Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
You have been studying France’s attitude to America for many years, and have written several books about it – what first got you interested in the subject?
When I came to Washington in 2000, anti-Americanism was on the rise. I was invited by the State Department to give some advice about how one can explain the phenomenon. That got me interested in trying to understand French attitudes. As a result I began to publish studies about French anti-Americanism, and that ultimately led to thinking that I really needed to write a book about it.
The decisive moment came when at the State Department they were discussing French attitudes and one staff member said we needed some historical perspective, explaining that we needed to go back two years. I thought to myself, “We need to go back a little longer than two years to understand how the French perceive us.”
You obviously specialise in France but it wasn’t just France that was perceived as being anti-American.
Yes, of course there were other countries as well – such as Greece, Spain and the Middle East – where this was on the rise.
Your five books all offer some perspective on this. Your first choice, Philippe Roger’s The American Enemy, explores the background to that relationship starting in the 18th century, so a lot longer than two years.
Indeed! I chose this book because Philippe Roger contributes an erudite yet witty and scathing account of Gallic anti-Americanism. He starts in the 18th century when French naturalists claimed they found the New World inhabited by deformed animals and degenerate natives. And he ends with Cold War intellectuals like Sartre, who complained that America at that point was suffering from rabies – by which he meant virulent anti-Communism.
The subject of The American Enemy is French intellectuals rather than public opinion or policy. Roger has composed a kind of genealogy of ideas, and argues that the French developed a veritable discourse about America built on stereotypes, prejudices and fictions. Americans are supposedly materialists, Puritans and racists.
In the book there is a character called Georges-Louis Buffon, an 18th century French scientist who had some of the misguided attitudes you are talking about towards America. Even though he hadn’t been there he was sure it was somehow deficient, with dogs not barking and birds not singing. Where did people like him get these ideas?
If you go back to the 18th century there is an expression of cultural superiority. French intellectuals saw America as a rude country of immigrants lacking any cultural eminence. So there is a Gallic condescension operating here. Even to this day there is a belief that the French are the guardians of culture and we [Americans] are the purveyors of some kind of cultural pap. Roger is trying to ridicule this discourse which he finds biased, hypocritical and uninformed. He is trying to remove a toxin from French intellectual life.
Your next choice, America, the Menace by George Duhamel is seen by many as the classic anti-American text from between the wars. Why was there so much ill feeling towards America at that time?
Part of it has to do with policy. There was a good deal of resentment against how America treated France after the First World War. There were issues like the collection of war debts. But I think that in Duhamel’s case, the source of trouble was dismay and anxiety about American modernity that he observed when he toured America in 1929 and 1930.
The French title of the book is Scenes from the Life of the Future, so what he was writing was a kind of warning to the French that unless they were careful they would likely end up imitating the Americans. In America, he thought, capitalism and mechanisation had run amuck. He likened America to an anthill inhabited by brain-dead workers doing monotonous jobs at machines, convinced by ceaseless advertising that life’s goals were nothing more than acquisition of products like cars and household appliances.
It sounds like an early warning about the perils of consumerism.
Yes, but again the culture theme emerges. Duhamel argued that America lacked culture in a European sense. He claimed that America’s culture centres on entertainment like movies and sports, rather than on art, music or literature. He ends the book asking: Where are the great American artists, writers and composers? The answer he gives is that there are none because this is a mass society of workaholics and conformists. Duhamel’s book is important because it was the most read text about America for two or three generations. French school children were still reading excerpts from it as late as the 1970s.
And in your book you look into whether Duhamel’s predictions came true.
Yes, and to some extent they did come true.
How do you find the French feel about Americanisation?
Ambivalent. On the one hand they condemned us for exporting American products and practices, but in the end they have learnt how to live with it. I think there is a great deal of ambivalence about accepting so much of consumer society like McDonald’s, Hollywood movies and Eurodisney.
Which hasn’t been a great success.
Eurodisney has been something of a disappointment to Disney. It never really lived up to their expectations. They had enormous trouble with the park at the beginning, when it almost went bankrupt twice. And even now it doesn’t attract the audience that Disney expected.
Richard F Kuisel holds a joint appointment in the History Department at Georgetown University and at the BMW Centre for German and European Studies. He has a particular interest in Franco-American relations and has written several books on the subject, most recently The French Way
France, like America, puts common political values at the core of national identity. It's a good model for integrating immigrants. British multiculturalism demands little or no integration, and produces far more problems
Intelligent interview with Alain Minc, French political fixer. On Sarkozy: "The crisis has definitely helped him to become adult." On Dominique Strauss-Kahn: "The details weren't known, but people knew about his fragility"
The arrest was bad enough. Imagine the trial, and what it will do to French-US relations. "The ocean-liner of American justice and the ice floes of French conspiracy theories are already bobbing in one another’s direction"
If economics isn't your area, this will make the scales fall from your eyes. Superb, concise commentary on eurozone financial troubles and the IMF, by the fund's former chief economist. Thanks @polit2k for alerting us
We all know the myth of the heroic girl warrior. She's become a feminist icon in America, a symbol of the far right in France, a hero of the revolutionary left in Latin America, a saint in Rome. But who was the real Jeanne d'Arc?
