The French Way (13 page)

Those in the party, the moderates who dissented from such zealotry, clustered around Michel Rocard. In the eyes of the Jacobin socialists, Rocard's clique stood condemned, infamously, as
la gauche americaine.
The Communist Party, which held four portfolios in the Mauroy government, also backed the Lang-Chevenement hard-liners in resisting American cultural imperialism. Even though the communists had moderated their stance toward the United States in the 1970s, they had continued to attack Giscard's “American party” for its mistaken effort at entering the American-run global market at the cost of smothering French identity. One of Mauroy's communist ministers, Anicet Le Pors, warned Americanization brought “ethnocide.”
⁷⁰

In short, the triumphalist Left, following its stunning electoral victory, led the charge and heartened the partisans of anti-Americanism. And, of course, there was the unrepentant radical intelligentsia of an earlier generation, those celebrities like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who ridiculed opponents with the anti-American label. For example, they assigned the worst sin possible to the New Philosophers: the Americans had co-opted them.
⁷¹

The discourse of primal anti-Americanism also persisted among some Gaullists, as well as socialists and communists. Jacques Thibau, a former director of the public TV station Antenne 2 (now France 2) under de Gaulle and an authority on the media, described his country's predicament as “colonized France” and analyzed in detail how America had occupied the French mind and economy and turned the country into a political dependency. Evoking a common critique of imperialism—that the most advanced form of cultural dominance occurred when the colonized shared the colonizers' views of themselves—Thibau argued that the French had accepted the stereotype of themselves as provincial and backward while the Americans were supposedly the model of global modernity. Unmasking Americanization
by showing ways in which American films, television programs, and advertising colonized the French imagination, or how American multinationals exploited dynamic economic sectors like computers, or how “modernization” was a trap relegating France to weakness in the global division of labor, ran rampant in the pages of his diatribe. By submitting to American manipulation and homogenization, he concluded, France was committing “ethnocide.”
⁷²
But Thibau's rant contained no prescriptions on how the French could escape this fate except that they should not try to imitate the inaccessible American model—advice he did not follow himself. Despite his disgust with the Americanization of his peers, Thibau acknowledged that he had sent his son to the Harvard Business School and owned California real estate. A more conventional Gaullist swipe at the United States came from Georges Pompidou's former foreign minister and Mitterrand's foreign trade minister (1981-83), the irascible Michel Jobert, who advised Americans to accept the alleged loss of their exceptional position in world affairs.
⁷³
What piqued Jobert was what had disturbed de Gaulle: the U.S. government cloaked its self-interest and will to power in the guise of altruism and libeled anyone who opposed it not as just mistaken, but as evil or traitorous. When it came to the twin imperialisms, American and Soviet, Jobert found the American variety more dangerous because it was more insidious.
⁷⁴

If there was some continuity on both the right and the left in anti-Americanism rhetoric in the 1980s, new variations on old tropes about America also emerged: one came from what was deemed the New Right; the other appeared in the garb of postmodernism.

The New Right

The
Nouvelle Droite
, or New Right, as used here, refers to the study group Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes sur la Civilisation Europeenne (GRECE) and its affiliated reviews like
Nouvelle Ecole
, which
were formed in the wake of the Algerian War and the events of 1968—that is, its members were advocates for keeping Algeria French and opponents of the gauchiste students who sparked the disorders of May 1968.
⁷⁵
Formed from a small group of young politically engaged intellectuals, many in their twenties and thirties, the New Right labored at designing a comprehensive political, social, and cultural agenda—or what they termed “metapolitics”—aimed at invigorating France, global cultural diversity, and the “European empire.” Among its activists were numerous educators, students, journalists, intellectuals, and professionals as well as at least one member of Giscard's government. GRECE sponsored conferences, founded a publishing house, and published or assisted several reviews; for a time, some of its members held editorial positions in the mass circulation weekly
Le Figaro Magazine J
⁷⁶
The star of the movement was Alain de Benoist, one of whose essays received an award from the Academie Française. Numbering only a few thousand members but, at least briefly, reaching possibly hundreds of thousands through channels like
Le Figaro Magazine
, the New Right attracted considerable attention, much of it hostile, from the late 1970s through the 1980s.

These counterrevolutionary intellectuals compiled a formidable negative agenda. They weighed in against the Enlightenment, Judeo-Christian cosmopolitanism, socialism, communism, egalitarianism, liberalism, the Jacobin nation-state, religious fundamentalism, consumerism, globalization, and, most notably, came to be stridently anti-American; indeed GRECE was the only major political or intellectual organization of the time that made America its principal enemy. It sought to revive France without returning to the nationalist, exclusionary, anti-German, or Catholic themes of the traditional far right. Their goal was to enhance cultural diversity in particular to renew European civilization as an alternative to a uniform, Americanized, Atlantic pseudocommunity. For GRECE an ideal community was organic, rooted in an inherited culture, racially homogeneous, and hierarchical—one led by “natural” elites who performed “heroically.” When the organization spoke of a “European race” it referred to Northern Europe,—to
Celts, Vikings, and Germans. Benoist refuted charges of racism and fascism—but not to everyone's satisfaction. He proclaimed his support for immigration and “the right to be different” and he embraced Third World peoples as the natural allies of this new Europe, a stance that was dubbed
tiers-mondisme de droite.
After all, Benoist insisted, it was not immigrants who had spoiled French culture or hawked the commercial values of
la sociiti marchande.
GRECE refused to align itself with any political party keeping its distance from the ruling right-wing parties and attacking Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National as political opportunists running on a reactionary, anti-immigrant platform.

Americanization in the late 1970s, as viewed from the New Right, became even more than Marxism the principal threat to European and global cultural diversity. Any attempt at installing a universal culture, as the Americans supposedly intended, would lead to convergence and entropy or the death of living, national, regional, or local cultures. Or, as these newcomers to the far right phrased it, “American-Western civilization” spread egalitarianism and a uniform, hedonistic, and consumerist culture that had little to do with true European culture. Culture, they contended, had boundaries, national or continental, and one such boundary—surely an eccentric proposition—was the Atlantic. American and European ways were supposedly essentially antagonistic. It would be best if Europe disengaged from American culture and intensified exchanges with Third World societies. After all, from their perspective, Europe and the Third World were both victims of the Americans' market ideology. Advancing global diversity, which was the cause of all peoples, would stop the spread of
Homo economicus amirician.
As for Europe, Benoist declared, “it will be made against the United States or it will not be made.”
⁷⁷

The New Right readily borrowed from the standard Gallic repertoire of stereotypes: Americans were Bible-toting preachers who worshipped the dollar; they were consumers immersed in a “gadget culture”—and they were obese. They preached morality to the rest of the world after they had exterminated the Native Americans and dropped
atomic bombs on the Japanese. While they pretended to be worldly, they were intensely parochial: half of the sophomore geography class at a Florida university, according to one account, could not place Spain on a blank map of Europe.
⁷⁸
Benoist claimed that 90 percent of Americans had never read a book.
⁷⁹
What America sold was a “global mass culture” that “annihilated” naturally distinct—meaning hereditary—cultural communities. The French people, according to the New Right, were enduring “the staggering progress of the Americanization of our ways of thinking and living.”
⁸⁰
Should American English advance any further among the French, an alarmist article in
Le Figaro Magazine
warned, they would lose their heritage, their soul, and would “soon accept the American way of life” and become colonized “gallo-ricaines.”
⁸¹
The toxic effects of Americanization could be seen when American movies were so recognizable that there was no need to translate their titles, or when televised news awarded more coverage to the United States than to France.
⁸²
The coming of cable and satellite television and videocassettes made the television monitor the central front in the fight for cultural independence. Benoist wrote that in their entire history France and Europe had never been so profoundly “occupied” as they were in the 1980s: “France has never been less French and Europe less European” than today because of Americanization.
⁸³
GRECE concluded that if there were two “totalitarianisms” facing France—Soviet communism and American liberalism, both advancing egalitarianism and homogeneity—the greater danger came from the United States because it was closer to realization. Benoist pushed this choice to its logical conclusion and reluctantly advanced philo-bolshevism: “The East imprisons, persecutes, bruises the body and suppresses individual freedom. The West breaks up organic structures, depersonalizes peoples. It creates happy robots; it air conditions hell; it kills souls.”
⁸⁴
Or, as he once infamously declared, if he had to choose between the two evils, he would prefer to wear “the Red army cap” than have to live and “eat hamburgers in Brooklyn.”
⁸⁵
Not everyone within GRECE endorsed Benoist's bizarre choice, and some defected. Consistency, coherence,
balance, and even common sense were not the strength of someone who had so many hates and whose agenda rapidly evolved.

One could not expect any relief from intellectual or political elites; according to these young partisans, they had sold out to the Americans: “In the space of twenty years the majority of the [French] intelligentsia has succumbed to its [America's] siren call.”
⁸⁶
Nothing in the way of protecting French culture from the Americans would come from the politicians of the Fifth Republic. The parties of the Right were constrained from protecting French culture either by their market ideology or by fear of appearing antimodern. Indeed, some of them were mistakenly enamored of Americanization and Reaganism. On the left, they charged, the ruling socialists courted Disney, and Mitterrand paid homage to the lords of Silicon Valley. In response GRECE hosted a conference in 1986, “The Challenge of Disneyland,” at which Benoist called for the extermination of Mickey Mouse and a cultural war against the United States.
⁸⁷

After initially welcoming Mitterrand's cultural watchdog Jack Lang, the New Right was disappointed: he, and the socialists, proved inept at invigorating and protecting French culture.
⁸⁸
Lang wrongly treated culture, like books, as merchandise, something that generated profits or economic growth. All he accomplished, according to GRECE, was radio broadcasts of French
chansons
, gaudy colloquia at the Sorbonne, and new flower pots at the Grevin Museum. He offered no coherent or vigorous program to revive national culture. What the New Right failed to mention was that its recommendations for cultural policy—more protection and exchanges with the Third World—were precisely what Lang championed. The New Right urged both the Right and the Left to overcome their historic rivalry and make resistance to Americanization the unifying issue, and to construct a “European Monroe Doctrine” against the American empire.
⁸⁹
Such a plea underestimated how complicit both the Right and the Left had become in Americanization and how inadequate primal anti-Americanism was for generating a new politics.

As complements to the New Right there were similar right-wing sermons like the one by Henri Gobard, a professor of literature, who warned that the French were submitting not to another culture but to a negation of culture, one that mixed the arts, styles, and religions of various countries into an “undefined hamburger that was not American but simply
usaique
.”
⁹⁰
Another conservative academic, former diplomat and member of the New Philosophers, Jean-Marie Benoist, who later converted to Reaganism, drew parallels between the Soviet gulags and the American media: both imperial powers imposed their tyrannies of normality or uniformity.
⁹¹