America on Their Minds
Mini Teaser: The subject of Franco-American relations is "vast," in the Gaullian usage of the word, and for most Americans vastly boring.
The subject of Franco-American relations is "vast," in the Gaullian usage of the word, and for most Americans vastly boring. When the interminable General said "vast," pointing his huge beak downward at his interlocutor and dropping his voice an octave to produce his famous gouaille, or mocking tone, he meant that the subject or problem in question was insoluble, or long since dismissed from his august consideration, which came to the same thing; and that in any event it was idiotic of you to bring the matter up. On this issue (and it was by no means the only one) the allegedly anti-American French leader and the American people were profoundly attuned to each other.
That was a long and benighted time ago. In those days, well into the 1970s, in fact, our State Department and Congress regularly and conscientiously enquired into the solidity and quality of our relations with the Western Europeans, which were generally quite good, and in particular with the French, which were problematical, to say the least. We even ran "morale surveys," as they were called, to measure how we were faring in the Cold War competition with the Soviets for European public opinion. From all of which it transpired that the French, no less than the other Europeans, saw themselves as incorrigibly part of "the free world," even if it curled their lips to use the term, and stubbornly preferred its way of life, even when--especially when--they voted to strengthen the parliamentary and social influence of Soviet agents in their country. Here was an apparent paradox to furrow the brows of our leadership and our pundits in Washington; and it was sometimes grist for the mills of politicians seeking to show that the party in power was neglecting our moral and psychological defenses in Europe. There was even a flap from time to time, as during the Kennedy-Nixon presidential campaign in 1960, when one of these morale surveys was inadvertently leaked (by me, alas) to the little band of famished newsmen who hung around the American embassy in Bonn.
Still, I cannot recall that this sort of thing ever aroused much interest in the United States outside what is now called the Beltway. To be sure, there has always been a hard core of francophiles among us, artists and writers, professors, gourmets, not to mention the Order of the Cincinnati and the high society ladies who organize festivities to raise money for the restoration of Versailles, where the golden legend of our Eternal Alliance began: Franklin and Vergennes, Washington and Lafayette; and the fashion buffs, of course, and those who make pilgrimages to Giverny for Monet's water lilies, to Deauville for the races, to Cannes for the film festival, et tout et tout. But these are elite elements. For the rest, with the exception of brief periods of contention between our governments on trade policy, say, or on the role of NATO outside Europe, I think it fair to say that the French have enjoyed (or suffered from) a sort of benign neglect in America; and that this state of affairs promises, in the foreseeable future, to endure.
In short, since the departure of de Gaulle, and a fortiori since the Soviet Empire has begun to crumble from within, we Americans have become increasingly "Gaullian" on the issue of Franco-American relations, i.e., increasingly bored. Whereas the French, in case you haven't noticed, the arrogant, witty, and oh so intelligent French, are now suddenly in the position of the General's interlocutors--they can't stop bringing the matter up.
For this last there are good and obvious reasons--and they all lead the French inexorably back to the old suspicion, first voiced by Tocqueville, that our Revolution might have something to tell them about their future; even more, perhaps, than 1789 and All That. Why? Because they have finally made their entry into the modern world, decolonized, adopted a constitution of "presidential" format, like ours, kicked the Marxist habit, if not yet quite the habit of thinking of politics in the grandiose Welt-historisch manner they picked up from the Germans generations ago. And this above all: they have discovered economic growth, the heaven and hell of it, and in the process been mediatised, as they like to say, and become enamored of gadgets and popular culture. Precisely what Georges Duhamel(1) and Franc[ced]ois Mauriac and so many others--the traditionalist Academy and the avant-garde forming a popular front on this issue--warned would happen if the French turned away from their glorious traditions and went whoring after those strange American gods.
The upshot of all this is that our most ancient ally is greatly, indeed strangely, preoccupied with us at the moment, principally because of our cultural presence, which has increased exponentially since World War II. So, on one side in any event, we have the makings of a famous romance. But there is a hitch, alas, as in the old Jewish joke about the matchmaker who eloquently persuades the tailor's son to marry Rothchild's daughter. Well, that's half the job done, he says, leaving the tailor's shop. The fact is that the current French passion for America and things American is unrequited. Not because we have taken it into our heads to dislike the French, but--worse--because we haven't. As we are constantly being told by our pundits and pollsters, who after all cannot all be wrong all the time, we are an increasingly contentious and self-obsessed people. And the odd thing about this imbalance, this unrequited passion, is that it seems--at least at this moment of writing--hardly resented by my normally prideful and sarcastic French friends, unless their resentment be simmering away somewhere beneath the surface, beyond the range of my aging antennae, which I rather doubt.
To be sure, the phenomenon is sometimes ironically noted, as when someone produces an opinion poll showing that only 2 percent of the American people can name the French prime minister (the estimable Rocard) or that 3 percent think that it matters whether the French approve or disapprove our policy in Central America. But this sort of thing has come to be accepted as a fact of nature, as it were, a consequence of relative size and power and of the incuriosity and imperious ignorance of detail which, in the French historical memory, is the very privilege, precisely, of size and power. Just as we, on our side, have come to take it for granted when we cross the Atlantic and observe how assiduously the descendants of Racine and Couperin, of Rabelais and Voltaire, follow the adventures of Bill Cosby and Roseanne on their television sets, spend their time and treasure on our films, books, records, toys, designer jeans, and gadgets, so that it is no longer surprising to encounter Parisians who (thanks to the extraordinary erudition of certain French broadcasters) know more about our popular culture, especially about our films and our popular music, than we do, if only because we do not share--how could we?--their unrequited passion for ourselves.
The foregoing lucubrations might well have occurred to anyone who, having spent half his adult life in France, returns to Paris and finds the children of his friends besotted by our sitcoms and computer games, filled with Hollywood lore and eager to tell him who was on the drums when Johnny Hodges and Duke Ellington did "Back To Back" and "Side By Side." There's precedent for this sort of thing, of course, since nothing comes from nothing, unless it be God; and I am suddenly reminded of a bony-faced old man with curiously Mongolian eyes whom we found hiding in Tunis in 1943, when the Germans gave up in North Africa. His name was Andr[acu]e Gide. He was brought to Algiers, where I was working in Psychological Warfare, and his first question to me was about Dashiel Hammett. How was he? And where? And was he not our greatest writer of prose? And then, too, we had Sartre and a swarm of sub-Sartreans touting Dos Passos, Faulkner, and Hemingway right after the war. But all that was still in the realm of High Culture, even if it was informed--in accordance with the Sartrean or some other ideology--with adversarial intent. To be anti-American then--and then was the time, if ever--was hardly to be out of step with American art and literature! The age of the electronic media and the bandes dessines (the comic strip as an art form) had not yet dawned.
But my purpose is not to summarize five decades of French cultural fashion in five lines. It is rather to suggest, if you have an interest in the evolution of France as a society and a culture, and in the Europe of which it is an indispensable part; if you believe (as I do) that all this is of some relevance to our own future, that you forthwith lay hands on and read a book published by MacMillan in London last summer and a few months ago by St. Martin's Press in this country, to wit: The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism: A Century of French Perception(2). It is this book, I must confess, and not the fact that I divide my time between the two countries, that is the proximate cause of the foregoing lucubrations; and of a few still to come. At 258 pages, index included, it is a slim and tightly packed collection of essays by some twenty scholars, mostly French but including Robert Paxton, the historian of Vichy France; Theodore Zeldin of St. Antony's College, Oxford, the author of a monumental history (in the currently fashionable French sociological manner) of nineteenth-century France, and more recently of the unmonumental but more readable The French; and various other foreign observers such as the late Michael Harrison of the Geneva Institute of Advanced International Studies and Ezra Suleiman of Princeton.
This excellent opus is the English (and only minimally updated) version of a volume published in 1986 by Hachette in Paris with a significantly different title: L'Amerique dans les Te[cir]tes, Un Sie[gra]cle de Fascinations et d'Aversions. The French texts were competently translated by Gerald Turner, and both volumes were edited by three senior fellows of the CERI, the international studies group of the French National Political Science Foundation, which in December 1984 organized the colloquium and elicited the texts that form the content of this book. The English title promises an account of anti-Americanism as a political phenomenon, and the book richly delivers on this score, tracing the development of Gaullist attitudes on one hand--essentially reassertions of old-fashioned French nationalism, i.e., of the political, cultural, and commercial interests of la Grande Nation against the barbaric new superpowers--and, on the other hand, of the communist, fellow-traveling, and neutralist attitudes, i.e., the World According to the Left-Wing French Intellectual: a twice-told tale which is brilliantly recapitulated here in essays by Denis Lacorne, Diane Pinto, Marie-Christine Granjon, Pascal Ory, and Michel Winock.
The two tendencies are quite distinct in their surface manifestations--form, tone, and sensibility--and yet more often complementary than contradictory in their substance; indeed, they are often represented by the same person at different stages of his or her career. Within the broad geopolitical framework which gives coherence and continuity to the thinking of Charles de Gaulle himself, it was always possible to accommodate a certain simplified or "vulgar" form of Marxism--the only one, as Raymond Aron acidly pointed out in The Opium of the Intellectuals, that French literary people ever bothered to pick up. The result is often a massive and, on the whole, amusing mental confusion, as exemplified by Parisian gurus like Re[acu]gis Debray, erstwhile comrade-in-arms of Che Guevara, later a counselor to Franc[ced]ois Mitterrand, and most recently author of an encomium to General de Gaulle; or, better still, like Jean-Marie Benoist, a former French cultural attache[acu] to Great Britain and professor at the Colle[gra]de France, who, according to Denis Lacorne and Jacques Rupnick in their introductory essay
Several years before his lightning conversion to Reaganism...had no qualms in decrying `the twin monolithic tyrannies of uniformity...Woodstock and the jeans uniform on one side; the Gulags on the other,' before going on to draw a striking parallel between the said Gulags and the American media: 'Almost obscenely symmetrical in their hegemonic ambitions and in the mirror-image absolutism of their lust for power, the two great empires...employ different methods (to share out the planet between themselves....
Etc., ad nauseam. Which provides our authors with a lovely pretext for quoting Pierre Hassner to the effect that
France is the only country where it is possible to say absolutely anything, so long as it is said in a manner which is sufficiently systematic or romantic, apodictic or apocalyptic, best of all if one can manage to combine both, even if one has said precisely the opposite, but in the same style, just a few years or even months previously.
Insofar as The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism is an exercise in current history, I know of no better or more perceptive summary of the pilgrim's progress which the French intelligentsia accomplished so articulately, passionately--and, at times, so hilariously--in the years following World War II. These were the "simultaneously elitist and revolutionary years," to paraphrase Diana Pinto, when the only good Americans were those summoned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, to be followed by the sudden burst of activity in the social sciences in the 1960s and the early 1970s, with Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Lacan, and the new historians, not to speak of their literary or cinematic counterparts, all ending up in the blind alley of Deconstruction. It was during this latter period that French intellectual attitudes towards America became less peremptorily hostile, more quizzical, as the story of the Gulag began to come out, and we, on our side, became at once more real and more complex to the French: mired in Vietnam, struggling through the civil rights movement, and offering the extraordinary spectacle of a "counter-culture," allied with an oddly mindless nativist leftism that seemed to leave Marx, or any identifiable European model, far behind. All this culminated in the Great Revelation of the late 1970s and 1980s with the simultaneous collapse of the Soviet Union's image in France and the onset of an entire set of new and now favorable (indeed enthusiastic) attitudes towards America, the market economy, and the so-called "formal," "bourgeois" liberties once so contemptuously dismissed. It was in the first fine flush of this new dispensation that the senior fellows of the CERI organized their symposium and conceived the volume they called L'Ame[acu]rique dans les Te[cir]tes.
The original French title means literally "America in our heads," "on our minds," like that song we used to sing about Georgia; and despite many interesting excursions into economics, juridical questions, sociology, and history, ancient and modern, this is the central theme of the book: America-mania, obsession, the French fascination with America as myth and reality, the vehicle and symbol of the modernity which was so profoundly altering a society that had slumbered like Sleeping Beauty during and between the two world wars and now, having been wakened by Ernest Hemingway and well and truly kissed, was beginning what came to be called les trente glorieuses, the thirty glorious postwar years during which real per capita income would be multiplied by a factor of four or five and tens of millions of French country people would pour into the cities, including some shining new ones constructed to receive them. All this coincided with the return to metropolitan France of more than a million overseas French, including Jews who elected not to live in the newly independent North African lands, soon to be followed by hundreds of thousands of others--Arabs, Berbers, and southern Europeans--in search of work. And meanwhile, of course, there was the threat from the East, troop movements in Prague and around Berlin, and a whole new (and still rather shapeless) Europe slouching towards Brussels to be born.
With so much change and the resistance inevitably provoked by change, it should not surprise us that the French, brought up in the conviction that there was something called Civilization to which they had acquired proprietary rights, were by no means unanimously prepared to celebrate what was going on. Terms like "modernity" or "the future" were actually terms of opprobrium for many conservative Frenchman, while the so-called progressives insisted that we Americans (being capitalism incarnate) had no claim to them at all. So anti-Americanism had solid roots and antecedents on both sides of the French political spectrum; and it did indeed Rise and Fall and probably--in other forms and on other occasions--will do so again.
The colloquium of December 1984 was held, as it happens, at a moment of particularly fervid America-mania, when the first disastrous years of Mitterrand Socialism, followed by a hasty retreat to Mitterrand Capitalism, together with Afghanistan and the Soviet climb-down on the Pershing missiles, and various other factors stemming from the so-called "Solzhenitsin effect," including the subsequent gradual de-Marxification of the media and the schools, all combined to make the French--even the previously anti-American intellectuals--feel that they had been misled (largely by our intellectuals) into imagining that Reagan and his administration were dimwitted, to put it mildly. Instead, with that celebrated de[acu]mesure, or excessiveness, which since the Chanson de Roland (the national epic) has been the accepted French tragic flaw, they decided that Reagan was a genius. But the truth of the matter is that these political judgements, ephemeral even during the Cold War, are now bound to be rather more so, as we can see from the fact that the America-mania so frequently evoked in L'Amerique dans les Te[cir]tes had already begun to strike me as somewhat abated by the time I got to read The Rise and Fall. Which indicates once again that the latter title, which need not but inevitably does evoke politics, unduly narrows the focus of a work which is essentially about how the French are adapting on all levels to the modern world.
Let me be clear that none of the above is meant to suggest that a purely political hostility to America and its foreign policy, sometimes present in a sort of subterranean form, has never played a role of any importance in our relations with the French, viz. Henry Kissinger's tragicomic misadventures with a little man named Jobert, who deftly deflated Henry's best-laid plans for a "Year of Europe" in 1973; or more seriously, when the Mitterrand government refused to allow American warplanes to fly through French airspace on their way to strike back at one of the more blatantly terroristic Arab leaders. This form of anti-Americanism may yet again become important in the new post-Cold War Europe which we can barely discern, looking through a glass, darkly, in the early spring of 1991.
In fact, it would not be unreasonable to argue that political anti-Americanism had its positive side in that it helped spur our policy-makers, almost half a century ago, not only to conceive the famous European Recovery Program (from which the OEEC, as it was then called, logically followed, and then the various European institutions and NATO itself) but also to "sell" it to Congress and the American public, and to get it so quickly underway. My older readers, at least, will have understood that these dark allusions are to what Dean Acheson called the Creation, our postwar containment policy, which involved not only constructing a barrier against the Soviets in Europe and elsewhere but also seeing to the economic and financial health of the free world. The Europeans, of course, were essential to this enterprise, but they were absorbed in the task of clearing away the rubble and feeding their children; and just how much help we could expect from them was moot.
Thus it was that during the months and years after V-E Day, when I served for some time in our Paris embassy before formally submitting to tonsure and taking my vows to the Foreign Service, we spent a good deal of worry and thought on anti-Americanism, then le dernier cri in Paris, a multi-faceted phenomenon that seems to have sprung up as soon as the huzzahs had died down. We were not always of one mind about the immediate or eventual importance of this unpleasantness, our group being composed of distinguished Old French Hands as well as some newly hatched ones like myself; but we were bound to take it seriously because the State Department, with the press already nipping at its heels, had acknowledged that it was endemic in Western Europe, and especially virulent in France. So the so-called Psychological Services which had been dismantled as hastily as our infantry divisions in 1946 were whacked together again--a year or so later, if memory serves--as Information and Cultural Services, not to mention the unmentionable, the CIA. Never mind that their function was far from clearly defined. As a nation, we were on record as having "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind," as Jefferson had unforgettably put it in the Declaration, and as a people, we were notoriously sensitive to hostility. We liked to be liked.
Or did we really?
Let me bracket that question for the moment and say merely this: in the Paris embassy and in the Foreign Service generally, we were sensitive to hostility and aspired to be liked. So much so, in fact, that our French friends were constantly advising us to keep cool and take a leaf from the English, who couldn't care less what others thought of them, and for whom in any case, as a local journalist reminded me, "the wogs begin in Calais." This was none other than Pierre Daninos, who had lived through much of the war in London. He was amused by the fact that his compatriots, when they did not irrationally hate the English, irrationally admired them, racism and all, whereas our (i.e., American) racism was merely barbaric, devoid of eccentricity and charm. Pierre Daninos was soon thereafter to write a humorous and immensely successful book about a mythical Major Thompson, and became too rich and busy to waste his time hanging around our press attache's office, but his real subject, of course, was the French, and it was from him, quite early on, and from some of his colleagues in the local press--highly over-qualified people by our standards--that I learned that French anti-Americanism was sui generis and quite unlike the normally phobic relations of the Europeans to each other. It was of a different nature, deeper, more integral to their intimate self-image, as opposed to what they merely thought, at this moment or that, about this or that; and in this respect, if in no other, it was comparable to anti-Semitism, a phenomenon unto itself.
But this was not the phenomenon that showed up in the opinion polls and interested the State Department, because it gave them no figures to brandish on Capitol Hill. That was the stuff of politics, born of the Cold War and bound to die with it. The other, the deeper, the more lasting phenomenon was neither "anti" nor "pro" nor anything so simple. It had to do, although we did not know it then, with something like what the French now refer to as their identity problem.
This is nothing more--nor less--than the old French meditation on what it means, or should mean, to be French. It has gone on and will go on, God willing, for a very long time. And the fact that it currently takes the form, so brilliantly adumbrated by this little volume of essays, of a meditation on what America means to the French should give us pause--even if, as the French put it, our own heads are somewhere else. Sooner or later, it seems to me, we are going to have to sit down and do our own meditating on what France (and Europe) means to us.
Since his retirement from the Foreign Service, H.J. Kaplan has worked in Europe and the United States as a business executive, writer, and editor.
(1) Author of a famous best-selling journey through America called Sce[gra]nes de la Vie Future. Published in 1929-30, it horrified French readers with lurid visions of what lay in store for them when they adopted vulgar and efficient American ways.
(2) New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990. 258 pp., $39.95.
Essay Types: Essay