answer, as I have tried to show, is not quite as simple as it seems.
There is indeed a “knowledge gap” between France and the
United States. It concerns issues as different as the role of religion in
American politics, the ravages—more imaginary than real—of “political
correctness” and other such typically French exaggerations about the
“horrors” of American feminism, or the seething anger of the American
ghetto, verging on open warfare. The greater our ignorance, the more
fanciful the stereotypes that serve to decipher American reality.
Those Not With Us Are Against Us
Francophobia, no doubt encouraged by the Bush administration, is an
old phenomenon, which can be traced back to Protestant England
and was instrumental in building modern British nationalism, as well
demonstrated by Linda Colley.31 It was unleashed in the United States
for a simple reason: the Bush administration could not tolerate any
criticism from Western allies, particularly those who should have been
eternally grateful for the U.S. intervention in two world wars. In the
field of international relations, eternal praise is not a common political
value, even from friends and allies, and yet it was expected from
the Bush administration. “Those not with us are against us” was the
motto of the age. There was therefore no hesitation on the part of the
American press, eager to please the White House, to describe French
foreign policy as that of a “perfidious” if not “treacherous” nation,
the sole aim of which was the failure of the U.S. military strategy
(despite the thin evidence presented to the UN by Colin Powell of the
existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction).32 We know today that
this evidence was more fictitious than real and that the French criti-
cism of an untimely war against Iraq was based on a healthy dose of
critical thinking, perfectly justified under the circumstances. The
French manner was, perhaps, inelegant: the threat to use the French
veto at the UN “whatever the circumstances” was clumsy, to say the
least, and the inability of the French to envisage an end to repeated
rounds of inspections aroused doubt about the good faith of French
diplomats.33 But to go so far as to accuse the French of treason was a
line that only the most vicious Francophobes could cross. That line
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Anti-Americanism and Americanophobia
47
was indeed crossed by several established (and not so established)
members of the American press. It was a good time for bashing the
French, those disgusting “cheese eating surrender monkeys” (The
Simpsons)—a phrase that was endlessly repeated in signed and
unsigned editorials. Murdoch’s press pictured President Chirac as a
“weasel” running away from responsibility (The New York Post), or
a wriggling worm (The Sun, in England), and stranger still, The
Wall Street Journal portrayed Chirac as a “transvestite, balding, pygmy
Joan of Arc.”34 French leaders became a band of cowards who slunk
away the moment things got hot, forgetting how America had saved
France twice from disaster. As for our intellectuals, suffering, in the
words of Jonah Goldberg, the editor of the National Review On Line,
from “mental fecal impaction,” they naively believed that Old Europe
still meant something, that it still carried weight in the world arena.
This is why, our visionary explained, “Hollywood morons and French
Intellectuals alike find the taste of Fidel Castro’s posterior so palatable.”35
At the U.S. Congress cafeteria, French fries had become “liberty fries”
to play up to the most xenophobic of American congressmen. One of
the most merciless cartoons of President Chirac portrayed him as
a transvestite, in a “compromising position” with a particularly virile
Saddam Hussein, in simulated advertisements for condoms, with the
legend: “ ‘Republican Guard’: the only proven protection for your
weapon of mass destruction.”36
The Historical Origins of French
Americanophobia
Just as American Francophobia must be distinguished, for the sake
of clarity, from American critiques of French politics and society,
Americanophobia must be distinguished from mere anti-Americanism.
By anti-Americanism, I mean the critical and reasoned expression of a
disagreement with what Americans say or do. By Americanophobia, I
mean the total visceral rejection of anything that has to do with American
culture, democracy, or economy, in short, with American civilization.
Anti-Americanism expresses itself through critical acts or words; it may
not be reasonable, but it is openly debated in the public sphere and is
related to the concrete events that mark the ups and downs of Franco-
American relations. Philippe Roger and Jean-François Revel’s recent
books abound in examples of this nature (see chapter 1).
The story of French Americanophobia is an old one, going back to
the beginnings of the transatlantic relationship. It was best expressed
in Cornelius de Pauw’s virulent thesis of American degeneracy. In his
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48
D enis Lacorne
Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains, published in 1768, the
primary concern of this Dutch priest who wrote in French and worked
at the court of Frederick the Great, was to serve the interests of his
master. Realizing that the prince wished to discourage German emi-
gration to North America, and inspired by Buffon and some French
explorers, de Pauw argued that, in America, all natural forms, whether
vegetal, animal, or human, had degenerated to the point of having a
shrunken appearance. His essay was clearly aimed at terrifying the
future North European settlers. Hence his dramatic description of the
pernicious effects of the American climate on four-legged animals
“more than six times smaller than their European counterparts,” on
moronic human creatures, contaminated in every part of their organism37
and rendered feeble by the horrors of famine and hunger. De Pauw
did not hesitate to affirm that:
American tigers and lions were entirely mongrelized, undersized,
cowardly and a thousand times less dangerous than those of Asia and
Africa . . . wolves, wolverines and bears also occurred as miniatures in
this land, and were less audacious than their counterparts on the old
continent. . . . Finally, a generalized mutation and bastardization had
affected all four-legged creatures in this part of the world, deep down
to the very principles of life and its regeneration.38
Animals brought from Europe survived with difficulty in the New
World, to the point of “dogs losing their voice, and ceasing to bark in
most of the countries of the new continent.” On the contrary, the most
repugnant animals escaped this phenomenon and were of sufficiently
impressive sizes to discourage potential emigrants:
Here the earth’s rotting surface was overrun with lizards, eels, snakes,
reptiles and monstrous and highly poisonous insects . . . Most cater-
pi
llars, butterflies, centipedes, beetles, spiders, frogs and toads, were
giant-sized, and multiplying in number beyond imagination.39
The new colonizers, still according to de Pauw, encountered terrible
reproductive difficulties, since the “climate of the New World con-
cealed a hidden vice, which to this day is inconducive to the multipli-
cation of the human race.” Worse, the rare children who were born in
this new land had a low life expectancy: “the suffocating malignancy
of the atmosphere affected them right from the cradle, and strange
illnesses cut them down at a young age.”40
Such exaggerations explain, in turn, why Founding Fathers like
Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison devoted so much energy, and much
* * *
Anti-Americanism and Americanophobia
49
of their correspondence, to refuting the arguments put forth by
de Pauw—the first example of a European truly committed to the
systematic denigration of America.41
Two centuries later, it was no longer possible to characterize the
United States as a country that could not be civilized. On the contrary, it
was now the excess of American civilization, American hyper-modernity,
that nourished anti-American sentiment. Some Americanophobes, like
the communist writer Roger Vailland, mixed humor and irony in their
perfectly reactionary denunciation of the French enthusiasm for what
was, then, a recent American invention, the refrigerator:
I have never really understood what use a Frigidaire could ever be in a
country like France, where, apart from two moderate months in a year,
and then again not every year, the climate is uniformly so cold that
a window pantry is quite enough to keep till Monday, Tuesday or
Wednesday the leftovers from Sunday’s lamb roast. Those of my friends
who own one use it mainly to produce little cubes of ice, which are
meant to be added to a glass of wisky [sic], and which alter its taste.
Wisky, besides, has grown so dear that their Frigidaire no longer serves
anything but a symbolic purpose.42
In its most extreme form, Americanophobia today expresses itself in
a morbid desire for the military defeat of America, or even for the
destruction of America. To sweeten his deadly pill, Dr. Baudrillard
thus claimed, a few days after the trauma of 9/11, that each of us,
French, secretly wished the death of America. This was our schaden-
freude, our secret joy at the suffering of others—a suffering that is
necessary and justified because Americans well deserved it! Our jubi-
lation, according to Baudrillard, was proportional to our “terrorist
imagination,” supposedly shared by all well-meaning men and women.
The “sacrificial” nature of the attack was beyond description. It
displayed violence at its best—a strange mixture of “the white magic
of cinema, and the black magic of terrorism.” The destruction of the
twin towers ultimately fulfilled the dream of the West: “our aversion
to any final or permanent world order.” Hence this stubborn “fact,”
more real than all others, despite Baudrillard’s well-known aversion
for the very possibility of a reality principle:
We desired this event, each one of us wished it to happen, for it is
impossible not to wish the annihilation of such an hegemonic superpower.
Even though this is quite contrary to Western moral values, it is a
fact, and this fact precisely reveals the pathetic violence of all efforts to
deny it.43
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50
D enis Lacorne
And yet, such an extreme example of Americanophobia is not a recent
phenomenon in France. It was well entrenched in the France of the
1930s, with classics on the subject of French decadence like Georges
Duhamel’s Scènes de la vie future (Scenes from the Future, 1930),
Robert Aron’s and Arnaud Dandieu’s La decadence de la nation
française (The Decadence of the French Nation, 1931) or their Cancer
américain (American Cancer) published in the same year, or again
Daniel Rops’s Le Monde sans âme (A World Without a Soul, 1932), to
which should be added the works of partisans of a French spiritual
renaissance like Jacques Maritain, Alexandre Marc, and Emmanuel
Mounier.44 But the latter did not secretly wish the death of America;
their only dream was to check the evil of the age: the proliferation of
American materialistic values.
For Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu, the editors of Ordre
Nouveau, the degradation of the French spirit, or French “republican
decadence,” was due to “the full rationalization of modern society,
which under the auspices of Ford, Taylor and Young, has dehuman-
ized all our frames of reference.”45 The adoption by the French elites
of a new “industrial dogma,” amounted to a two-fold betrayal: betrayal
of the old patriotic, emotional enthusiasm derived from the French
revolutionary tradition, and betrayal of the French capitalistic tradi-
tion. From a purely “material and quantitative” perspective, according
to Aron and Dandieu, France had “already lost the battle, and sacri-
ficed itself upon the altar of social structures utterly hostile and foreign
to her.” In this perspective, the French had become the “parasites” of
of the old Roman Empire, poor teachers oblivious of the meaning
of what they “copied or taught.”46 In a grand élan heralding the
anticapitalist utopias of the 1930s, Aron and Dandieu attacked
the “cosmopolitan plutocracy,” which in submitting France to the
supranational order of the Young plan, had destroyed “all manifestations
of love for the land and the nation.” The war debt settlement did pro-
duce the terrible feeling, accepted as a matter of fact by all the grands
bourgeois, “that France was done for.” Anticipating the personnalistes
theses of Emmanuel Mounier, the future editor-in-chief of the quar-
terly Esprit, Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu offered a new solution
to the utter degeneration of France: a “return to a real, sentimental
and anti-rational individualism.” The aim was vague but grandiose.
Whatever the cost, it was an urgent task to recover the revolutionary
patriotic élan, a taste for self-affirmation, a renewed acceptance of
the “risks of victory, which demand energy and aggressiveness.”47
The Americanophobia of the 1930s effectively expressed, to use
* * *
Anti-Americanism and Americanophobia
51
François Furet’s words, a certain “pseudo-Nietzcheism”48 that gave
central importance to the exaltation of the will against the cold ration-
alizations of an Homo œconomicus, supposedly exemplified by
American bankers and captains of industry.
In Le Cancer Américain, Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu took
stock of the gravity of the American disease, a subtly insidious, sur-
reptitious cancer, which penetrated all human communities, beginning
with our cities, our universities, indeed our minds, since, they pointed
out, “America is a
method, a technique, a sickness of the mind.”49
The link with Georges Duhamel is undeniable; it is akin also to the
concerns of Emmanuel Mounier who, in his written review of Duhamel’s
Scènes de la vie future, warmly applauded the author for his denuncia-
tion of “Americanism,” that “barbarism which threatens the entire
human edifice” in the name of a progressive civilization destined to
control the fate of the human species. An ultimate consequence would
be nothing less than the “extermination of all individual life forms.”
Faced with the terrifying emergence of “idolatrous mechanism,” the
civilized individual, according to Mounier, had no choice but to “wake
up to the alarm” in order “to save the future of mankind, whatever it
might hold.”50
The founding manifesto of the quarterly Esprit took up the same
themes in 1932, implicitly targeting the grand American tyranny,
whose drastic effects called for a healthy revolt. The consequences,
if the authors of the manifesto were to be believed, were quite
clear: “Societies governed like businesses; savings dilapidated to
adapt man to machine and to extract only material profit from human
effort; a private life torn apart by appetites and desires, totally disor-
dered and pushed to all forms of homicide and suicide (. . .).”
The solution, again, was to save man “by making him conscious
of his true identity,” while accepting the “permanent fate of the
Spirit, without any attachment to its temporal manifestations,” with-
out enslaving it to the search for profit. The final call for freedom
was: “It is time to free heroic action from bitterness and joy from
mediocrity.”51
Strictly speaking, the exalted rhetoric of the editors of l’Ordre
Nouveau and Esprit, was not just French in inspiration. Behind the
specter of a decadent France was that of a decadent Europe, and the
defense of a French spiritual renewal echoed the thoughts and writings
of an influential German philosopher, Martin Heidegger.52 Heidegger
shared with his French literary counterparts a similar Americanophobia.
His enemy was the twin facets of modern capitalism: American and
Bolshevik materialism and mechanism, the true causes of Europe’s