Posted on 04/17/2005 7:19:50 AM PDT by Valin
Here is a tasty statistic: when the US went into Iraq a survey showed that America's popularity plunged everywhere - except in France. The French opposed the invasion vehemently, but the country was already so saturated in anti-Americanism that the index scarcely flickered. Which makes Philippe Roger, a professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, a brave and lonely man. His book is that seemingly impossible thing: an attack on French Americophobia written by a Frenchman. For, as he demonstrates in this scholarly yet highly entertaining work, the French allergy to all things American is a national psychosis which today tells us more about the condition of France than it does about the United States.
Something went awry in the French world view almost as soon as America was discovered. It seems amazing, but in the eyes of French naturalists of the 17th century the new continent was noteworthy chiefly for the piffling size of its flora and fauna, and for its moronic, feeble-spirited inhabitants. Perceived as small, wet and poisonous, America was a "lesser world" of which no good could ever come. Claims like these persisted into the 18th century, which was why Thomas Jefferson brought a seven-foot carcass of a moose to Paris.
Still, the French did not want to know. Alexis de Tocqueville's great work of qualified praise for American democracy, De la démocratie en Amérique, was printed in a mere 500 copies, and his reputation took a knock when he prophesied that the dispute over slavery would not lead to civil war. Although France followed the course of the conflict passionately, it was not from pro-black sentiment, but in the naked hope that it was a war from which America could never recover. From that day to this, when books about the decline and fall of America pour from French presses, the aspiration persists that somehow, sometime America can be wished away.
The psychosis, begun at the intellectual level, communicated itself to the nation. When the Americans unexpectedly beat the French at rugby in the 1924 Olympics in Paris, a mob tried to lynch the winning team. President Woodrow Wilson had his lynching at the hands of the French press earlier, at the Paris Peace Conference, when his idealistic approach to foreign affairs brought accusations of attempting to play God. Prohibition was to persuade some Frenchmen that puritanism had actually driven the Americans insane. Meanwhile, reports by distinguished French visitors to the US were always the same: no food, no books, no intellectual life, appallingly unfeminine women - and, most infuriating of all, no concierges.
Anti-Americanism increased in bitterness during the interwar years, in inverse proportion to French perceptions of their own national decline. The American role in liberating France earned a nod of appreciation - although obviously it had only come to Europe's aid to enslave her in debt - but with the domination of Marxism in postwar France it was soon back to the old game. Leftists argued that America was the true totalitarian country, more dangerous than the Nazis because of its pretence that its dictatorship didn't exist - the last trick of the devil himself, n'est-ce pas?
"Rabid animals" was Sartre's somewhat rabid phrase for Americans after the execution of the Rosenbergs (Communist spies whose treason has recently been confirmed). His solution was to "break all ties that bind us to America". This he did, refusing to go there, which proved useful, since he never had to justify his increasingly surreal claims about American Cold War atrocities to US audiences. The boycott by the intellectual Left had the effect of sealing France even more hermetically in her anti-American neuroses.
During the German occupation, when French anti-Semitic collaborators had no reason to disguise the real roots of their hatred, it had seemed that a ne plus ultra of crazed invective had been reached: it was then that America's addiction to jazz was explained by "the Negro character inherent in the Jewish race". It would be funny, except that similar obscenities continue to our day. Some are casual, such as a recent film review in Le Monde that, commenting on the ambition of the American film industry to dominate the planet with its images, concluded: "Goebbels said the same thing about German images in his day." And some are sick, like the huge sales of the French book alleging that the Americans had blown up the Twin Towers themselves. Sicker still was the admission by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard after 9/11 of "the prodigious jubilation in seeing this global superpower destroyed... Ultimately they [Muslims] were the ones who did it, but we were the ones who wanted it."
Clearly, French culture has suffered provocation. It would be silly to dismiss French complaints about the average American's astounding ignorance of Europe, the French contempt for the crassness of much American popular culture, and most recently the horrifying prospect of big American buyers forcing French vineyards to make their subtly variegated products taste more like that turgid, over-rich Californian grape-juice which passes for red wine. But France's real problem with America is that it exists, and to that there seems no solution.
The advent of President Bush has not improved things, although French antagonism remains constant, whoever is in charge in Washington - a malignant infatuation with the force of perverted love. The only thing that might mitigate the pain is if French artistic and intellectual life - her cinema, literature, architecture, science and universities - were to undergo a miraculous efflorescence, and America's were to wither, but for the moment things are tending in the opposite direction.
For all its amusing vignettes, Philippe Roger's message is sober, and a foreword asks an excellent question: how far is the demonising of America, not just in France but the world over, helping to convert a war of words into a more fearsome conflict?
The English rendering of Roger's book is sometimes awkward, but that is not unusual. French style and French concepts simply do not translate easily into English, and vice versa. Which of course is the problem, although after reading this book one's standard reaction - "Vive la différence" - is somewhat muted.
George Walden's books include 'The New Elites' (Penguin)
That was as ephemeral as a puff of wind.
My grandparents toured Europe in the early 1950's, when you would think that there would still be some gratitude for our efforts against the Nazis. This was indeed the case in England, Holland, and Belgium. They were even treated well in Germany.
However, they were treated with sneering contempt throughout France. One hotel clerk asked them where they were from, and then said "Américains? Ptui!" as he spit on the floor.
I hate France.
-ccm
I can do you one better. I loathe the french!!!
ROTFLMAO. Ain't that the truth in a nutshell.
I can do you one better. I loathe the french!!!
I'm with you two! I despise those cheese eating surrender monkey's!!
French wine is a waste of good grape juice.
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