The French Way (14 page)

But it would be tedious to review all this repetitious and corrosive right-wing literature. What deserves more attention, despite its egregious flaws, is the popular, yet odd polemic, by Jean Baudrillard.

I Amerique

Baudrillard's
Amerique
, which was published in 1986 and appeared two years later in a trendy, illustrated English translation, was possibly the most widely advertised and reviewed anti-American text of the decade, one that belonged to no particular political persuasion but leaned vaguely toward the left.
⁹²
At the time Baudrillard enjoyed a following in American artistic and academic circles as well as considerable prominence at home.

Amerique
may represent the nadir of a Gallic literary/philosophical genre, one that began with Baudelaire, that uses America as a metaphor for (post)modernity. In this long essay Baudrillard, a sociologist-cum-philosopher, reworked cliches about America employing a postmodernist vocabulary and exposition along with Marxist sentiments and categories. The result is a pretentious, self-indulgent, impenetrable, jargon-filled, maddening, random collection of sometimes inane but always gloomy observations—not to speak of the factual errors: Minneapolis is supposedly located “on the edge of the Rockies” (13).
Amirique
infuriated most American reviewers and did not impress many French critics.
⁹³

It is modernity itself, Baudrillard exclaims, not “just a gap between us, but a whole chasm of modernity” that divides America from Europe (73). America “is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version” (76). In America everything is possible: it simulates affluence, freedom, sexual gratification, and justice and in so doing has become “the absolute model for everyone” (77). The whole world dreams the American dream, less because of American power than because of its (un)culture, especially its cinema. Americans, he asserts, have no past, no identity, and live only in the present: the future belongs to such people with “no origins and no authenticity” (76). Europeans, he writes, “shall never catch up,” can imitate and parody the Americans, but “do not have either the spirit of audacity for what might be called the zero degree of culture, the power of unculture” in order to be modern in the American sense of the term (78). He adds, “From the day when that eccentric modernity was born in all its glory on the other side of the Atlantic, Europe began to disappear” (81).

To be sure, America is also a culture of hyperreality or virtual representation, a complex of artifice, lies, false promises, and broken dreams; it is as empty as the desert—Baudrillard's favorite postmodern landscape. Americans, he opines, “have no sense of simulation. They are themselves simulation in its most developed state…” (28-29). Having elevated, or disparaged, America as the epitome of postmodernity, Baudrillard proceeds to rehearse the standard tropes about a society of conformity, inequality, crime, and violence; about “vertical” cities without centers or pedestrians; about the genocide of Native Americans; and about the Calvinist work ethic. Americans appear as some anonymous mass: only two individuals are named in his essay, Ronald Reagan and Walt Disney—a censorious selection. There are nasty comments about the ubiquitous American smile—the contraction of the facial muscles that hides emptiness and indifference. Speaking of New York, he wails, “It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility,
indifference, Puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence,” yet, he continues, it represents the world's future “because the entire world continues to dream of New York” (23). Baudrillard is paranoid about American cities: Santa Cruz, California, as part of “the post-orgy” world, seems like paradise, but “a change of just a few degrees would suffice to make it seem like hell” (46). Squirrels in urban California appear like cute, furry Disney friends, but, he writes, “behind these smiling eyes there lurks a cold, ferocious beast fearfully stalking us” (48). There is little point in cataloging the inanities that purport to be profundities in
Amerique
, but it is difficult to resist the temptation to mention a few: in Los Angeles “the only real society or warmth” is on the freeway (53); “there are no cops in New York” (22); and “Manhattan was built according to the architectural conceptions that were laid out for Coney Island.”
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To this postmodernist theorist America is simultaneously a “utopia achieved” and an “anti-utopia being achieved” (97). But is this achieved utopia, he asks, paradise ? Yes, he answers, in the sense that Santa Barbara, Disneyland, and America itself are all paradise, even if this paradise is “mournful, monotonous, and superficial” (98). It is also an anti-utopia because America represents the end of European values and culture: it is a society without reflection or introspection, without reverence for cultural heritage, without depth or a sense of the tragic, without any aspirations for meaning or identity. According to this French theorist, culture in America has no aesthetic pretensions; it is merely kitsch, advertisements, diversion, hyperreality, and simulation. Because he thinks “the cinema and TV are America's reality” (104), Baudrillard dismisses American high culture. One wonders if any French writer has made more obtuse statements about America than these.

Time and again Baudrillard bares his fixation with California, equating this western state, this “mirror of our [European] decadence,” with America (104). But California is “not decadent at all. It is hyper real in its vitality, it has all the energy of the simulacrum”(i04). It is
“the world center of the inauthentic” but only in a European sense: Europe has disappeared in America, and what remains is the authenticity of Disneyland. “When you leave Disneyland and enter so-called real America, you realize that all of America is Disneyland, that all its characteristics are gathered there in a virtual matrix….”
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That America could not be Europe's future because it represented “the disappearance of Europe” seems in a perverse way to give Baudrillard pleasure: “There is something fascinating, dizzying, about feeling the very sources of one's own culture disappear.”
⁹⁶

Baudrillard cannot end his tour without ridiculing American political life. California returns yet again in the guise of Ronald Reagan, whom he sees as a symbol of a nation that has taken refuge in “a triumphal illusionism” (108), that has lost its past hegemonic power and substituted “power as a special effect” (107). Reagan has made America into California, where paradise has been realized and the have-nots are abandoned or banished, and he has transformed the presidency into a kind of cinematic performance. If Reagan is the symbol of contemporary America, then, he asks, is the superpower now “at the face-lift stage”? (115). Exhausted from his deconstruction of the continent Baudrillard concludes, “The country is without hope. Even its garbage is clean….life is so liquid…the bodies and the cars so fluid, the hair so blond, and the soft technologies so luxuriant, that a European dreams of death and murder, of suicide motels, or orgies and cannibalism to counteract the perfection of the ocean, of the light, of that insane ease of life, to counteract the hyper reality of everything…” (121-22).

Anti-anti-Americanism

When the Left came to power in 1981, the socialists and communists tried to play to anti-American sentiments and beat the drums of cultural imperialism, but they found most of the intellectual community was deaf to their appeal and impatient with their revolutionary
credo, their cultural exceptionalism, and their tiers-mondisme. Jack Lang's speech in Mexico City provoked a storm of dissent rather than applause. The enemy, according to his critics, was to the east, not the west. The Solzhenitsyn affair, the atrocities in Cambodia, the plight of the Vietnamese boat people, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and repression of the Solidarity movement in Poland made attacks on America seem misdirected. Primal anti-Americanism seemed backward and irrelevant, particularly among independent leftists, the New Philosophers, and moderate political journalists.

Politically, anti-Americanism was “the socialism of imbeciles,” trumpeted Jacques Julliard.
⁹⁷
Writing in
Le Nouvel Observateur
in 1986 Julliard was among the most outspoken journalist/intellectuals who denounced the anti-Americans, including those on the left. He welcomed what he believed were signs that the socialists had abandoned their full-throated attacks on America. To Julliard, anti-americanisme primaire in a cultural sense represented: “the revenge of failed writers and mediocrities of Francophonie. Since the collapse of the communist ideal, political anti-Americanism is no longer a winner in France. It is only a shady meeting place frequented by Communists, the fascistic extreme Right, anti-Semites and neo Machiavellians.” Or, as he elaborated, this kind of anti-Americanism represented a “sad procession of poujado-communists, vengeful Maurrasians, failed writers, or false left-wing Gaullists who have found America the ideal scapegoat of modern times.”
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One must admit, as we shall see, that Julliard's brutal interpretation was on target.

Was anti-Americanism passe or, at least, should it be? This was the principal issue discussed by independent leftist and moderate political analysts.

The most important journal for the intelligentsia,
Le Monde
, which had a long history of being hard on the United States, changed its colors: it joined those who endorsed the retreat of anti-Americanism and wished it would disappear. As early as 1980 Guy Scarpetta, a literary critic for the daily, wrote of anti-americanisme primaire as
“a veritable French sickness that consists of being able only to affirm our identity by opposing the United States.”
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He went on to describe the persistence of this malady among hard-line socialists like Jean-Pierre Chevenement, who had blamed the events of May 1968 on the “Californians,” or the director of the Pompidou Center, who refused to host a retrospective of two American artists. Scarpetta insisted it was time to resist these “old xenophobic demons.” And early in Mitterrand's term the paper featured columns mocking those like Jack Lang who advocated protectionism against American mass culture.
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A few years later, under the title of “Uncle Sam's French,” Nicolas Beau proclaimed that “anti-Americanism was sick” and that
Le Monde
itself had “turned away from its anti-American stance.”
¹⁰¹
How could one be anti-American when America was everywhere you looked—it was
banalisi
—he asked? If the
branchi
of the 1960s identified with the American counterculture, in 1984, according to Beau, they embraced the more upwardly mobile, the
“Dallas
esthetic” of making money and striving for success. Jean Cocteau may have once asserted America killed dreams, the columnist concluded, but the time had come to forget Cocteau and say “bonjour l'Amerique.” And when Baudrillard published his anti-American polemic,
Le Monde
sneered at him.
¹⁰²

Among journalists or experts writing for more moderate publications like
Le Point, Le Figaro
, and
L'Express
or reviews on international affairs there were even more vehement denunciations of the old phobia. Dominique Moisi, the foreign policy analyst, argued that the decline of anti-Americanism was permanent; it could not survive because its underlying political structure had fallen apart, the youth of France embraced the American style of life, and both young and old were fascinated with high technology and entrepreneurship.
¹⁰³
Alain-Gerard Slama, a historian of ideas who was also a columnist, wrote that the French had become realistic about America: they now thought it and Europe to be facing similar problems. “If this observation is accurate,” he predicted, “the semi-eternal debate [between] Americanism and anti-Americanism will soon interest only some dinosaurs on the
extreme Right or in the Communist Party.” Europe, once freed from defining its fate in terms of dependence or independence from the United States, would be forced “to make a new start in order to become its own model, its own America.”
¹⁰⁴
It was no coincidence that the early 1980s also marked the apogee of Raymond Aron's reputation among the intelligentsia. Aron, a stout defender of Atlanticism, then writing for
L'Express
, had long been shunned by the Left. But this scourge of ideological politics and critic of anti-Americans like the New Right finally enjoyed national respect before his death in 1983. Two newcomers to these discussions were
Commentaire
, which featured luminaries like Marc Fumaroli, Alain Besan^on, and Jean-Claude Casanova and owed its inspiration to Raymond Aron; and
LeDebat
, founded and directed by Pierre Nora and Marcel Gauchet. These publications, the first coming from the moderate Right and the latter from the moderate Left, were at the heart of French intellectual life in the 1980s, and both refrained from anti-Americanism. These reviews engaged America in all its forms, but always as interested observers. They frequently relied on American experts for enlightenment about transatlantic developments. The tone was that of learning and comparing rather than of condescension or derision. They consciously turned against the Old Left and embraced what Nora called “intellectual democracy.” Thus
Commentaire
published Francis Fukyuama's essay “The End of History?” and
Le Debat
ran a series, “The Opacity of the United States,” that featured authorities on American culture like Robert Bellah and Michael Kammen.