The French Way (51 page)

American Society, Economy, and Values

More indicative than popular culture of deteriorating perceptions was the sagging appreciation of American society.

In 1988 the words most frequently selected to describe America from a menu of choices were:
power, dynamism, wealth
, and
liberty.
If
power
is at least ambivalent in the sense of approbation, all the choices were positive. By 1996 the top choices changed dramatically to
violence, power, inequality
, and
racism. Liberty
fell and
imperialism
rose.
⁴⁸
Reviewing these results
Le Monde
observed that “the image of the United States has not stopped deteriorating.”
⁴⁹
Four years later the picture was more forbidding. The number of those selecting words like
violence, power, inequality
, and
racism
had all increased; they were checked by as many as two-thirds of those polled.
⁵⁰
Asked to elaborate on these descriptive terms, respondents explained that
violence
referred to a general perception of a violent society and specifically to crime, drugs, guns, and the death penalty.
⁵¹
The most popular descriptions (in descending order) from another survey conducted the same year, which
also provided a menu of choices, were:
violence, the death penalty, social inequality, innovation, racism,permissiveness
(
tout estpermis)
, and
economic opportunity
.
⁵²
In yet a third set of surveys respondents also selected from a list of words to describe the United States. In 1995 those most frequently deemed accurate, in descending order, were
domineering, materialistic, democratic, violent, trustworthy, racist, cultured, religious, cooperative, isolationist
, and
hypocritical.
Five years later virtually all the negative choices (e.g.
domineering
or
violent)
increased, and all the positive ones (e.g.
democratic
or
trustworthy)
fell.
⁵³
The popular image of American society had become rather ugly.

American social policy also did not find many fans in France. In the 1980s rather few of the French embraced
Reaganisme.
In the early Clinton years a substantial majority said the United States failed in taking care of its sick and elderly.
⁵⁴
In 1996, two-thirds of one sample disapproved of the American social system because it offered “little social protection.”
⁵⁵
At the end of the Clinton administration the French cited alleged American failures in providing social protection, fighting crime, and integrating immigrants.
⁵⁶
The death penalty was singled out as a typical example of American barbarism. In 2001, after surveying how West Europeans assessed U.S. performance on social issues, the U.S. Department of State concluded that “the French are most critical, followed by the Germans.”
⁵⁷
The French dunned Clinton's America for doing a poor job of protecting the environment, safeguarding minority rights, providing quality health services, caring for the sick and elderly, and providing access to higher education. At the same time the French, as well as other West Europeans, awarded high marks to the United States for maintaining law and order, religious freedom, and economic opportunity.
⁵⁸
The apparent contradiction between approving the maintenance of law and order and criticizing Americans for violence and failing to combat crime is obvious.

Appraisals of the American economy matched those of social policy. The French people, much like their political leaders, opined that the market worked best when it was strongly regulated. At the end of
the century only 30 percent of the public considered the New World a good economic model. Almost two-thirds found, much like the Germans and to a lesser extent the British and the Italians, that the United States neglected many problems like job insecurity and unemployment benefits.
⁵⁹
But they found reason to praise it for creating jobs and developing new technologies.
⁶⁰
What was distinctive about the French, in comparison to other West Europeans, was their strong antipathy for “American ways of doing business.”
⁶¹

What seemed to inform these views of American society and economy were different personal and social values. Paraphrasing an American ambassador, for the French a good society offered equality and social protection and for Americans it provided opportunity and risk.
⁶²
Americans, unlike West Europeans, strongly believed individual success lay largely within one's control. In contrast, one continent-wide survey concluded that in most European countries majorities believed that forces outside an individual's personal control determined success.
⁶³
The French, like other West Europeans, were more likely to assign some responsibility to society for personal failure rather than blaming the individual. Americans were much less likely do so.
⁶⁴
It follows then that the French believed more strongly than Americans that government had a responsibility for the “very poor who can't take care of themselves.”
⁶⁵
Or, as the European-wide survey concluded, “Americans—alone among the populations of wealthy nations—care more about personal freedom than about government assurances of an economic safety net.”
⁶⁶

What is apparent is that the French, like many other West Europeans at the end of the century, did not think they shared much with Americans with respect to certain basic values. The French asserted that they and the Americans did not have the same conception of democracy (49 percent), family (58 percent), morality and ethics (69 percent), law and order (73 percent), work (76 percent), and lifestyle (81 percent). The French found greater difference in every one of these comparisons than did the Germans or the British.
⁶⁷
Such distancing
did not mean that there were no positive feelings registered. America was awarded high marks for traits like dynamism, wealth, economic opportunity, and democracy. But the perception of social difference was unmistakable. What is less certain was why the French believed they differed from Americans. The polls were silent on this question. One can only guess, for example, that the selection of
work
as a contrasting activity meant that the French assumed Americans valued work as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end—that is, Americans were “workaholics” while the French knew how to live. Such inferences require sources other than survey data.

If there was one value that came to most separate Americans from the French, it was religion. One poll queried: Is it necessary to believe in God in order to be moral? Over half of Americans answered yes. But only 13 percent of the French did.
⁶⁸
Similarly, when asked, “Is the U.S. too religious a country or not religious enough?” the French were unique among West Europeans. Almost twice as many French as Germans or British said that Americans were “too religious.”
⁶⁹
Another survey conducted systematically since the 1980s corroborates these findings; it shows that the United States became more patriotic and more religious than most European countries.
⁷⁰
By the end of the century the three thousand miles across the Atlantic corresponded to a perceived chasm in values.

Whose Opinion?

Up to this point, the opinion of the French has been treated as a unit, but one would like to know if attitudes varied according to criteria like age or gender. The survey data available tend to omit such distinctions. Fortunately there are some exceptions and these provide some hints about how attitudes were distributed among the population.

The best evidence for at least the elementary distinction between elites and the public derives from several surveys conducted by the U.S.
Department of State during 1999-2001. In these surveys “elite” samples were composed of the political elite (e.g., national party leaders; second-tier politicians and officials (e.g., mayors, ministerial staff); private businesspeople from large-and medium-size firms; public sector managers; educators from secondary schools and universities; media and cultural elites; and religious leaders. For each category an effort was made to assure a distribution between Paris and the provinces. The gender of the typical sample, which contained some five hundred respondents, was 80 percent men and 20 percent women.
⁷¹

Elites, more than the public (63 percent vs. 43 percent in January 2001), thought strong leadership in world affairs from the United States was desirable for the interests of France.
⁷²
But such approval did not disguise the fact that elites also expressed stronger reservations than the ordinary person on several issues and perceived Franco-American rivalry differently. One poll showed that if the two strata agreed that the United States and France were moving in opposite directions on several issues, elites adopted a much harsher stance. Topics on which elites saw transatlantic differences more sharply than nonelites were addressing trade and economic questions, protecting the global environment, reducing poverty in developing nations, and promoting democracy in Cuba.
⁷³
When elites were asked to volunteer in an unstructured interview what they thought were the major points of contention between the two nations, they gave priority by a wide margin to economics and trade, followed at a distance by U.S. foreign policy and hegemony.
⁷⁴

Elites were also more critical than the public of the performance of the United States on social issues. The two strata agreed that their American cousins were not performing well on several fronts, but elites were, as in international affairs, more severe. Compared to the public, elites more often dunned the United States for not providing health care; not taking care of the elderly; not protecting the environment; and not assuring quality education to all.
⁷⁵
On the only two issues for which the two social groups thought the United States was performing well, which were offering economic opportunity and maintaining law
and order, elites were more positive than the public. Elites were more extreme: they were more negative on what they disapproved, and more positive on what they approved, than the public.

Most notable was elite versus public difference over social values as opposed to social policy. Elites targeted lackluster American performance on meeting social problems. For the public the transatlantic gap seemed even more basic: it stemmed from supposedly dissimilar conceptions of social institutions and values.
⁷⁶
The public, for example, more so than the elite, concluded that the French and the Americans did not share a common lifestyle. An analyst, however, is left guessing what exactly the French thought was different in lifestyles.

With respect to American popular culture, conventional wisdom has held that elites have been less receptive than the public. This stems from the loud and strident voices emanating from St. Germain des Pres in contrast to the eager consumption by the masses of imports like Hollywood movies. But these surveys do not corroborate this thesis for the fin de siecle. Or, at least, the two social groups seemed to agree if the question asked was simply, “In general what is your opinion of American popular culture such as music, television, and films?” Faced with a favorable/unfavorable binary, favorable answers were given by the public and elites at almost the same levels (52 percent and 49 percent, respectively) in 2000.
⁷⁷
Nevertheless, almost half of both these strata also registered “unfavorable” opinions so that American popular culture did not receive a standing ovation.

The data afford a small opportunity at refining elite responses further. Party affiliation mattered among political elites. When given the chance to select extreme—either “very positive” or “very negative”—opinions of the United States, the “nays” gathered on the left of the political spectrum. The most censorious choices came from communists and members of the Green Party.
⁷⁸
Even though the Cold War had ended, the communists continued to form the hard core of those expressing anti-American sentiments. As for the socialists, some 18 percent awarded the United States with the “very negative” assessment, but
that was not much different from the Gaullist Rassemblement pour la Republique, or RPR (15 percent). (In 2002 the RPR was renamed the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, or UMP.) The fewest negatives came from the centrist Union pour la Democratie Française and the far right Front National. Significantly “very positive” views were negligible among political elites on both the left and the right. For example, only 14 percent of the supposedly pro-American RPR was willing to give a high rating to the United States.