With Us or Against Us

by Tony Judt

  answer, as I have tried to show, is not quite as simple as it seems.

  There is indeed a “knowledge gap” between France and the

  United States. It concerns issues as different as the role of religion in

  American politics, the ravages—more imaginary than real—of “political

  correctness” and other such typically French exaggerations about the

  “horrors” of American feminism, or the seething anger of the American

  ghetto, verging on open warfare. The greater our ignorance, the more

  fanciful the stereotypes that serve to decipher American reality.

  Those Not With Us Are Against Us

  Francophobia, no doubt encouraged by the Bush administration, is an

  old phenomenon, which can be traced back to Protestant England

  and was instrumental in building modern British nationalism, as well

  demonstrated by Linda Colley.31 It was unleashed in the United States

  for a simple reason: the Bush administration could not tolerate any

  criticism from Western allies, particularly those who should have been

  eternally grateful for the U.S. intervention in two world wars. In the

  field of international relations, eternal praise is not a common political

  value, even from friends and allies, and yet it was expected from

  the Bush administration. “Those not with us are against us” was the

  motto of the age. There was therefore no hesitation on the part of the

  American press, eager to please the White House, to describe French

  foreign policy as that of a “perfidious” if not “treacherous” nation,

  the sole aim of which was the failure of the U.S. military strategy

  (despite the thin evidence presented to the UN by Colin Powell of the

  existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction).32 We know today that

  this evidence was more fictitious than real and that the French criti-

  cism of an untimely war against Iraq was based on a healthy dose of

  critical thinking, perfectly justified under the circumstances. The

  French manner was, perhaps, inelegant: the threat to use the French

  veto at the UN “whatever the circumstances” was clumsy, to say the

  least, and the inability of the French to envisage an end to repeated

  rounds of inspections aroused doubt about the good faith of French

  diplomats.33 But to go so far as to accuse the French of treason was a

  line that only the most vicious Francophobes could cross. That line

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  Anti-Americanism and Americanophobia

  47

  was indeed crossed by several established (and not so established)

  members of the American press. It was a good time for bashing the

  French, those disgusting “cheese eating surrender monkeys” (The

  Simpsons)—a phrase that was endlessly repeated in signed and

  unsigned editorials. Murdoch’s press pictured President Chirac as a

  “weasel” running away from responsibility (The New York Post), or

  a wriggling worm (The Sun, in England), and stranger still, The

  Wall Street Journal portrayed Chirac as a “transvestite, balding, pygmy

  Joan of Arc.”34 French leaders became a band of cowards who slunk

  away the moment things got hot, forgetting how America had saved

  France twice from disaster. As for our intellectuals, suffering, in the

  words of Jonah Goldberg, the editor of the National Review On Line,

  from “mental fecal impaction,” they naively believed that Old Europe

  still meant something, that it still carried weight in the world arena.

  This is why, our visionary explained, “Hollywood morons and French

  Intellectuals alike find the taste of Fidel Castro’s posterior so palatable.”35

  At the U.S. Congress cafeteria, French fries had become “liberty fries”

  to play up to the most xenophobic of American congressmen. One of

  the most merciless cartoons of President Chirac portrayed him as

  a transvestite, in a “compromising position” with a particularly virile

  Saddam Hussein, in simulated advertisements for condoms, with the

  legend: “ ‘Republican Guard’: the only proven protection for your

  weapon of mass destruction.”36

  The Historical Origins of French

  Americanophobia

  Just as American Francophobia must be distinguished, for the sake

  of clarity, from American critiques of French politics and society,

  Americanophobia must be distinguished from mere anti-Americanism.

  By anti-Americanism, I mean the critical and reasoned expression of a

  disagreement with what Americans say or do. By Americanophobia, I

  mean the total visceral rejection of anything that has to do with American

  culture, democracy, or economy, in short, with American civilization.

  Anti-Americanism expresses itself through critical acts or words; it may

  not be reasonable, but it is openly debated in the public sphere and is

  related to the concrete events that mark the ups and downs of Franco-

  American relations. Philippe Roger and Jean-François Revel’s recent

  books abound in examples of this nature (see chapter 1).

  The story of French Americanophobia is an old one, going back to

  the beginnings of the transatlantic relationship. It was best expressed

  in Cornelius de Pauw’s virulent thesis of American degeneracy. In his

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  48

  D enis Lacorne

  Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains, published in 1768, the

  primary concern of this Dutch priest who wrote in French and worked

  at the court of Frederick the Great, was to serve the interests of his

  master. Realizing that the prince wished to discourage German emi-

  gration to North America, and inspired by Buffon and some French

  explorers, de Pauw argued that, in America, all natural forms, whether

  vegetal, animal, or human, had degenerated to the point of having a

  shrunken appearance. His essay was clearly aimed at terrifying the

  future North European settlers. Hence his dramatic description of the

  pernicious effects of the American climate on four-legged animals

  “more than six times smaller than their European counterparts,” on

  moronic human creatures, contaminated in every part of their organism37

  and rendered feeble by the horrors of famine and hunger. De Pauw

  did not hesitate to affirm that:

  American tigers and lions were entirely mongrelized, undersized,

  cowardly and a thousand times less dangerous than those of Asia and

  Africa . . . wolves, wolverines and bears also occurred as miniatures in

  this land, and were less audacious than their counterparts on the old

  continent. . . . Finally, a generalized mutation and bastardization had

  affected all four-legged creatures in this part of the world, deep down

  to the very principles of life and its regeneration.38

  Animals brought from Europe survived with difficulty in the New

  World, to the point of “dogs losing their voice, and ceasing to bark in

  most of the countries of the new continent.” On the contrary, the most

  repugnant animals escaped this phenomenon and were of sufficiently

  impressive sizes to discourage potential emigrants:

  Here the earth’s rotting surface was overrun with lizards, eels, snakes,

  reptiles and monstrous and highly poisonous insects . . . Most cater-

  pi
llars, butterflies, centipedes, beetles, spiders, frogs and toads, were

  giant-sized, and multiplying in number beyond imagination.39

  The new colonizers, still according to de Pauw, encountered terrible

  reproductive difficulties, since the “climate of the New World con-

  cealed a hidden vice, which to this day is inconducive to the multipli-

  cation of the human race.” Worse, the rare children who were born in

  this new land had a low life expectancy: “the suffocating malignancy

  of the atmosphere affected them right from the cradle, and strange

  illnesses cut them down at a young age.”40

  Such exaggerations explain, in turn, why Founding Fathers like

  Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison devoted so much energy, and much

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  Anti-Americanism and Americanophobia

  49

  of their correspondence, to refuting the arguments put forth by

  de Pauw—the first example of a European truly committed to the

  systematic denigration of America.41

  Two centuries later, it was no longer possible to characterize the

  United States as a country that could not be civilized. On the contrary, it

  was now the excess of American civilization, American hyper-modernity,

  that nourished anti-American sentiment. Some Americanophobes, like

  the communist writer Roger Vailland, mixed humor and irony in their

  perfectly reactionary denunciation of the French enthusiasm for what

  was, then, a recent American invention, the refrigerator:

  I have never really understood what use a Frigidaire could ever be in a

  country like France, where, apart from two moderate months in a year,

  and then again not every year, the climate is uniformly so cold that

  a window pantry is quite enough to keep till Monday, Tuesday or

  Wednesday the leftovers from Sunday’s lamb roast. Those of my friends

  who own one use it mainly to produce little cubes of ice, which are

  meant to be added to a glass of wisky [sic], and which alter its taste.

  Wisky, besides, has grown so dear that their Frigidaire no longer serves

  anything but a symbolic purpose.42

  In its most extreme form, Americanophobia today expresses itself in

  a morbid desire for the military defeat of America, or even for the

  destruction of America. To sweeten his deadly pill, Dr. Baudrillard

  thus claimed, a few days after the trauma of 9/11, that each of us,

  French, secretly wished the death of America. This was our schaden-

  freude, our secret joy at the suffering of others—a suffering that is

  necessary and justified because Americans well deserved it! Our jubi-

  lation, according to Baudrillard, was proportional to our “terrorist

  imagination,” supposedly shared by all well-meaning men and women.

  The “sacrificial” nature of the attack was beyond description. It

  displayed violence at its best—a strange mixture of “the white magic

  of cinema, and the black magic of terrorism.” The destruction of the

  twin towers ultimately fulfilled the dream of the West: “our aversion

  to any final or permanent world order.” Hence this stubborn “fact,”

  more real than all others, despite Baudrillard’s well-known aversion

  for the very possibility of a reality principle:

  We desired this event, each one of us wished it to happen, for it is

  impossible not to wish the annihilation of such an hegemonic superpower.

  Even though this is quite contrary to Western moral values, it is a

  fact, and this fact precisely reveals the pathetic violence of all efforts to

  deny it.43

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  50

  D enis Lacorne

  And yet, such an extreme example of Americanophobia is not a recent

  phenomenon in France. It was well entrenched in the France of the

  1930s, with classics on the subject of French decadence like Georges

  Duhamel’s Scènes de la vie future (Scenes from the Future, 1930),

  Robert Aron’s and Arnaud Dandieu’s La decadence de la nation

  française (The Decadence of the French Nation, 1931) or their Cancer

  américain (American Cancer) published in the same year, or again

  Daniel Rops’s Le Monde sans âme (A World Without a Soul, 1932), to

  which should be added the works of partisans of a French spiritual

  renaissance like Jacques Maritain, Alexandre Marc, and Emmanuel

  Mounier.44 But the latter did not secretly wish the death of America;

  their only dream was to check the evil of the age: the proliferation of

  American materialistic values.

  For Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu, the editors of Ordre

  Nouveau, the degradation of the French spirit, or French “republican

  decadence,” was due to “the full rationalization of modern society,

  which under the auspices of Ford, Taylor and Young, has dehuman-

  ized all our frames of reference.”45 The adoption by the French elites

  of a new “industrial dogma,” amounted to a two-fold betrayal: betrayal

  of the old patriotic, emotional enthusiasm derived from the French

  revolutionary tradition, and betrayal of the French capitalistic tradi-

  tion. From a purely “material and quantitative” perspective, according

  to Aron and Dandieu, France had “already lost the battle, and sacri-

  ficed itself upon the altar of social structures utterly hostile and foreign

  to her.” In this perspective, the French had become the “parasites” of

  the American empire, “conquered minds” comparable to the Graeculi

  of the old Roman Empire, poor teachers oblivious of the meaning

  of what they “copied or taught.”46 In a grand élan heralding the

  anticapitalist utopias of the 1930s, Aron and Dandieu attacked

  the “cosmopolitan plutocracy,” which in submitting France to the

  supranational order of the Young plan, had destroyed “all manifestations

  of love for the land and the nation.” The war debt settlement did pro-

  duce the terrible feeling, accepted as a matter of fact by all the grands

  bourgeois, “that France was done for.” Anticipating the personnalistes

  theses of Emmanuel Mounier, the future editor-in-chief of the quar-

  terly Esprit, Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu offered a new solution

  to the utter degeneration of France: a “return to a real, sentimental

  and anti-rational individualism.” The aim was vague but grandiose.

  Whatever the cost, it was an urgent task to recover the revolutionary

  patriotic élan, a taste for self-affirmation, a renewed acceptance of

  the “risks of victory, which demand energy and aggressiveness.”47

  The Americanophobia of the 1930s effectively expressed, to use

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  Anti-Americanism and Americanophobia

  51

  François Furet’s words, a certain “pseudo-Nietzcheism”48 that gave

  central importance to the exaltation of the will against the cold ration-

  alizations of an Homo œconomicus, supposedly exemplified by

  American bankers and captains of industry.

  In Le Cancer Américain, Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu took

  stock of the gravity of the American disease, a subtly insidious, sur-

  reptitious cancer, which penetrated all human communities, beginning

  with our cities, our universities, indeed our minds, since, they pointed

  out, “America is a
method, a technique, a sickness of the mind.”49

  The link with Georges Duhamel is undeniable; it is akin also to the

  concerns of Emmanuel Mounier who, in his written review of Duhamel’s

  Scènes de la vie future, warmly applauded the author for his denuncia-

  tion of “Americanism,” that “barbarism which threatens the entire

  human edifice” in the name of a progressive civilization destined to

  control the fate of the human species. An ultimate consequence would

  be nothing less than the “extermination of all individual life forms.”

  Faced with the terrifying emergence of “idolatrous mechanism,” the

  civilized individual, according to Mounier, had no choice but to “wake

  up to the alarm” in order “to save the future of mankind, whatever it

  might hold.”50

  The founding manifesto of the quarterly Esprit took up the same

  themes in 1932, implicitly targeting the grand American tyranny,

  whose drastic effects called for a healthy revolt. The consequences,

  if the authors of the manifesto were to be believed, were quite

  clear: “Societies governed like businesses; savings dilapidated to

  adapt man to machine and to extract only material profit from human

  effort; a private life torn apart by appetites and desires, totally disor-

  dered and pushed to all forms of homicide and suicide (. . .).”

  The solution, again, was to save man “by making him conscious

  of his true identity,” while accepting the “permanent fate of the

  Spirit, without any attachment to its temporal manifestations,” with-

  out enslaving it to the search for profit. The final call for freedom

  was: “It is time to free heroic action from bitterness and joy from

  mediocrity.”51

  Strictly speaking, the exalted rhetoric of the editors of l’Ordre

  Nouveau and Esprit, was not just French in inspiration. Behind the

  specter of a decadent France was that of a decadent Europe, and the

  defense of a French spiritual renewal echoed the thoughts and writings

  of an influential German philosopher, Martin Heidegger.52 Heidegger

  shared with his French literary counterparts a similar Americanophobia.

  His enemy was the twin facets of modern capitalism: American and

  Bolshevik materialism and mechanism, the true causes of Europe’s