The French Way (9 page)

First came the snub; then the broadside; then the programs. That is how France's new socialist minister of culture, Jack Lang, went on the attack against American popular culture. He refused to attend the American film festival at Deauville in September 1981; several months later he gave a notorious address denouncing American cultural imperialism at a UNESCO conference in Mexico City; and then he tried to organize a global “crusade” to combat cultural imports from the United States. Lang, the key actor in this story, was a flamboyant young politician whose movie-star good looks, iconic pink jacket, dramatic initiatives, and hyperactive ways won him both admiration and ridicule. He presided over the Ministry of Culture from 1981 to 1986 and again from 1988 to 1993.

Lang forged his strategy against American cultural imperialism in the late 1970s as a way of distinguishing socialist policy from that of the Right—in particular from that practiced during the administration of Valery Giscard d'Estaing, and as a means of assisting Francois Mitterrand: it would curry favor among the more
gauchiste
party members and intellectuals and separate Mitterrand from his party rival Michel Rocard. Lang hosted luncheons for Mitterrand with scientific, artistic, and literary luminaries like Roland Barthes to elevate the candidate's stature. His plan was to play to the Third World at a moment when the ideology of
tiers-mondisme
still captivated many socialists. American
mass culture, from his perspective, placed the independence of all nations, not just France, as well as the principle of cultural diversity, at risk. But culture had a certain economic dimension. American multinationals—for example, Hollywood's large studios—threatened the existence of the world's artistic industries such as cinema, television, publishing, and music. Before the presidential election of 1981 Lang staged festivals, gave interviews, and issued press releases attacking both Americanization and the Right: the true Left, he proclaimed, opposed “the penetration of a cosmopolitan and pan Atlantic culture.”
¹
At a symposium he organized at Hyeres, which attracted film celebrities like Bernardo Bertolucci and Bulle Ogier, the participants petitioned the European Community to protect the national cinemas of Europe from “colonization” by American multinationals. Lang filled the air with grand promises about a socialist victory: all of France would become a festival of creativity.

A few months after the socialists' electoral triumph, Lang, as the new minister of culture, turned down an invitation to attend the annual American film festival at Deauville, claiming, “A minister must choose between the exploiters and the exploited. The role of the minister is not to participate in fashionable receptions financed by American companies, but to be where there is life.”
²
He told an interviewer that he was not opposed to American culture, only to its excessive penetration—pointing out that in 1980, of 235 foreign films distributed in France, 195 were American, 30 were European, and a mere 10 came from the rest of the world: “Do you think the government and parliament can accept this caricature when we are engaging in a new North-South dialog?”
³
The new minister defended his refusal: “Don't count on me to promote American movies. We are not diehard anti-Americans, but we must recognize that the American cinema is backed by a powerful, world-wide distribution network” and he urged a European counterattack. “We want to defend our art of living and not allow an impoverished and standardized external model be imposed on us.”
⁴

If the Deauville snub was a sensation within France, the speech in Mexico City in July 1982 grabbed global attention. The occasion was a UNESCO conference on cultural policy at which Lang elaborated two themes. Coining the slogan “economy and culture: the same struggle,” he tried first to connect culture with economic development. It was a rather fuzzy notion about culture acting as a source of economic dynamism. Encouraging creativity in culture, he argued, would stimulate innovation, inventiveness, and enterprise. It was a second theme, however—his sharp attack against a standardized, globalized culture made in America, even though he did not explicitly name America—that excited his audience. Lang orated about “certain great nations” that once taught the world freedom now seeking profits by imposing a homogenized culture on the planet. “Today cultural and artistic creativity are victims of a system of financial, multinational domination against which we must organize….Our countries accept passively, too passively, a certain invasion, a certain submersion of (both) images manufactured elsewhere and standardized music.” Reviewing global television programming, Lang observed that most of it comprised standardized productions that “naturally plane down
(rabotent)
national cultures” and transmitted a uniform style of life. He asked, “Is it to be our fate to become the vassals of the immense empire of profit ?”
⁵

The French minister enjoined the delegates to launch “[a] real crusade against—let's call things by their name—this financial and intellectual imperialism which no longer, or rarely, appropriates territories. It appropriates consciousness, it appropriates modes of thinking, it appropriates styles of living….We must act if we don't want tomorrow to become sandwich-men for the multinationals.”
⁶
Underlying this “crusade” was Lang's conviction that standardized—that is, American—movies and television programs, forced on others by American multinationals, stifled the development of true creativity that he believed was rooted at the national, regional, local, and municipal levels, and possibly within everyone. He assumed the natural creativity of people needed to be encouraged, released, and expressed as a way of
stimulating cultural growth and diversity. This was best accomplished, he said, with like-minded nations banding together to ward off uniformity. France, for example, should league together with other Europeans, with the Francophone world, and with other Latin nations.

It was reported that most of the delegates from Third World countries approved of Lang's tangy speech, that it raised diverse reactions among the Europeans, and that it exasperated the Americans.
⁷
One member of the American delegation was so infuriated by the address that he challenged the Frenchman to a public debate; it was refused. The American delegation was incensed not only by the accusation of imperialism and the incitement against American audiovisual products, but also by Lang's laudatory comments about Cuba. On his way to Mexico he had visited Cuba, gone lobster fishing with Fidel Castro, and spoken of his “natural sympathy” for the Cuban experiment and his admiration for Castro's successes in education and health care. Cuba and France both refused “the international dictatorship of a great power as well as the standardized and industrialized monoculture.”
⁸
According to Lang, “Cuba is a courageous country that is building a new society. Its socialism is not like our own (but) we respect it.”
⁹
In a rather obvious taunt aimed at the Americans, he affirmed the right of the Cubans to live under the political system of their choice. In Mexico Lang gave full voice to socialist tiers-mondisme, to courting the Third World especially the population of Latin countries, and to chiding U.S. policy in the Caribbean and Central America. Only a few months earlier President Mitterrand had addressed a north-south summit in Cancun, Mexico, also attended by U.S. president Ronald Reagan, on the merits of international economic assistance for the Third World.

The Deauville boycott and the Mexico speech sparked a sharp debate among French intellectuals about cultural imperialism, national identity, and anti-Americanism. Lang had his fans. The most outspoken, representing the Third World, contended that liberation from colonialism depended on asserting cultural identity. Tahar Ben Jelloun, a Moroccan writer living in Paris, assailed American cultural imperialism
for its latent racism and its scorn for other cultures. Americans, he wrote, sold weapons and images in the name of freedom: “[O]ne could say that the family in
Dallas
is objectively an accomplice to the massacres being committed in Lebanon at this moment by the Israelis.” (The American TV show
Dallas
, with its lead character J. R. Ewing, was commonly evoked as the prime example of American television in the 1980s.) Among homegrown writers, the novelist Herve Bazin encouraged Lang to check the Americans before they completely overran French culture
¹⁰
The movie director Gerard Blain, who had once worked in Hollywood, applauded the Deauville incident and inveighed against “the poison” of American films that “crushed or cretinized” creativity, lowered morals, invaded the subconscious of children, and turned the French into “miserable clowns” who imitated the American way of life. Blain did not spare America itself, “a country of invertebrate zombies.”
¹¹
Using less brutal language, the newly organized Committee for National Identity—which included such celebrities as the actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault, the playwright Eugene Ionesco, the author Albert Memmi, the editor-philosopher Jean-Marie Domenach, and the historian Philippe Aries—endorsed Lang's actions. Committee members complained about Hollywood exports taking over theaters and television screens not only in Europe but also in the developing world. The committee's manifesto asserted that “cinema is a faithful reflection of a national identity and its abandonment to foreign interests leads inevitably to a certain deculturalization especially among young people.”
¹²
For example, French children, it was charged, knew more about the American Civil War than the French Revolution. The committee called for more restrictive quotas on Hollywood movies in order to make room for films from France, from Francophone countries, and from other Latin and European nations on television and in the theater. Lang adopted the committee's recommendation of quotas for both the large and small screen and made it central to the debate over Americanization in the 1980s. But he was careful about discriminating among Hollywood's talent; thus, in 1981, he honored the American film director King Vidor, distinguishing his work as that of an artist from others whom he belittled as hustlers.
¹³

Figure 1. Wolinski's parody of Jean-François Millet's painting
The Angelus
: contemporary farmers pausing to pray are told to “hurry up” because
Dallas
is beginning. Courtesy Maryse Wolinski.

If enthusiasts of tiers-mondisme, representatives of the audiovisual industries, and a few major writers approved of Lang's campaign, he received a cold shoulder from a host of prominent intellectuals. Many were simply indifferent to his appeal. Some pointed out the hypocrisy, given a French past that included Napoleon, of damning Americans for cultural imperialism. Others took exception to fighting outdated battles with ham-fisted tactics aimed at the wrong enemy.

A typical response came from author and screenwriter Guy Konopnicki, who mocked the diehard defenders of national identity. Because of globalization, the myths of contemporary French youth, he argued, were not about Gauls or the French Revolution but came from Walt Disney and the American West. To inhabitants of the contemporary urban world, what America exported was more relevant than Jean Giono writing about peasants. American capitalism was simply more proficient at creating and marketing mass culture: socialism, he warned, was not going to be built by rejecting what capitalism did better.
¹⁴
It seemed misguided to Konopnicki and others to fault Americans for French shortcomings and futile to try to build walls against imports from across the ocean. Alain Finkielkraut chastised Lang for demagoguery in blaming the Americans for what the French were doing to themselves: “Don't unload our mediocrity on the transatlantic Great Satan.”
¹⁵
Yes, “Uncle Sam dumps grade B products on the world,” noted Finkielkraut, but the French, according to this prominent philosopher, simply preferred
The Godfather
to domestic films and had loved watching drivel on television long before
Dallas
appeared. Almost all of Lang's critics agreed that cultural protectionism was not the answer. Andre Glucksmann, one of the highly visible “New Philosophers,” thought Lang was heading in the wrong direction altogether. Glucksmann denounced Lang's “cultural protectionism” along with the “archaic” program of the socialists.
¹⁶
The actor/entertainer Yves Montand thought the minister's policy smelled a bit like the reactionary nationalism of wartime Vichy. He agreed with the writer Michel Tournier that what was needed was an offensive strategy, that “if you really want to counter United States ‘hegemony' the best response,” according to the latter, was “to inundate it with French culture.”
¹⁷

Many disapproved of Lang for, intentionally or not, reviving anti-Americanism. Georges Suffert, a writer and editor at
Le Point
, took him, and others like him, to task for preaching “primal anti-Americanism,” calling the minister a “third-world dilettante”
(tiers-mondiste de salon)
while Jean Daniel, the editor of the
Nouvel Observateur
, weighed in
against the “reappearance of a nationalist left” and objected to socialists adopting anti-Americanism.
¹⁸