French Anti-Americanism ... And American Anti-Frenchism

Stroll into any Parisian bookstore and you will immediately appreciate one of France's great national obsessions: America. The display shelves are crammed with books on almost every aspect of American life. In the run-up to the US presidential election it seemed as though every opportunistic French writer with any connection to America had a theory to propound or a story to sell about the world's sole hyperpuissance. There has also been a ready market for translations of those American authors - such as Michael Moore, Paul Krugman and Kitty Kelley - who have been less than complimentary about their more rightwing compatriots....

In L'ennemi Americain, a fascinating genealogy of French anti- Americanism, Philippe Roger argues that the phenomenon is best viewed as a recurrent discourse that has periodically surfaced in French thought. At different times, anti-Americanism has been trumpeted by the hard right in French politics and then by the hard left. But this discourse has been constantly sustained by a corps of French intellectuals, for whom anti-Americanism has almost become a defining feature.

In Roger's view, this anti-Americanism remains something of an enigma: objectively, there is little reason why the French should have been so cool about the US for so long. The two countries share many of the same ideological values, boast similar political institutions, and have fought many of the same fights. The French general Lafayette helped American insurgents defeat their colonial British masters. The Americans have twice helped save France from the Germans. The French gave the Americans one of their most treasured national symbols: the Statue of Liberty. The Americans have sheltered France from the threat of the Soviet Union.

To bastardise Oscar Wilde, it seems as though France and the US are two nations divided by a common ideology.

According to Roger, French disillusion with the US set in soon after American independence, in spite of the fine rhetoric about the two sister republics' devotion to liberty and the rights of man. Talleyrand, the French foreign minister who visited the US in the 1790s, was an early and harsh critic. "America is completely English," he complained. With mounting frustration, he realised that the weight of past ties, a common language and national interests would more likely push the newly independent America towards Britain than France.

That early French disappointment with America crystallised into concern in the 1890s. It was then that the French public latched on to the image of the Yankee as a rampant capitalist at home and a budding imperialist abroad. The Yankee violently suppressed workers' rights in the US and aggressively pushed American products abroad as his economic might grew. "America is invading old Europe, she is flooding her, she is going to submerge her," wrote Joseph Emile-Barbier in 1893.

US successes in the Spanish-American war of 1898 only fuelled those fears. The capture of Cuba and the Philippines convinced French politicians of the "American peril", and also encouraged a sense of solidarity with a fellow European power. Not for the last time, the assertion of American interests abroad led to calls for a more unified European counterweight. Even the much-derided British were finally considered to be European.

The French were temporarily infatuated with President Woodrow Wilson for bringing the US into the first world war on their side. Two million people turned out to greet Wilson when in Paris to negotiate the settlement with Germany. But French politicians quickly grew to detest his stubborn rejection of their own views and his moralising ways. "Wilson speaks like Jesus Christ and conducts himself like Lloyd George," they grumbled in the corridors of Versailles.

Washington's subsequent retreat into isolationism and its lack of support for the League of Nations allowed another wave of anti- Americanism to wash over France in the late 1920s and 1930s. France's "philosopher-writers", many of whom came under the intellectual sway of Moscow, denounced the "American cancer", even though they remained almost wholly ignorant about the country. As Roger notes: "The US could be weighed and judged without ever having been visited."

Roger contends that France's distrust of the US was bound up with a sense of European decline after the collective madness of the first world war. Perhaps in fear of their own future, the French cavilled at the mechanisation of American society and the homogenising effects of its culture - in much the same way as anti- globalisation campaigners complain about the US today. The first French quota on US films was imposed as early as 1928....

If America's image has suffered at the hands of malign French intellectuals then it seems the US has finally caught on to the habit and is beginning to repay France in kind. Our Oldest Enemy, which has received glowing reviews in some rightwing American periodicals, amounts to little more than a polemical rant, with spurious claims to being a revisionist historical analysis.

The authors, a journalist and a historian, make little attempt to understand or explain why the French think the way they do; there are precious few references to any French sources in the bibliography. Instead, France's anti-Americanism is simply ascribed to resentment towards a more powerful and successful country.

Yet the book fairly bristles with a sense of outrage and self- righteousness that almost mirrors the worst of the French intellectual moralisers of the 1930s. In the authors' world view, it seems that an anti-American can be defined as anyone who opposed the war in Iraq. And they approvingly quote US congressman Roy Blunt as quipping: "Do you know how many Frenchmen it takes to defend Paris? It's not known. It's never been tried."

Blunt's "joke" must surely count as one of the most ignorant observations of all time - and it is shameful that the authors repeat it without comment. In the first world war alone, France lost 1.36 million soldiers - more than 3 per cent of her pre-war population. A similar scale of loss in the US today would mean the deaths of 9.5 million people. After such an experience, it is perhaps little wonder that French politicians concluded that war should only be the last resort. But that hardly makes them the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" as pilloried by nationalistic American commentators.

The authors' reinterpretation of history continues with the claim that the French were just as much to blame as Hitler for starting the second world war, by imposing such an unjust settlement on Germany at Versailles. "From this perspective, the second world war was as much the product of French intransigence and vengefulness as it was the result of Hitler's lust for domination," the authors contend, in an extraordinary case of moral equivalence.

The French were also to blame for getting the Americans involved in Vietnam (as if US politicians were incapable of independent thought) as well as the massacres perpetrated by Pol Pot - for the reason that he studied in Paris for a while. And besides - horror of horrors! - the French were only acting in their national interests, rather than out of ideological sympathy, in supporting the infant American republic against the British....

Are we ever likely to emerge from this dismal cycle of name-calling and wilful mutual incomprehension? At times, it seems, some French and American intellectuals are only of one mind when believing the worst of each other.

Perhaps the "problem" with America from the French perspective, Roger observes, is that it is simultaneously too far away and too close. The French do not understand what makes the heart of America tick, while being exposed daily to its mass culture and its products. Conversely, in their current mindset, the Bush administration and its supporters have little interest in - or understanding of - a country that once considered itself to be the world's exceptional nation.

Roger's enigma seems unlikely to be unravelled anytime soon.