French Politics, Culture & Society

As the (un)diplomatic debates over Iraq in the first months of this year and the attendant media coverage amply attested, the well-known lovers’ quarrel between America and France, an “I Love You, Moi Non Plus”2 mixture of frustration and admiration, gratitude and annoyance, is now into its third century and still going strong, as France and the French clearly continue to inspire strong feelings in Americans.

In what follows, we look at American opinion on France over 30 years’ time, as conveyed by several opinion polls. Granted that public opinion is an artefact, there are nonetheless phenomena that can only be grasped by quantitative studies that reflect the respondents’ modes of thought, values, beliefs, patterns of representation and attitudes, as elicited by a question posed at a specific time.1 Moreover, by looking at a number of subgroups we can avoid the implication that “(all) Americans think X or Y about France.” Furthermore, the evolution of the answers to similar questions can be as informative as the answers themselves, since it teaches us about changes or continuities in American society’s attitudes.

The “Déjà views” theme incites us to reflect on the repetitive nature of American discourses on France, on the fact that they occur and recur in strikingly similar forms during the long history of French-American relations. Moreover, many of the negative perceptions of France are closely interrelated, making up what might be called the “system of Francophobia.” The following remarks are attempts to underline both the systematicity and the historicity of some widespread American representations of French culture and society.

At the dawn of the 21st century, something new may be happening in the heartland of America: the spread of a negative image of France.1 Traditionally, a mostly positive image of France linked to its reputation for good food, high fashion, and sophisticated tourism, coexisted with a somewhat negative image in some elite circles. But the most important factor was definitely a lack of knowledge and the fact that above all, indifference reigned supreme. (See Body-Gendrot in this issue.)

The American press of the mid-nineties was not kind to France and the French. A surprising number of anti-French articles, some of them very disparaging and truly offensive, were published in major dailies and magazines (the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, etc.) between 1993 and 1997.1 The most abusive piece may have been an article in the Washingtonian: “Sacre Bleu! What Would Washington Be Like If the French Ran It? As Insufferable as the French Themselves” (July 1997, pp. 39-42). Its author, David Brooks, covers European affairs for the Wall Street Journal, giving one a sense of how biased this newspaper’s coverage of France can be.

In the opening pages of Diane Johnson’s Le Mariage, French bride-to-be Anne- Sophie d’Argel surveys the room in an attempt to determine the raison-d’être for the first of the many gatherings of Americans in Paris that she and her fiancé Tim Nolinger will attend in the chapters to come: “[W]as this a reception for … someone who had written a book, another book, about France? Zut, they produced them endlessly, Anglophones and their books. Even Tim threatened to write one.”1 As someone whose own behavior and beliefs are “patterned after books” (12-13), Anne-Sophie is no doubt particularly well positioned to provide not only a self-referential description of the book we are about to read but also to identify what has indeed become an ever broader and, of late, increasingly diverse cultural and literary trend.

“Screening France” in America takes several forms: American films that take place in France or use French people as their central characters, French films released in the US, and American remakes of French films. Since American remakes of French films usually become full-fledged American movies, and French films are often re-edited before being shown on American screens, all forms tend to display the same characteristics, often determined by the American cinematic taste for romance, a clear separation between good and evil, and a preferably happy ending that will gather all the loose ends. Though such characteristics may satisfy moviegoers’ instinctive longings for romance, happiness and clear-cut morals, this taste was reinforced and legitimized during the Production Code and studio system era (from the 1930s through the 1950s).

In the last ten to fifteen years, at least twenty personal narratives and sets of essays have appeared, recounting attempts by Americans to fit in, to belong at some level in France. These texts, of which Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon is probably the best known, have by now become a full-fledged genre, one that appears, moreover, to be more prominent on France than on any other country or culture, with Italy/Tuscany as the only competitor. Two became bestsellers (Gopnik and Sedaris) and a third (Kaplan) was a National Book Award finalist. Nor is this an isolated phenomenon, as Carolyn Durham demonstrates in the area of fiction elsewhere in this issue.

Globalization requires the ability to work and interact with people of many different nationalities and cultures. Such interaction further involves the ability to communicate more effectively across these different cultures, whatever one’s field or discipline. This implies the absolute necessity for all of us to understand the languages, values and attitudes of other cultures so that misunderstandings and misconceptions are reduced. The events of September 11 greatly increased the public’s awareness of this issue. As a professor of linguistics wrote in the New York Times shortly thereafter, we need to “understand the words of our enemies—not to mention those of our friends.”1 The Cultura project seeks precisely to develop in-depth understanding of a foreign culture, by first looking at specific words that will provide access to the heart and core of another culture.

Philippe Roger, L’Ennemi américain: Généalogie de l’antiaméricanisme français (Paris: Seuil, 2002).

Jean-François Revel, L’Obsession anti-américaine: Son fonctionnement, ses causes, ses inconséquences (Paris: Plon, 2002).

Jean-Marie Colombani, Tous Américains? Le monde après le 11 septembre 2001 (Paris: Fayard, 2002).

Jeremy D. Popkin The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism, 1680-1800 by David A. Bell

Jay M. Smith A Revolution in Language: The Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France by Sophia Rosenfeld

Ted W. Margadant Making Democracy in the French Revolution by James Livesey

Gay L. Gullickson Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin-de-Siècle by Lenard R. Berlanstein

Elinor A. Accampo A Social Laboratory for Modern France: The Musée Social and the Rise of the Welfare State by Janet R. Horne

Thomas Ertman Institutions and Innovation: Voters, Parties, and Interest Groups in the Consolidation of Democracy—France and Germany, 1870-1939 by Marcus Kreuzer

Frank R. Baumgartner La Longue Marche des universités françaises by Christine Musselin

Notes on contributors