The French Way (15 page)

The Academics

Scholars joined in to study anti-Americanism and in so doing further discredited it. The phenomenon had not been a topic of serious academic inquiry, at least not among the French, prior to the 1980s. A few Americans had addressed it, usually in the form of doctoral dissertations in history or as conference papers, but it was hardly a major topic of scholarly
inquiry.
¹⁰⁵
Foreign policy experts in Washington, D.C., had always been concerned, but that was a separate world. All this changed in the early 1980s as the question became, What did anti-Americanism represent in the past and was it fading, perhaps even disappearing? The historian Michel Winock initiated the discussion, writing of the resurgence of the phobia in 1980-81 and scorning it.
¹⁰⁶
Sciences Po hosted the first Franco-American scholarly conference on anti-Americanism in 1984, presenting social scientists and historians like Winock, Denis Lacorne, Marie-France Toinet, Jacques Rupnik, Andre Kaspi, and Pascal Ory. As the scholarly conversation developed it generated colloquia in Paris and New York that featured authorities like Philippe Roger and celebrities like Regis Debray, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Crozier, and Pierre Bourdieu. In their wake came major scholarly studies by French and American researchers who mapped the historical phenomenon in depth.
¹⁰⁷

This academic attention diminished, even belittled, anti-Americanism by exposing both its vagueness and imprecision as an analytical category and its sources in irrationality, envy, ignorance, narcissism, antimodernism, and political extremism. It also confirmed its decline, though views differed about whether this was circumstantial or irreversible.

Finding an acceptable definition of the phenomenon was elusive. Delineating the category strictly seemed to exclude most everyone, including the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, but a broader classification might include those like Alexis de Tocqueville, who did not seem to belong. There was also the difficulty of clearly categorizing most discourse, groups, or individuals as either antior pro-American.
¹⁰⁸
Attitudes often evolved or were mixed or even contradictory so that America simultaneously fascinated and repelled. Equally perplexing was how adversaries and admirers often used the same images, but attributed opposing values to them.

Despite such classification problems, the experts agreed the phenomenon could be explained by the fears and passions of the French. Some scholars contended perception of threat varied according to
what ideals or interests seemed at risk. Concerns about Cold War affairs—for example, what was more dangerous (the Soviet Union or the United States) or about the domination by American multinationals—aroused anxieties about French independence or status, while those antagonized by American mass culture worried about protecting national identity or the traditional role of intellectuals. Other academics analyzed anti-Americanism as less about ideals or interests and more about the irrational and the imaginary: they offered psychological explanations like envy, projection, or stereotypical thinking.
¹⁰⁹
Scholars frequently located anti-Americanism within the Franco-French debate about modernity, placing the anti-Americans in the camp of enemies of economic, technological, and scientific progress. And it was common to perceive the phobia generated by a clash of two universalisms, or twin narcissisms, with the Americans championing democracy and the French
civilisation.

Researchers made further distinctions. They detected a cleavage between the elites and the public and made intellectuals or extremist politicians on both the right and left responsible while arguing the public endorsed most American cultural imports.
¹¹⁰
And systematic anti-Americanism, or anti-americanisme primaire, according to these scholars, was rare and virtually nonexistent among certain groups like business managers or elite civil servants.

But the major question posed by the academics, as the historian Andre Kaspi put it, was, “Has French anti-Americanism finally ceased to exist?”
¹¹¹
Kaspi may have responded negatively, but the fact that he and other scholars raised the question suggests that the pattern was one of decline. Social scientists surveying trends in public opinion concurred: they speculated France might have become “the most pro-American country in western Europe” and one expert argued that the phobia was on its way to becoming a parlor game.
¹¹²
The voice of anti-Americans, Michel Crozier concluded, no longer stirred an “important echo.”
¹¹³
The weight of this scholarly discussion in the 1980s further damaged the authority of anti-Americanism.

I The Philo-Americans

As we have seen, by the mid-1980s, America—or most everything associated with America—was chic, whether it was jogging or the preppy look. America as a fashion for the status-conscious extended even to left-wing journals like
Libiration
and
Le Nouvel Observateur
, in which readers found articles celebrating a yuppie-cum-American style.
¹¹⁴
More of the same was to be found in conservative journals like
L'Expansion
and
Le Figaro.
But there was more than status and fashion involved in this discussion; there were those who praised American society and culture: the “philo-Americans,” or the most ardent anti-antiAmericans. On the periphery of these admirers were the liberal ideologues and the pragmatic modernizers, those who selectively borrowed from their American cousins.
¹¹⁵

Outspoken praise for America, even at the fin de siecle, was exceptional among the intelligentsia. There had been only a handful of enthusiasts like Jean-Francois Revel through the 1970s, but in the next decade they spoke out more confidently and their ranks grew modestly. For example, two political moderates, Leo Sauvage and Georges Suffert, joined the small chorus. Sauvage, who had been bureau chief for
Le Figaro
in New York through the mid-1970s, collected hundreds of sympathetic stories, interviews, and anecdotes in an entertaining book titled
Les Amiricains
that aimed at debunking myths about France's transatlantic cousins. He made fun of Gallic fears about American urban crime, for example, by recalling an incident in Brooklyn in which the police arrested a man accused of breaking the windows of parked cars. This perpetrator, as it turned out, was not a thief or vandal but the co-owner of a local shop specializing in replacing automobile windows.
¹¹⁶

Georges Suffert issued a more forceful attack. His background was that of a left-wing Catholic; he had directed the technocratic Club Jean Moulin as well as serving as editor-in-chief at Servan-Schreiber's
L'Express
before covering the United States for the moderate weekly
Le Point
in the 1970s and early 1980s. He confessed openly to love America.
His book
Les Nouveaux Cowboys
was an explicit attack on anti-americanisme primaire. Sensibly, Suffert conceived of America as a vast storehouse in which an outsider could find what he or she wanted. Yet, he argued, however one evaluated America one must nevertheless admit its dynamism, its willingness to invent, change, and adapt. “The new cowboys” were the technological whiz kids and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley who created “an aristocracy of intelligence and informality which has no equivalence in my very small and very dear Europe.”
¹¹⁷
Speaking to a typical Frenchman, Suffert counseled, “I am going to tell you why you don't like Americans: they play, they putter about assembling a world, and before long you will no longer know how to play in it.”
¹¹⁸
When Suffert tried to explain primal anti-Americanism he identified the usual suspects, such as humiliation and jealousy; the French could neither pardon the Americans for liberating them in 1944 nor for making them feel so small, parochial, and backward—especially in technology. Then there was simple ignorance as well as the legacy of communism, and, to a lesser extent, Gaullism. Probing more deeply he found a disturbing basis for his people's historic irrationality: “one discerns vaguely a pathetic refusal of change, camouflaged under the colors of various progressive ideologies, envy of an [American] empire that invents one renaissance after another like a child blowing soap bubbles, [and] nostalgic heartache of dethroned kings….”
¹¹⁹
Suffert had exposed the roots of primal anti-Americanism.

On the periphery of the philo-Americans were those who found much about America that France should imitate or borrow without necessarily posing as enthusiasts. We have already encountered the French Reaganites, the economic liberals, analysts like Guy Sorman and Louis Pauwels who advocated a wholesale adoption of American economic policies and practices and saw Ronald Reagan as the anti-Mitterrand. More numerous than these free-market ideologues were the pragmatists—the descendants of a long tradition of French industrialists, labor leaders, intellectuals, and other reformers that dated back at least to the 1920s—who saw importing certain American practices and values as the way for France to remove obstacles, such as the state bureaucracy, that
blocked the way to modernity. Jean Monnet, the architect of the postwar reconstruction period was part of this tradition, as were the productivity enthusiasts of the Marshall Plan era,. In the 1980s those who advocated selective borrowing—and thus either explicitly or implicitly rejected anti-Americanisme primaire—included familiar faces from earlier years like Michel Crozier and Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber; the latter being the author of the 1960s best-seller
The American Challenge
, gathered like-minded commentators at
L'Express
that included Revel and Suffert.
¹²⁰
Latecomers to the fold of pragmatic modernizers were the likes of Michel Albert and Alain Minc, who embraced America for its spirit of innovation and risk-taking or its linkages between research and industry.
¹²¹
Albert worked at the planning commission while Minc, a prominent corporate manager and government adviser, wrote extensively about information technology and economic policy. He identified Silicon Valley with the rise of individual entrepreneurship and the vogue of the market. The roster of American-inspired modernizers could be extended to many business managers and government officials.

Reappraisals

For many intellectuals anti-Americanism in its “primal” formulation had become retrograde: it could be dismissed as a product of illusions, emotions, or ignorance. Nevertheless, a certain hauteur remained in their assessments of American culture. The itineraries of three prominent figures, Pierre Nora, Jean-Marie Domenach, and Regis Debray, are our evidence.

In the 1980s Pierre Nora was in the midst of editing and publishing what became the most influential history of France of his generation, the monumental
Les Lieux de mimoire
(Realms of Memory), which reconstructed the nation's memory and sense of identity. He was also directing the review
LeDibat
, teaching at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and serving as history editor at the venerable Editions Gallimard,
where he championed translations of major works in American social science and history. Nora described himself as a disciple of Raymond Aron and a supporter of
la gauche americaine.
He stood at the center of the myriad of networks that crisscrossed French intellectual life. Entry into the Academie Française in 2001 was to crown his career.