by Barry Rubin
Of course, there are many in America-especially in the 195os-who would have agreed with the kind of critique offered by Siegfried and other French intellectuals. But there is a tiny but very significant difference. Americans condemned the "conformism" and "materialism" of the 1950s, as well as such phenomena as the power of Senator Joseph McCarthy, as the results of an era. Anti-Americans outside the country portrayed them as core aspects of America's essence, as typical and inevitable products of its society. These stereotypes were taken to extremes. When Jean-Paul Sartre visited the United States in 1945 and 1946, he concluded that it is when an American is "showing the most conformism that he feels the freest."50 According to Sartre, just as Americans worship conformity ("The American uses his mechanical bottle-opener, fridge or car at the same time as all other Americans and the same way they do"), they feel that everyone in the world should behave and think exactly as they do.51
Never quite out of sight in all these evaluations was a fear that the United States wanted to impose its system on France and would succeed in doing so, at least if not fought fiercely. This belief had been the mainstay of French anti-Americanism going back to the nineteenth century. While declaiming their own system's superiority-and finding the United States inferior because it was different-they attributed the same arrogance to the Americans, who did not in fact go through life believing themselves better than the French. Equally, French anti-Americans often argued that the U.S. system was going to collapse yet were obsessed with a pessimistic expectation that their own system was doomed to be overwhelmed by Americanization. But why would this happen unless their own people-even if only because they were hypnotized by advertising "betrayed" them and preferred American or American-style culture and customs?
The French vision was one of a competition between their own "civilizing mission" against the "anti-civilization" drive of the United States. The Americans were seen as the new savages, and not noble ones either. In this scheme of thinking, America took the place of those classical inferiors, the peoples of the Third World, whose cultures-in terms now held to be racist and imperialistic-were previously seen by Europeans as the epitome of what was backward and primitive. There was no country in the world that had imposed its culture, language, and worldview on its colonies more than did France. And this is what French intellectuals expected America to do to its new "colonies," which might consist of the entire world.
But the trade goods of American culture were considered worthless and meaningless, plastic beads and trinkets intended to replace the priceless works of great artists. The perception, as two French scholars critical of anti-Americanism explained, was that the United States had nothing to export except "its lack of culture. [Americans] are condemned to cause all the cultures they touch to perish and to uproot all traditions. By exporting their way of life they end up killing the national soul everywhere since they themselves are the progeny of such murder."52
This was a powerful belief in France and among many European intellectuals, which they helped spread to the rest of the world. Once that concept was accepted, it was a simple matter to embrace Communiststyle anti-American propaganda as accurately portraying the political aspects of this vandalism and brutality. If one thought so badly about the United States, it was easy to assume that all the charges against it were inevitably true.
For example, during the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for spying on the American nuclear program for the USSR-a charge that history has shown to be accurate-Sartre wrote, "Don't be surprised if from one end of Europe to the other we are shouting, `America is a mad dog!' Let's cut every tie that binds us to her lest she bite us and we go mad too."53 When the United States defended South Korea (under UN auspices, no less) from the aggression of its northern Communist neighbor, de Beauvoir thought after seeing two American soldiers, "They were defenders of a country which was supporting dictatorship and corruption from one end of the globe to the other."54
Such political outrage was often based on cultural distaste, while cultural distaste in turn was often grounded in fear of conquest. When de Beauvoir in 1952 was so stirred to hatred by seeing those two American soldiers enter a hotel in France, she reflected that they looked as if they were members of an arrogant occupation force. True dictatorship and corruption were seen as being more closely related to the forces of American cultural invasion than to the USSR's repressive tyranny.
As she mused in a 1960 book, in trying to understand her own attitude toward the United States:
We regarded America as the country where capitalist oppression had triumphed in the most vile fashion. We detested the exploitation, unemployment, racism and lynch-law there.... Nonetheless, leaving aside its good or evil aspects, there was something gigantic and unfettered about life there that we found fascinating. ... Ironically, we were attracted by America whose government we condemned, whilst the USSR, the scene of an experiment we found admirable, left us cold.55
Yet this frank assessment about the mixed nature of attitudes toward the United States only seemed to show how dangerous was America's attractiveness. Its ability to seduce people with freedom, success, hot music, trashy films, or fast food-despite its horrible features-was one of the most frightening aspects of America, a subversive threat to hostile Europeans as it would later be to radical Islamists. To catch oneself falling under America's spell was the moment in which it was imperative to rebel and reject the lure of Satan.
The spawn of Hollywood was deemed particularly dangerous in this respect. The number of American films imported into France during six months in 1946 was 36. A year later, the number had risen to 338 for that same amount of time. In 1947, a Committee of Defense for the French Cinema was created to warn that spending money to see "the rubbishy American movies" would destroy France's economy as well as its mind .16
Nevertheless, by the 195os, American films were over 50 percent of all those distributed in France. Inevitably, most were of poor quality, but they were certainly popular.17 One French cinema expert made this success sound like a foreign military invasion aided by local traitors: "With the complicity of some politicians and even newspapers ... relying on the support of a bombproof distribution system, the Americans force their movies on us."58
Yet hidden away here is the obvious implication of such views: the real traitors were the average people ready to consume American products. They must be shamed into changing their behavior. Yet, after all, they were not being captured and marched, with guns at their backs, to the cinemas. They were simply exercising their own preferences. For French intellectuals who saw themselves as the generals in the army of culture, these people were deserters. But if French tastes were so elevated already, why would the masses want to see American films in the first place? Perhaps it was because the French and American masses were really not so different after all.
Another good example of this phenomenon was the battle over CocaCola. Coca-Cola is a sweet soft drink that people around the world seem to like. As Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian-born intellectual who after embracing many different ideologies was at the moment pro-American and resident in London, pointed out in 1951, there was no coercion involved: "The United States do not rule Europe as the British ruled India; they waged no Opium War to force their revolting `Coke' down our throats. Europe bought the whole package because Europe wanted it."59
But precisely because Coca-Cola had become a symbol of Americanization, there was strong opposition to its introduction. The company expanded operations into Holland and Belgium in 1947, and then to Switzerland, Italy, and France two years later. Local competitors tried to stop the drink from being sold. There were lawsuits and campaigns by Communist parties to portray the beverage as containing dangerous amounts of caffeine, poison, or addictive substances. The popular Italian Communist Party newspaper warned that it would turn children's hair white, while, more imaginatively, the small Austrian party said the local bottling plant could be transformed into a factory making atomic bombs.60
In
France, the Communists found an argument to appeal to every sector of French society. During a 1950 debate on the Coca-Cola menace in parliament, a Communist deputy laid it on the line: "We've seen successively the French cinema and French literature attacked. We've watched the struggle over our tractor industry. We've seen a whole series of our productive sectors, industrial, agricultural, and artistic, successively attacked without the public authorities defending them."61 Perhaps he feared France being reduced to the same status as East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia by Moscow.
Warning that France might be "coca-colonized," the Communist daily L'Humanite said the new drink would damage wine sales and worsen the trade deficit, while the distribution system would double as an American espionage network. Not even the most sacrosanct French symbols were said to be safe. A rumor claimed that the company wanted to put a Coca-Cola ad on the front of Paris's Notre Dame Cathedral.62 Not to be outdone in patriotic rhetoric by the left, the right-wing Poujadist movement proclaimed that the rooster, symbol of France, would only sing "Cocorico" (the French equivalent of cock-a-doodle-do) "And not CocaCola! "63 A Catholic newspaper was equally defiant: "We must call a spade a spade and label Coca-Cola for what it is-the avant-garde of an offensive aimed at economic colonization against which we feel it's our duty to struggle."64 Le Monde, the icon of the French intellectuals, joined in and made it clear that the issue was far broader than what people drank at lunch. One writer explained: "Conquerors who have tried to assimilate other peoples have generally attacked their languages, their schools, and their religions. They were mistaken. The most vulnerable point is the national beverage. Wine is the most ancient feature of France. It precedes religion and language; it has survived all kinds of regimes. It has unified the nation. "61
Le Monde put the issue clearly in terms of anti-Americanism: "What the French criticize is less Coca-Cola than its orchestration, less the drink itself, than the civilization-or, as they like to say, the style of life-of which it is the symbol."66
In 1950, parliament passed an anti-Coca-Cola bill that authorized the government, acting on scientific advice, to draw up new regulations for beverage companies. While Coca-Cola was never outlawed, fewer people drank it in France than in any other country in Western Europe.
By way of contrast, it is interesting to note how Americans treated the French national beverage differently by importing its wine while developing a massive industry of their own. Something few native-born Americans would have drunk in 1950 became extremely popular without either damaging America's distinctiveness or persuading French intellectuals that the United States was a friendly and equally advanced civilization.
Another symbol of the Americanization threat became the chronic French hysteria about the Anglo-Saxonization of their language. Rene Etiemble, professor of comparative literature at the Sorbonne, wrote the 1964 book, Parlez-vous Franglais?, that assesses the French language's supposed corruption. With the adaptation of such words as the "twist" dance, "segregation," and, of course "Coca-Cola," he warns, the American way of life is "going to contaminate and botch what we have left of cuisine, wine, love, and original thoughts."67 Another writer described "the scheme to homogenize [French] by means of Angloid pidgin."68 And a third, in 1980, claimed that the contamination of French was part of an emerging universal pidgin English that was to communication what "fast food is to gastronomy. "69 Yet despite all this fear of an assault on the French language, less than 3 percent of new words in French come from English.70
In France, it often seemed as if every event was analyzed regarding its relationship to the alleged American threat. After another writer exalted the upsurge of revolutionary fervor in France during 1968 as a European revolt against Americanization, Regis Debray-a political philosopher whose main claim to fame had been his wrong prediction that Cuban-style revolution would sweep Latin America and expel U.S. influence-explained that the radical upsurge was merely one final gasp before France surrendered to America, abandoning its great dreams of a just society, national community, and solidarity with the world's exploited and oppressed."
When Disneyland opened a European theme park near Paris in 1992, intellectuals denounced it as the equivalent of a "cultural Chernobyl," a reference to the defective Soviet nuclear reactor that spewed out large amounts of radioactive poison across the Ukrainian countryside.72 Yet the theme park proved very popular even with the French, a fact that only proved for intellectuals the dangers such things posed to their way of life.
This feeling of being beleaguered and on the defensive reached the highest levels of French government. The idea that the United States was a threat, as presented in the best-selling 1967 book by jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge, became a major issue in policy debates. Hubert Vedrine, a French foreign minister under the socialist President Francois Mitterrand, coined the term "hyperpower" in the 198os to describe U.S. domination over a "unipolar world."73
In 1982, Michel Jobert, who held that same post under the conservative Gaullist President Francois Pompidou, saw Cobol, a computer language invented in the United States, as worse than the Soviet invasion of Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. Cobol, he explained, was "more insidious and more part of our daily life than the threat from the East." Whereas the Soviets had been discredited by their attack on Afghanistan, the "Cobol coup" is taking place so quietly that those being taken over by the Americans were not even aware of it.74
The next year, cabinet minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement, a Socialist who seven years later would resign from office to protest French participation in the first war against Saddam Hussein, raised a hysterical alarm: "Never since the Hundred Years' War [which ended 500 years earlier] have our people known such an identity crisis. Our language is threatened with extinction for the first time in history. America has become the last horizon of our young because we have not offered them a great democratic design."75
That last point was a critical one for understanding the growing antiAmericanism expressed in France beginning in the final years of the twentieth century. There was a strong belief among many that the young generation was becoming too Americanized. Customs, music, film and clothes, the Internet, and many other things were cited as proof. One college professor explained that she feared her daughter was becoming Americanized because she had begun to make herself snacks rather than engaging only in formal meals.76 This sense of being in the midst of a losing battle was shared with movements in many parts of the Third World as well.
But despite these fears of subversion, there were not many signs of retreat among the anti-American forces. Indeed, they generally succeeded even in barring the use of the term "anti-Americanism" in the French media and universities. To talk of such a phenomenon was to suggest that there was some systematic bias against America that should be corrected. There was no such prejudice, ran the response, but merely an accurate recounting of that country's genuine faults. Those criticizing anti-Americanism were often branded as American agents.77
During the 195os and i96os, the leading French critic of antiAmericanism was Raymond Aron, who suggested that his compatriots respected the USSR more for oppressing its intellectuals than the United States for ignoring them.78 In the 1970s, the most popular dissenting interpretation was that of Jean-Francois Revel, who claimed that anti Americanism was part of the European left's larger effort to discredit liberalism by attacking its main model and champion. Misrepresenting the United States as a repressive, unfair, racist, nearly fascist society was a way to say, he later wrote, "See what it looks like when liberalism is implemented!"79 Yet the fact that Revel's books also sold well in France proved that many people were open to alternative points of view.
Despite all the bluster about French-or, in other cases, Europeansuperiority, the paranoid attitude so often evinced toward America represented a tremendous breakdown of confidence and a closing off of possibilities, the fearful rejection of change or of considering alternatives that is the very essence of the reactionary wor
ldview. As the Frenchman Claude Roy wrote in his 1949 book on America, "Nothing is more ridiculous than the snails of the Old World who withdraw into their shells at the sight of the New World."80
Yet France, a society priding itself on its great history and even greater culture, trembled at any infusion of American culture because it assumed that there was no possibility of competing fairly. Instead of viewing such input as an inspiration for new forms of creativity, the wagons were circled to blot out images deemed too horrifying for French people to endure. By shutting itself off, France risked the danger of shutting itself down.
As a result, while France could easily have won any sneering contest, it lost the battles that truly counted. For example, France was the world's first country to have a public Internet, yet a reluctance to use such a demeaning medium and a demand that it set all the international standards for the new system resulted in the country lagging far behind in high technology. Equally, while it was eager to assert the superiority of its language, France watched as English increasingly became the world's common language. When a Japanese auto company merged with Renault, the company's French executives had to learn English in order to communicate with the Japanese.
Typical of the ostrich defense of putting one's head firmly into the sand, an approach too often adopted by the French intelligentsia, was the proposal of Claude Hagege, a respected professor of linguistic theory at the College de France, that French primary schools should teach two foreign languages, but neither of them would be English.81
