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1944 FRENCH ANTI-AMERICANISM

I am teaching Revel's Anti-Americanism and I could not forgo sharing with you the following tidbit: Hubert Beuve-Mery, the future founder and editor of Le Monde, wrote in 1944:

"The Americans constitute a real danger for France - a danger different in kind from the threat represented by Germany, and the threat that may eventually emerge from Russia. . . . The Americans can always prevent us from making the necessary revolution and their materialism does not even have the tragic grandeur of the materialism of the totalitarians. If they cling to a veritable cult of the idea of liberty, they do not feel the need to liberate themselves from the sevitudes that their capitalism entails."

Is there something to be learned from Beuve-Mery's remark?

Submitted by avvakum on Sun, 2004-03-21 13:28.
I appreciate that Prof. Klinghoffer is just offering an interesting citation, and not making an argument, but the citation struck me to be in need of a comment. Prof. Klinghoffer has cited this passage to demonstrate very effectively what French 'anti-Americanism' looks like. More than some crude anti-Americanism as such (though he is clearly opposed to American influence), this is a statement of whatever Mr. Beuve-Mery has imagined France to represent, as well as a confession of what he believes threatens that France. I think everyone understands that.

I believe I have seen Mr. Beuve-Mery's remark before, because it has been sometimes cited before in criticisms of French attitudes, but I wonder whether there might not be something to be learned from his observation about America, even if few can take seriously the idea of "the tragic grandeur" of totalitarian materialism or some of his other ideas.

Americans very often see capitalism as the engine and symbol of a free America, and they assume that capitalism is a complement to our traditions of political liberty and the culture that engendered them. Mr. Beuve-Mery raises the possibility, though from what I assume was a socialist perspective with an entirely different sense of "the servitudes of capitalism" from what an American might have, that this harmony between capitalism, particularly mass industrial capitalism, and those traditions does not really exist. There are certainly American precedents for this idea in Jefferson, the Populists and the modern Agrarian writers.

Jefferson believed that the triumph of the 'moneyed interest' was the end of the republican system and political liberty--was he really mistaken? Capitalism constricts the relative personal independence that Jefferson believed individuals required to be good citizens and guardians of their chartered liberties against usurpation.

Understanding anti-Americanism is all very well, but it might be even more profitable if we took the occasion of others' criticism to consider what we understand ourselves to be, and to ask whether there might not be some kernel of insight in even something so hostile as French critiques.