, and national identity? If France refused to follow the American way, it risked becoming a has been, a picturesque, anachronistic, survivor from the belle epoque that had once been a modern society and a great power. If France imitated the Americans, it risked a different death.