The French Way (11 page)

Television, like the cinema, struggled with American imports. Yet unlike the cinema, television was growing by leaps and bounds in the 1980s and the socialists, seeking to encourage decentralization, aided this surge by opening what had been a virtual government monopoly to several new private channels like Canal Plus and La Cinq. But these private stations came to rely heavily on American shows, which cost a fraction of locally produced programs, to fill their schedules. And on major TV channels in 1983, one-third of movies shown and an even
larger share of serialized dramas and game shows came from the United States. It took, for example, just six months for
La Roue de la fortune
, a French version of
The Wheel of Fortune
, to surpass the number of viewers for the more traditional and more intellectual game show
Des Chiffres et des lettres.
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Such developments contradicted Lang's grand proposal of making French television “the best in the world.” In order to inspire more creative programming and avoid being swamped by cheap American imports, in 1984 Lang created a fund supplied by a new tax on the income of television channels. He also imposed stiff quotas of 50 percent for French films on the new private channels, but these were difficult to enforce.

Matters took a turn for the worse between 1986 and 1988 when conservatives assumed control and Lang had to watch from the sideline as Francois Leotard ran the ministry. Deregulation, favored by prime minister Jacques Chirac and Leotard, seemed only to escalate programming of inexpensive American game shows or variety shows and Hollywood films. Private channels like La Cinq and M6 filled their airtime with American imports, provoking some critics to complain that television was being Americanized. Worse still, La Cinq, against Lang's wishes, was awarded to a private group headed by Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian magnate whom many thought had ruined Italian television with American shows.
Le Monde
ran a cartoon depicting a pair of American tourists watching television in Paris: the man, wearing cowboy boots and a Stetson, proclaims “I love French TV”' to which his obese wife responds, “It's so American.”
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The socialists charged the Right with selling out to the Americans, and as the French presidential election campaign began in 1987 Lang made limiting American television programs an issue. Now the problem would be addressed at the higher level of Europe.

At Brussels he labored to get the European Community to adopt quotas. Many Europeans, besides the French, worried that American television exports would soon dominate their programming. Jacques Delors, Mitterrand's former finance minister who was now president
of the European Commission, observed, “I would simply like to pose a question to our American friends: do we have the right to exist? Have we the right to preserve our tradition, our heritage, our language ? How will a country of ten million inhabitants be able to maintain its language-the very lynchpin of culture-faced with the universality that satellites offer?”
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In April 1988 the European Commission adopted the controversial Television without Frontiers directive that called for devoting a majority of programming to European products “where applicable.” Its aim was to facilitate intra-European exchange of television broadcasts and also protect the community from American imports. It would take another year of negotiating, which featured some intense European/American jostling before the directive became law. Lang justified the action: “We are not doing this in order to be hostile toward the United States. We are in favor of competition, but it must be fair.” He thus won the adoption of European quotas in principle, but the “where applicable” clause inserted by opponents, led by Margaret Thatcher, undercut the victory by leaving implementation to individual countries. Lang complained about the watered-down directive: “This is only one step, and a timid one at that.”
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The French cinema industry denounced the socialists for backsliding on quotas, and Max Gallo, the writer and friend of Mitterrand, demanded “real protection” against “the shadow of Batman.”
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Parading their opposition, a delegation of French movie directors headed by Bertrand Tavernier marched before the European Parliament in Strasburg protesting the “colonization” of the audiovisual sector.

American trade officials were furious, calling the new directive “outrageous” and warning that quotas would lead to a commercial war between “fortress Europe” and the United States.
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The chairman of the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee called the directive “censorship”; other congressmen threatened retaliation; and the U.S. House of Representatives adopted a resolution denouncing the European Commission's initiative.
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A miniature trade battle erupted, with the Americans and the French threatening to block each other from filming movies
in their countries. President George H. W. Bush joined the scrum, asking the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade to condemn the directive. In fact, American programs rarely exceeded the 49.9 percent level for any network within the EC, rendering the directive rather superfluous. Lang soldiered on at trying to win the EC to tougher quotas, but without much support from other Europeans. No one seemed satisfied—not the Europeans, not the French film industry, and certainly not the Americans. France imposed its own rules under the Television without Frontiers mandate, requiring broadcasts of at least 50 percent of the French-made and 60 percent of the European-made films that were shown. Among the member states of the EC there was, following the directive, a gradual decline in the number of U.S. programs shown on television; most countries observed the 50 percent ceiling.
⁴⁴

These modest efforts could not stem the flow of American imports and failed to stimulate sufficient French or European production to supply television's voracious appetite. In fact, television production declined in France in the mid-1980s while transmission of foreign programs grew.
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One of the most serious problems in raising domestic output was the fact that the purchase of an American show was far less expensive than producing one. Monitoring quotas also proved difficult, and television stations found ways to evade them. Similarly, Hollywood's share of the big screen continued to grow. Between 1980 and 1993 the box office share of American films soared from 35 to 54 percent while the market for French films fell in almost the same proportion.
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Audiovisual issues were arguably the most important aspect of French cultural policy in the 1980s, and combating America was neither successful for Lang nor satisfying for the industry or the political Left, some of whose members continued to campaign against the Americanization of television.

Limiting American audiovisual imports also meant developing French or European alternatives in music. The taste of French youth for rock music added millions of francs to the trade deficit through the import of recordings and foreign manufactured musical equipment.
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As a countermeasure, Lang's ministry heavily subsidized local popular musicians including jazz, blues, reggae, and rock artists. He helped build rehearsal studios, renovated a building in Paris to serve as a concert hall for rock music, and made a show of attending rock concerts. In 1985 as part of the socialists' youth employment program Lang allocated five hundred jobs to the association Reseau Rocks, run by Bruno Lion, making it the largest employer of rock musicians in the country. In 1989 the unconventional and always imaginative Lang appointed the twenty-seven-year-old Lion to his ministry to promote French rock music.
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One cannot give Lang's ministry high marks for developing a coherent strategy for invigorating the audiovisual sector, much less for matching it with the government's diplomacy. It did not go unnoticed that while Lang was attacking American popular culture, he and Mitterrand were handing out honors to Hollywood celebrities (the president gave the Legion of Honor to Orson Welles, and Lang made similar awards to Jerry Lewis and Warren Beatty), or that the socialists were courting the Walt Disney Company. Moreover, cultural initiatives and foreign policy were not aligned during the early years of Mitterrand's presidency. At the very moment Lang was challenging American cultural imperialism in Mexico City before an American delegation headed by Jean Kirkpatrick, a trusted foreign policy adviser of Ronald Reagan, Mitterrand was doing his best to win Reagan's confidence by acting as a Cold Warrior. In fact, Lang had not consulted Mitterrand about his UNESCO address, and the Elysee believed that the minister was simply reporting the facts about the Americans, even though he had done so in a “maladroit” way.
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The most persuasive explanation for this incongruity is that the Mitterrand team arrived in power eager to advance tiers-mondisme and combat multinationals as central features of a socialist foreign policy, and they assumed these goals would not compromise their efforts toward improving relations with the U.S. government. They never intended to align themselves fully with the United States and sought to open a dialog with the Third World, to
curb the power of multinationals, and to challenge Washington's policies in Latin America. Mitterrand's team believed they could win the U.S. government's confidence on other issues like fighting the Cold War while quarreling over the Sandinistas in Central America and inciting cultural anti-Americanism.

Lang quietly retreated from anti-American posturing without ever relinquishing the cause of combating American standardized culture. He did not retract his belief that American imports stifled creativity and identity, but he became more conciliatory. On a visit to New York in 1984 for the opening of a French film festival the minister admitted he had made an error in his Mexico address: he said he should not have used the word
imperialism
because it carried different meanings to Americans—that is, where the French might think of imperial Rome, Americans associated it with communist anti-Americanism. Trying to placate his audience, he revealed that Francois Mitterrand watched
Dallas
, that “he knows the story line and he knows every character.” As for Cuba, Lang admitted he now had mixed feelings about Castro; but “I could not say Cuba is a total failure.”
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A year later, instead of boycotting the American film festival at Deauville, he hosted a party for it.

Given the tepid domestic reception to his early attempts at raising the demon of American cultural imperialism, the shifting priorities of the socialists, and the huge and varied agenda of the Ministry of Culture, such as expediting Mitterrand's
grands projets
and fostering creativity, fighting the Americans receded as a priority. Lang, however, never abandoned his struggle against cultural Americanization. The row over the Television without Frontier directive in 1988-89 and the continuous baiting of the Americans demonstrated his determination. Later, during his second tour at the Ministry of Culture, Lang, in an interview with an American magazine, affirmed his distaste for America as “the mass culture superpower” that threatened to replace cultural diversity around the world with “an international mass culture without roots, soul, color, or taste.”
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Would technology, he was asked, create diversity through more channels of artistic expression? His answer was,
not likely: “the higher the satellite, the lower the culture.” He refused to retract what he had championed almost a decade earlier, that “it is criminal to destroy or dilute a culture.”

In retrospect Jack Lang tried to arouse some passion for the socialist program by exploiting French fears of cultural loss and stirring up anti-Americanism. The ploy largely failed. It awakened as much opposition as it did enthusiasm and the support was often ugly. Moreover, his audiovisual policies, which ranged from increasing aid and employing quotas, accomplished little toward forcing an American retreat. The tidal wave was unstoppable and Lang lacked the budgetary resources and political support, both domestic and European, to build an effective bulwark. Given the appeal of American popular culture, Lang lost to a formidable opponent.

I Is Anti-Americanism Passe? The Intellectuals Debate

Jack Lang's offensive against American cultural imperialism prompted a major debate about anti-Americanism itself. Central to this discussion was the question of finding an appropriate response to the American “invasion”—especially that of the media. What is historically significant about this conversation is that the balance shifted perceptibly against the anti-Americans. They were drowned out by the voices of those who insisted
anti-amiricanisme primaire
—that is, “primal” or “primitive” anti-Americanism—was passe. Of course, such ranting continued and gained fresh partisans, such as those of the New Right, and took on different forms like that of postmodernism while less virulent forms of the disease persisted. It was still chic at Parisian dinner parties to ridicule Americans. Christine Ockrent, the television news anchor, in comparing how French and American officials celebrated Christmas Eve in Beirut—the former attended church services while the latter opted for a party hosted by a comedian—caustically commented, “To each his own cultural level.”
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And schoolchildren still
read texts about how Americans who lived in a consumer paradise were slaves to comfort and conformity and lacked culture in a European sense. Nevertheless, a new chapter in this centuries-old discourse emerged in the 1980s. Journalists and other intellectuals led the rebuttal in condemning old ways, and they were joined by academics who wanted to use their critical tools to confront a bad habit before banishing it. By the end of the decade some former antagonists of America reassessed their position. Indeed, a decade earlier the scaffolding that supported those who lived off attacking America had already begun to collapse and a trend toward a more modulated appraisal had emerged. A brief look back at the 1970s reveals how and why the authority of anti-americanisme primaire began to dissipate.