Monday, March 14, 2005
The Arc de Triomphe.
March 14, 2005 CONNECTIONS In Battle of Mutual Hostility, U.S. Is Outmatched by France By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
American Francophobia is not all it's cracked up to be. Actually it's not even a phobia. It is more like an expression of extreme distaste or disgust. Its character is evident in the invention of "Freedom Fries" or in the pouring of Bordeaux wine into sewers. It is theatrical and demonstrative. It tends toward ridicule. And usually it reacts to something very specific: it has a news peg. The latest peg was France's opposition to United States policies in Iraq. And repercussions from that confrontation are likely to overwhelm any partial reconciliations. They have already inspired a series of books critical of France, the most recent by American journalists who have lived there. In "Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese" (Encounter Books), for example, Denis Boyles sends off dispatches dripping in sarcasm about a country that, in his telling, let 15,000 of its elderly die in the heat wave of August 2003 as their relatives refused to cut short their summer vacations, surreptitiously dispatched arms to Iraq during the years of United Nations sanctions and the corrupt Oil for Food program, and readily exercises unilateral power when it prefers (in Ivory Coast) while condemning any hint of it elsewhere. A forthcoming book, "The Arrogance of the French: Why They Can't Stand Us - And Why the Feeling Is Mutual" (Sentinel), by Richard Z. Chesnoff, is less concerned with argument than with sentiment. But it ends with a list of French products to boycott, for those so inclined, and includes some French phrases the savvy American tourist might find handy when faced with French hauteur and hostility. ("Please be polite," is the translation of one, "we didn't raise pigs together.") The accumulated evidence of France's flaws can be compelling, but what pale stuff this is compared with Francophobia's French counterpart! Next month, the University of Chicago Press will publish a book that attracted much attention when it first appeared in France, in 2002: "The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism" by Philippe Roger (the translation is by Sharon Bowman). Mr. Roger, who teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, almost single-handedly creates a new field of study, tracing the nuances and imagery of anti-Americanism in France over 250 years. He shows that far from being a specific reaction to recent American policies, it has been knit into the very substance of French intellectual and cultural life. While American Francophobia can seem transient, news oriented, associated with the political right and theatrical in character, French anti-Americanism - like a venerable Old World tradition - reaches far and deep. It is championed by both the left and right. And over its long evolutionary course, various scientific, philosophical, political, social and racial justifications have been offered. Mr. Roger suggests that its convictions are so fundamental that they are barely recognized, and they are spreading. Mr. Roger does not debate whether or not particular manifestations of anti-Americanism are justified or unjustified. Mostly, he seems to think them unjustified, but that doesn't matter: anti-Americanism is not the result of perceptions, rather, it determines them. Nor is he interested in counterexamples like Lafayette or Tocqueville except if they shed light on his theme. He points out, for example, that Tocqueville's classic dissection of democracy in 19th-century America was widely criticized for portraying a "sugar-coated America." "In its repetition and perpetuation," Mr. Roger writes, "French anti-Americanism must be analyzed as a tradition." It is, he suggests, a "discourse," a way of thinking and speaking about the world that has its own premises and logic. Before the founding of the United States, for example, one reaction to the Romantic idealization of the New World came in a series of scientific studies of the continent's plant and animal life. In 1768, the naturalist Cornelius De Pauw called America a "vast and sterile desert" whose climate nurtured "astonishingly idiotic" men. The natural historian Buffon claimed that its animals were stunted miniatures of their Old World counterparts. These assertions were so widely believed in France that Thomas Jefferson devoted considerable energy to their refutation. Naturalism's hostility then gave way to social condescension from both royalists and republicans. Scorn of America became a literary trope. In Balzac's novels, Mr. Roger points out, it is the "good-for-nothings" who go to America. In Stendhal's novels, various characters' disdain for the United States and what one calls the "culture of the god dollar" seem to echo the author's own convictions. Mr. Roger argues that during the Civil War, many in French society hoped that the South would be victorious partly because it would provide more opportunities for French power. But the war was also seen as a racial battle between Anglo-Saxons in the North and Latins - almost Franco-Latins - in the South. For France, the Civil War replicated the larger power struggle it was confronting in Europe. By the end of the 19th century, French writers also began to fear American power. One writer referred to Uncle Sam as "Oncle Shylock," resonantly adding anti-Semitism into the mix. In the 20th century, French politicians blamed the United States for joining the First World War too late, then for insisting that France repay its debts. Intellectuals like Sartre credited the Soviet Union with winning the Second World War and said that England and the United States invaded just to get in on the victory. After the war, Mr. Roger writes, "what was left to defend in France? Frenchness." Mr. Roger does not fully explain the reasons for an antipathy so far out of proportion to any nation's flaws, but his book stuns with its accumulated detail and analysis. Addressing his French readers, Mr. Roger argues that through this obsessive anti-American discourse, "we are shackled, unbeknownst to ourselves, to a whole past of repugnance and repulsions." With such a past, how can America's contribution to this confrontation hope to compete? Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
