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.

Essay Types: Essay