Chicago UP £24.50 pp536
When the two hijacked planes ploughed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, the admired French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard spoke of his “prodigious jubilation” at the sight. In the context of Philippe Roger’s painstaking history of French loathing of America, this reaction from the quintessential “French intellectual” comes as no surprise.
In the past 250 years or so, the United States has frequently given observers reason to dislike or distrust it; the achievement of Professor Roger’s book is to show that French hostility to the United States is different from the misgivings of other countries and is ultimately not much influenced by diplomatic disagreements or even by historical events. In France, hatred of America is the default setting of the majority and needs only occasional refreshment from “intellectuals”. It is more than a political opinion: it is a unifying factor at times of national division. And, like certain mental illnesses, it has a delusional system that is self-sufficient, uncoupled from fact.
When George W Bush announced that he intended to invade Iraq, a country without the will, desire or means to have instigated war itself, his international standing plummeted. The people of Britain and Germany among others registered their distaste in opinion polls. But not France. An action that perturbed the rest of the world made no difference to French people’s opinion of America because it was impossible for them to register a more profound revulsion than they already had. French polls merely flatlined where they always stood: at maximum. Max.
How did this pitiable state of affairs come about? Professor Roger of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris has written a book that the jacket calls ‘The History of French Anti-Americanism’, and that implied claim to be definitive is justified. At upward of a quarter of 250,000 words, it is less a history than an encyclopaedia or compendium. And with what comic high spirits does the story begin.
Something in the French soul just did not like the New World; early naturalists and explorers reported a flat, dull country where nature seemed oddly depleted. The animals were small, the birds hardly sang; and the people . . . My dear, the people. The women were plain and bossy, the men stunted and inclining to the homosexual. They had slaughtered the Indians and enslaved the Africans, but need hardly have bothered since their narrow religion, lack of cultural ambition and dreadful cities made them . . . well, barely human at all.
After Franklin and Jefferson had refuted the French naturalists, the attack switched to the aesthetic. French visitors discovered that despite their alliance with the French against the British in the War of Independence, the Americans seemed rather English underneath. It was partly the language, of course; but there was also a sense of cultural impoverishment: Thirty-two religions and only one dish to eat, as a French bishop put it; while a trip across early 19th century America was to one cultured Frenchman liketravelling backward through the progress of the human spirit.’De Tocqueville’s admiration of American democracy served only to rally the opposition, who accused him of sugar-coating the facts.
Under Napoleon III, France then backed the wrong horse in the Civil War. As well as having colonial ties to the South, it preferred some idea of Latinity that it imagined in the Confederacy to what it saw as anAnglo-Saxon element in the North. France predicted a disintegration of the United States after a military stalemate, and, as Roger says, there wasnothing more embarrassing than an unfulfilled malevolent wish.
Unless, of course, it was France’s defeat at Sedan by the Prussians in 1870, and President Grant’s telegram of congratulations to Wilhelm II. Or perhaps the plague of phylloxera that destroyed most of the French vineyards in the 1870s and was blamed on American parasites, as it became a powerful symbol of the New World’s destructive grip on the Old.
Some of the story so far is facetious and some of Roger’s dottier witnesses cannot be shown to be representative of French national opinion. But in 1898, it becomes serious, because this is the moment at which, says Roger, French anti-Americanism cohered; it stopped being the noisy opinion of various oddballs and achieved critical mass. The event that caused the coherence was the American declaration of war on Spain, followed by the invasion of Cuba and the landing on the Philippines. A threshold had been crossed. If Spain, why not France?
Even a country divided by the Dreyfus Affair was united against America. As Roger says: It is impossible to understand French anti-Americanism... without a sense of its social and national benefit in manufacturing consensus.
It did not matter that the Americans showed no interest in governing their acquired territories: the enemy was now in plain sight and it was kept there by racial mythologising.
The original Yankee was now in the French mind transformed into theAnglo-Saxon: rapacious, brutal and with a will to conquer a man who constantly chewed gum to increase the power of his ravening jaws. French racial theorists struggled to reconcile the idea of the melting pot with that of the Anglo-Saxon threat, yet managed to portray America as both frighteningly WASP yet ethnically chaotic and debased: the worst of both worlds. This caricature survived the 19th century and the American intervention on the French side in World War I.
American troops on the Western Front came too late for French taste and sacrificed relatively little; then post-war economic conditions effectively made France a vassal state to the great American moneylender. This debtor status opened up a rich seam of anti-Semitism, in such books as Le Cancer Américain or L’Oncle Shylock. (The flexible logic of racism somehow squared this with continuing to talk of the Americans as Anglo-Saxons; after all, the Vichy anti-British propaganda had no trouble in yoking images of Churchill and Fagin.) The American economic demands made of Germany, meanwhile, were held to have led indirectly to the next German invasion of 1940, to four years of shame and to the liberation by Allied Forces in 1944 of a country which had once again backed the wrong horse: Nazi Germany.
There were of course no thanks for General Eisenhower, since hatred of the liberator far exceeded resentment towards the conqueror. In 1968, a poll asked French people who on earth they thought least like themselves. The Americans won by miles. The people the French felt closest to were those who had invaded, decimated and/or enslaved them three times in 70 years.
France has often had reason to dislike America as in the case of Iraq, or in the matter of the economic conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. However, it is the grim achievement of Philippe Roger’s book to demonstrate that France’s lifelong hatred of America does not depend on intermittent justification, but is a self-perpetuating state of mind that meets a vital need in the French psyche. The fact that Roger wrote before the Iraq invasion therefore does not bother his thesis.
I began this book believing that the greatness of French civilization was perhaps connected to its self-regard; that the patronising ignorance of the French towards other cultures is a small price to pay for the joy their own civilization has brought to the world.
Now I am not so sure. As Professor Roger’s book went on, building its pathology of racism brick by brick, I felt that I was reading not so much the story of a national failing as a universal fable about man’s capacity for self-delusion and the human urge to self-validation through hating others. Francophiles, be warned: this is a deeply dispiriting book.
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websites:
www.americansinfrance.net/Culture/Anti-Americanism.cfm
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