by Tony Judt
more real colonization of minds, a foreign policy that is nothing but a
series of terrible conspiracies (of oil barons, genetically modified food
barons, the CIA and the Pentagon), brutal domineering behavior,
complete indifference to poverty and mass killings in the world—an
indictment of American abuse of power and dominant position, U.S.
disrespect for international law, in a word the neocolonial violence of
a new Roman Empire. The portrayal of Bush in the media fulfilled all
expectations. It seemed tailor-made—at last a president that America-
haters always dreamt of—a splendid blend of the brutal sheriff and the
fanatic missionary. These studies, as we might suspect, lacked scientific
rigor. Guesses and impressions passed for truths and every manner of
sophistry was deployed to prove the barbarity of America. George W.
Bush, for instance, when he was still the governor of Texas, was first
portrayed as a bloodthirsty leader, with a finger firmly pressed on the
switch of an electric chair. Elected president, commander in chief
of the U.S. Armed Forces, Bush suddenly appeared in the role of a
Christian crusader king, out to shake up the world, flying the standard
of a puritan fundamentalist horde gone out of control. News headlines
spoke of “George Bush’s Holy Crusade” (Libération), “War or Jehad?”
(Le Courrier International), “Holy Wars” (Le Point), “Holy War against
Jehad” (Le Nouvel Observateur), “The Clash of the Fundamentalists”
(Le Monde), for over three weeks.14
* * *
Anti-Americanism and Americanophobia
41
José Bové and Jean-Marie Messier:
Two Grand Causes, Two Fallen
Heroes of French Modernity
We see that the protean anti-Americanism of the past few years has
been nourished by contemporary world events, and fed also by fears
and fantasies inherited from the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.
The antiglobalization rhetoric of José Bové, the “shepherd of Larzac,”
is, in fact, little but a remake of the 1920s attacks on “Americanism,”
pointing to the subservience of modest independent artisans to American
corporate power, brutal assembly-line discipline, and the “dehumanized
settings” of an industrial society excessively rationalized by the rules of
Fordianism or Taylorism—in short, a world devoid of pride in personal
initiative and accomplishment.15
Single-handedly taking on the American Goliath and its Taylorized
food outlet—the McDonald’s fast-food chain—José Bové proved that
society had not totally silenced individual voices and that a lone David
could check the inexorable advance of the juggernaut of food stan-
dardization. Wholesome food was contrasted to American “junk”
(la malbouffe), the rich taste of a slice of Roquefort was compared
with a tasteless, greasy, grilled mass of ground beef. A modern incar-
nation of the personnaliste philosophy of the 1930s, José Bové sym-
bolized a typically French form of resistance to American trade
imperialism. His spectacular political protests launched with the sup-
port of the French Farmers’ Confederation—the destruction of a
McDonald’s restaurant at Millau in the Aveyron16 (euphemistically
termed a “dismantling” operation), or his active participation in
antiglobalization protests at the WTO’s Seattle Summit were happen-
ings which established his omnipresence in the French media (he was,
of course, barely mentioned in the U.S. media).
Acclaimed by leaders of the right and the left, united in their oppo-
sition to the uncontrolled globalization process, José Bové became a
self-made myth: he embodied the virtues of great comic book heroes.
He was at once Tintin in America, going after the evil producers of
genetically modified foods, and Asterix at war against the legions of a
new imperial Rome.
Oddly enough, the rejection of “American” globalization, symbolized
by José Bové, coincided with the emergence of a new type of French
corporate globalization, embodied by a truly Americanized French
CEO, Jean-Marie Messier. A classic product of the elite “Grandes
écoles” (Polytechnique and the National School of Administration),
a high-ranking, respected civil servant in the Balladur government,
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42
D enis Lacorne
Messier demonstrated that it was possible to live the American dream
in France—first by changing careers, then by taking control of an old-
style corporation, the Compagnie Générale des Eaux, and turning it
into one of the biggest media and communications companies in the
world, with its name appropriately changed to Vivendi Universal, after
a series of spectacular mega-mergers. Like the frog in the fable that
blew itself up to the size of an ox, this ordinary French company
became one of the leading American multinationals, highly rated on
Wall Street, gaining control of one of Hollywood’s major studios
(Universal Studios), and adopting English as its working language to
satisfy the wish of the majority of its board of directors. Messier, the
exemplary Parisian bureaucrat, even chose to transfer his private resi-
dence to Park Avenue, in Manhattan, to better establish his American
credentials.17
However, these two emblematic figures of French modernity ended
up as fallen heroes. José Bové landed in prison, sentenced by a French
court for attacks on private property, and Messier, in the end, was forced
to quit the chairmanship of a company he had driven to the verge of
bankruptcy. Both kinds of zeal led to failure. José Bové and Jean-Marie
Messier, men who symbolized the difficult French transition to moder-
nity and globalization, only revealed the paradox of French public
opinion—generally “suspicious” of globalization (72 percent of polled
opinions), but acknowledging at the same time that globalization was
a “good thing for France” (53 percent), and “especially good for French
industry” (63 percent).18
This inconsistency of the French surely reflects another paradox,
observed in a recent study by Philip Gordon and Sophie Meunier:
“While the French (often stridently) resist globalization, they also
adapt to it (discreetly and usually better than many would suspect).”19
Anti-American rhetoric should, therefore, never be taken literally: it is
often accompanied by blatantly Americanophile rhetoric, an aspect too
often overlooked by the media, and by authors who have made a career
out of anti-Americanism.20
Still, French anti-Americanism has a bright future. It feeds on a
century-old tradition, and enjoys continuing support from leading
political figures of all stripes, as well as from new lobbies, such as the
Farmers’ Confederation founded by José Bové in 1987, and ATTAC,
an antiglobalization public interest lobby launched in 1998 at the ini-
tiative of the editors of Le Monde Diplomatique. Echoing José Bové’s
radical slogan, “I have one enemy, it’s the market!,” Ignacio Ramonet,
the
editor-in-chief of Le Monde Diplomatique, declared in the same
vein at about the same time: “Let us disarm and defeat the market at
* * *
Anti-Americanism and Americanophobia
43
all cost!”21 Bové was popular because the left-wing media readily
supported his cause without questioning his motivations.22
The remarkable success of the French antiglobalization movement
would not have been possible without the quasi-unanimous support
of major French political parties. Among them are Jean-Marie Le Pen’s
National Front, belligerently opposed to the globalization of trade
during the European elections of 1999, as well as Charles Pasqua and
Philippe de Villiers’ ultranationalist party, the Rassemblement pour la
France, which lamented the sacrifice of the “grandeur of France upon
the altar of globalization” (Pasqua termed it the “new totalitarianism
of our times”). The Communist Party and its general secretary, Robert
Hue, who denounced the horrors of “unbridled neo-liberal globaliza-
tion” at WTO’s Seattle Summit, to say nothing of the curious alliance
of a Gaullist Chirac and a Socialist Jospin, both of whom have suggested
ways to “tame” or “humanize” globalization as if it were some kind of
wild beast that had to be reined in at all costs if the destruction of
European cultures and economic systems were to be averted.
Worried about the increasingly important role of American pension
funds in the workings of the French stock exchange, Chirac publicly
attacked the selfish interests of “California and Florida pensioners”
while Jospin denounced the “dictatorship of shareholders,” imposed
from across the Atlantic. Only the MEDEF (the leading organization
of French business firms) and the centrists of Liberal Democracy, led
by Alain Madelin, could see any good at all coming out of the global-
ization of liberal economies.23
The Illusion of Transparency
America is indeed an open society. News and information circulate
freely, American media organizations dot the globe, European jour-
nalists encounter no special obstacles when they work in the United
States, and the number of Europeans traveling to America rises from
year to year. However, behind this apparent transparency, the real
workings of American society are far from obvious. We believe
we know a great deal about America, but, in fact, we know very
little . . . There are numerous reasons for such ignorance: negligence,
lack of in-depth research, excessive reliance on hearsay and reduc-
tionist stereotypes, old-fashioned prejudices, and no doubt, a certain
arrogance, based on a feeling of European cultural and moral superi-
ority. It is so much easier to speak without trying to understand, to
look without really seeing, to condemn before checking the facts.
Two controversial topics can illustrate the actual ignorance that
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44
D enis Lacorne
characterizes French views of America: multiculturalism and the death
penalty.
American multiculturalism has been, since the 1990s, the bête noire
of the partisans of a secular, republican, and assimilationist French
society, who decry the importing of a “politically correct” ideology,
radically foreign to our own French ways.24 Transplanted to France,
American multiculturalism is perceived as a mortal challenge to the
core of our centralist, republican tradition. The introduction of new
forms of ethnic “identity politics,” the critics argue, would balkanize
French society into rival “ethnic ghettos” or territorial “communities.”
This, in turn, would prevent the assimilation of new immigrant groups
and, in the end, precipitate the dissolution of the “One and Indivisible”
French Republic. Worse, the acceptance of American-style multicul-
turalism could perpetuate regressive cultural practices like polygamy,
female excision, or forced marriage.25
Criticism of the excesses of American multiculturalism is not entirely
unjustified. The critics, however, seem to miss the forest for the trees.
In fact, there hardly exists such a thing as “American multiculturalism.”
There are different types of multiculturalism, and most radical and
separatist forms are rare even in the United States.26 Multiculturalism,
however divisive, did not prevent America’s spontaneous surge of
patriotism in the aftermath of the tragic events of 9/11. Beneath the
apparent confusion of a multicolored mosaic, there did survive a Unum,
a common political culture, a patriotic fervor shared by all Americans,
whether they happened to be recent immigrants—Europeans, Latinos, or
Asians. Multiculturalism is not, as we seem to believe in France, a
source of irreconcilable differences. The “disuniting” of America is
no more real than the “balkanization” of France. Opposition to mul-
ticulturalism, a French variant of anti-Americanism, is closely related
to an ancestral, obsessive fear of the fragmentation of the “One and
Indivisible French Republic”—a fear that can be traced back to the
French Revolution and more specifically to the Jacobins’ denunciation
of their political enemies, the Girondins, unfairly accused of wanting
to transform the new revolutionary regime into the chaos of a frag-
mented federal State, modeled on the American federal system.27
The French debate on the death penalty in the United States is an
equally striking example of the ignorance of French commentators.
The life stories of American death-row inmates, such as Karla Faye
Tucker, Betty Lou Beets, Gary Graham, Odell Barnes, or Mumia
Abu-Jamal are thoroughly familiar to readers of French newspapers
and some of the most famous French intellectuals, like Jacques Derrida,
have been mobilized to denounce the injustice of the death penalty.
* * *
Anti-Americanism and Americanophobia
45
Jack Lang, a former education minister, visited Texas to spend a few
minutes with Odell Barnes in the hope of influencing the state’s
Board of Pardons. Robert Badinter, the former chief justice of the
Constitutional Council, launched a press campaign against the U.S.
death penalty, collecting close to a million signatures for a petition
addressed to the newly elected American president, George W. Bush.
Badinter found it deplorable that the “oldest democracy in the world
and the greatest power on earth . . . has now joined the head pack of
homicidal states, together with China, Iran, the Democratic Republic
of the Congo and Saudi Arabia. . . . American society seems to be in
the grip of a killing madness. And yet it has failed to rid itself of crime.
All it has done is respond to killing with more killing.”28 Serge Tornay,
a professor at the National Museum of Natural History, believed he
had finally discovered the reason: it could all be explained by the
“theocratic” nature of American democracy. “It just might be the case,”
he wrote, “that human sacrifice, the notorious historical privilege of
theocratic and
totalitarian states, still constitutes a last resort. Faced
with the threat of annihilation of their social order, Americans today,
like the Aztecs long ago, are terrified by the prospect that the current
cosmic cycle is coming to an end. Only the deaths of countless human
beings, could generate enough energy to ward off the danger.”29
The maintenance of the death penalty in America and its abolition
in all European nations greatly facilitated the critics’ inference:
Europeans were civilized, in contrast to their American cousins, the
barbarians.30 But the explanation was incomplete. Paradoxically, it
is not due to a lack, but rather an excess of democracy, that America
maintains such a cruel practice. Indeed, contrary to what most French
critics seem to assume, Congress in fact has no authority to abolish the
death penalty across the United States. Criminal law (with the excep-
tion of federal crimes) falls within the province of the states and it is
up to their legislatures to decide to abolish or to retain the death
penalty. In France, a simple majority vote in the National Assembly
was all it took, in 1981, to abolish the death penalty, at a time when
62 percent of the French still favored the practice. In the United
States, federalism and local democracy tilt the balance in favor of
a practice that many jurists recognize as cruel and unjust, especially
vis-à-vis ethnic minorities. The death penalty lives on simply because
it is the will of the people! Also, contrary to what has often been said
in France, when George W. Bush was governor of Texas, he was not
personally responsible for his state’s high rate of executions: final
authority was not his, it resides exclusively with an independent Board
of Pardons.
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46
D enis Lacorne
Our ignorance can be explained by the tenacity of our centralist,
Jacobin tradition. The concentration of power in the One and
Indivisible French Republic has not prepared us French, to under-
stand the workings of a federal government. Why in the world haven’t
they, Americans, abolished the death penalty like we have? Could this
be because they are less democratic, and therefore less civilized? The
