The French Way (12 page)

Figure 3. “To each his own cultural level.” On August 15, 1987, French Catholics organize church processions on the Feast of the Assumption while thousands of Americans crowd Memphis to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley. Courtesy Plantu, “Les Celebrations du 15 aout.” In
A la soupe!
Paris: Editions La Decouverte/Le Monde, 1987, 135.

It would be a fool's errand to try to analyze the complicated world of French intellectuals in these decades given the diversity of views, the numerous cliques and reviews, the friendships and rivalries, the shifts in perspectives, and the subtleties and intensities of the discussions.
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Then there was the
non-dit
, or meaningful silence, about America that is impossible to chart. All that is necessary here is to draw out a few observations about how the way opened to launch attacks on anti-americanisme primaire and, to a lesser extent, to express some sympathy for America. In broad terms, primary anti-Americanism had rested during the early Cold War on three pillars: the antipathy of leftist intellectuals and the unholy alliance of communists (some socialists) and Gaullists.

One of the major props of the anti-American structure was the network of left-wing intellectual circles in Paris who, during the early postwar years, had made hating America a credential for membership and aligned themselves with the Parti Communiste Français (PCF). There was a wide range of attitudes within this community toward the PCF and the Soviet Union, but even the noncommunists or independents, like those around the journal
Esprit
, hoped that the Soviet Union would become the promised socialist Eden while they shunned America as the citadel of capitalism, consumerism, and militarism. But the Left's faith had begun to ebb during the 1950s, given the inexcusably repressive behavior of the Soviets in Eastern Europe and the revelations about Stalinism, so that they distanced themselves from the PCF and worked instead to ensure that the coming of socialism would bring freedom and democracy rather than the dictatorship of the proletariat. Many turned to alternative socialist models in the Third World, like those of Cuba or China. Some of the younger partisans on the left, known as the
gauchistes
, who sparked the so-called student rebellion of 1968, embraced notions of direct democracy and rejected both state power and party politics in principle. That year exposed the base opportunism of the PCF and its enmity toward the student movement as well as the antidemocratic habits of Moscow when the Warsaw Pact nations forcefully intervened to crush reform
in Czechoslovakia. It became obvious by the early 1970s that the communists were not the champions—but instead the enemies—of freedom, human rights, and democracy. This growing disenchantment erupted into an open press war in 1974 with the translation of Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn's
Gulag Archipelago
and its revelations about Soviet labor camps. When the communists and their fellow travelers tried to discredit Solzhenitsyn a galaxy of major intellectuals, many on the left, rallied to his side to attack the party for its Stalinist behavior. They refused to be intimidated. Solzhenitsyn's allies against the communists included, from the left, Jean Daniel and Jacques Julliard of
Le Nouvel Observateur;
Jean-Marie Domenach and Michel Winock at
Esprit;
Philippe Sollers at the review
Tel Quel;
and two young
engage
intellectuals, who were later labeled as the “New Philosophers,” Andre Glucksmann and Bernard Henri-Levy. Major journals like
Liberation
and
Le Monde
from the left or left-center joined—though the latter did so cautiously. Solzhenitsyn also found backing from Jean-Francois Revel at
L'Express
, and closer to the center, from Georges Suffert at
Le Point
and Raymond Aron at
Le Figaro
.
⁵⁴
All of these names, reviews, and journals would figure prominently in the debate about America a few years later. At the same time the independent Left became wary of the electoral alliance between the communists and the socialists who expected victory in the 1978 legislative elections: journalist/intellectuals like Daniel, Domenach, Julliard, and Revel worried that the communists in power might strong-arm their socialist allies, restrict civil rights, and impose their Stalinist form of socialism.
⁵⁵
By the mid-1970s the anticommunist Left had taken up the fight against totalitarianism wherever it might be found: within the PCF, among the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, in the Soviet Union, and even embedded in the revolutionary tradition itself. Part of this story involved historians like Francois Furet, who reassessed the French Revolution, debunked its Marxist historiography, and uncovered the roots of totalitarianism within the revolutionary project. Now the French Revolution, the very foundation of leftist politics, was implicated. Historians and political
theorists also began reexamining the American Revolution; the goal was to reinsert France in the age of democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century. The revolutionary project was giving way to a resurgent Republicanism.

If the antitotalitarian campaign of the 1970s marked a turn toward liberal democracy, civil society, and human rights among independent intellectuals on the left, cheered on by their more centrist colleagues, they were not necessarily converted to philo-Americanism. But they were becoming both more open to America and less tolerant of those on the left—not just the communists, but also elements of the Socialist Party, who still adhered to the Marxist inspired revolutionary credo that condemned American imperialism, overlooked the oppressiveness of the Soviets and other communist regimes, fetishized tiersmondisme, and preached French cultural exceptionalism. Attacking this menu became the trademark of the New Philosophers, who became darlings of the media. The shift was also visible among former Maoists like Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva, who had become regulars on the American academic circuit. They, along with many other stars of the French intelligentsia like Jean-Francois Lyotard, were discovering America in the 1970s.
⁵⁶
In 1977 Sollers, Kristeva, and company devoted an issue of their journal
Tel Quel
to America, arguing that the New World could offer solutions to the impasse in Europe over political and social injustice.
⁵⁷
The newspaper
Liberation
also became more receptive to America; it had begun in 1973 as a subversive gauchiste newspaper sponsored by Jean-Paul Sartre, among others, but quickly evolved into a more conventional journal of the Left. By the late 1970s,
Libe
, as it was nicknamed, was mocked for its appeal to a youthful, not-so-radical, audience and for expressing itself in “
French-American
.” Similarly the satirical journal
CanardEnchaine
ran an amiable series on “the American connection” in 1977.
⁵⁸
The movement toward liberal democracy could also be found in the proliferation of moderate, anticommunist reviews like
Commentaire
and
Le Debat.

America itself came under reexamination by the Left.
⁵⁹
One of the discoveries was that America spawned radicals who were not mere copies of European Marxists or social misfits. Edgar Morin found the “other” America, the one that did not resemble the stereotypes of conformity, racism, militarism, materialism, or puritanism and produced its own homegrown radicals, especially in California.
⁶⁰
Revel saw America as the true land of revolution, and identified Europe's future with the American Left while attacking anti-Americanism as a symptom of the French Left's paralysis.
⁶¹
And America, according to
Le Nouvel Observateur
, turned out to be more of a friend of “liberal socialism” than the Soviet Union.
⁶²
The New World also looked better to those searching for democracy when they observed how the Watergate scandal demonstrated the system was capable of self-correction. These reassessments benefited from frequent transatlantic visits of French academics and intellectuals, especially to American universities; such experiences opened eyes to the vitality and diversity of American democracy and to the nation's scholarly eminence and achievements in high culture.
⁶³
Michel Crozier, for example, after a year at Stanford University, contributed a stinging critique of the French bureaucratic state, stressing what it might learn from America.
⁶⁴
Many of these visitors, and there were many—men and women like Crozier, Julliard, Daniel, Domenach, Furet, Kristeva, and Michel Serres—would participate in the 1980s conversation about America.

Even the militants of the PCF, the noisiest cheerleaders for antiamericanisme primaire during the Cold War, lowered the volume. In the 1970s the party suffered from a steady loss of its electoral base and a dwindling ability to intimidate the noncommunist Left—many of whom believed the party had exposed the emptiness of its revolutionary cant and its political incompetence. Detente and the coming of Eurocommunism led the party to mute its ideological dogmatism, including its attacks on America. The PCF might still badger Giscard about capitulating to American multinationals, but it also acknowledged American achievements, like enjoying the highest standard of living in
the world. Following his first visit to the United States, Jean Elleinstein, a party historian and proponent of Eurocommunism, marveled at American freedoms and the prosperity of some African Americans.
⁶⁵
The party newspaper admitted Americans enjoyed opportunities for personal advance and considerable freedom, even if, it also pointed out, these liberties were often illusory.
⁶⁶
At least the PCF was willing to grant some concessions to American society and economy. But it was the communists' political failings, the emptiness of their message, and their unwavering defense of the Soviet Union that made them vulnerable should they try to play the anti-American card.

The Gaullists, the third pillar of what was once a formidable anti-American coalition, continued posturing against Uncle Sam, but they surrendered their commanding political position in the 1970s and curbed their attacks. Their hold on the presidency came to end in 1974 with the election of the conservative non-Gaullist Giscard, and they would not regain the Elysee for twenty years. Factionalism splintered the party so that it ran three candidates for the presidency in 1981 and all lost. Jacques Chirac, after briefly serving as prime minister (197476) reorganized the party and cast it as Giscard's rival. Some Gaullist hard-liners like Jean-Marcel Jeanneney, Michel Debre, and Michel Jobert attacked the “Atlanticist” and globalizing tendencies of Giscard; and Chirac criticized Giscard for leaning toward the market and away from the “voluntarist” or Gaullist way of national economic planning. Charles De Gaulle's disciples also continued to inveigh against the superpower division of Europe: in 1978 Chirac expressed regret that France had fallen under an American protectorate.
⁶⁷
Behind this bombast, the Gaullists were mellowing in the 1970s: they were on their way to becoming the most pro-American political party, along with the Union pour la Democratie Française, the conservative backers of Giscard, in France. In a few years Chirac would rather abruptly move the party strongly toward an Atlanticist posture while other prominent Gaullists began to urge more American-style competition in the economy and society.
⁶⁸

Despite these signs of waning enthusiasm for anti-Americanism, some intellectuals and politicians continued to vituperate about Uncle Sam in the 1980s. Leading the assault on American culture were Lang's faction of socialists, and these hard-liners were joined by newcomers who twisted the discourse into novel shapes. Ideologues, as usual, provided the most intense firepower. The extreme Right and Left joined forces, or at least praised one another, in campaigning against America. For example, the New Right endorsed Lang's battle against cultural imperialism—at least at first. And one prominent Gaullist, Michel Jobert, served as a minister in the socialist government and gave full-throated support to Lang. Similarly the communists cited conservative tracts about the dangers of Americanization. Anti-Americanism brought the far reaches of the political spectrum together and provided backing, meager as it was, for Lang's policies.

Lang spoke for a potent faction of the Socialist Party that held posts in the government of Pierre Mauroy (1981-84), which served under President Mitterrand. Lang represented the rush of tiers-mondiste enthusiasm and stubborn resistance to American imperialism in all its forms that informed the stance of the party in the 1970s and colored the early years of Mitterrand's administration. Lang enjoyed at least passive backing from the president and more explicit encouragement from members of the Elysee team like Regis Debray and Jacques Attali. He was assisted by the so-called Jacobin socialists, led by Jean-Pierre Chevenement, who streaked their socialism with nationalist and protectionist colors and wanted to act even more aggressively than the minister of culture in guarding French culture and shutting the door to American imports. Chevenement, who was minister of research and industry in the Mauroy government, consistently opposed American policies, whether the issue was television programs or the war in the Persian Gulf. In a 1983
Le Monde
article he grieved over the fate of the French language, noting, “Never since the Hundred Years' War have our people known such an
identity crisis. Our language is threatened with extinction for the first time in history. America has become the last horizon of our young because we have not offered them a great democratic design.”
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