Abstract
French anti-Americanism has never been as much the focus of debate as it is today. This is true both in France, where a crop of books has appeared on the subject, and in the United States, for reasons linked to the French refusal to support the American invasion of Iraq. Some authors have underlined the unchanging nature of the phenomenon, defining anti-Americanism as a historical “constant” since the eighteenth century, or again as an endlessly repetitive “semantic block” to use Philippe Roger’s expression. Others, like Jean-François Revel, have tried to show what lies hidden behind such a fashionable ideology: a deep-rooted critique of economic liberalism and American democracy. Yet others, while rejecting the anti-American label, like Emmanuel Todd, have attempted to lift the veil and lay bare the weaknesses of American democracy and the extreme economic fragility of an American empire “in decline,” despite appearances.1
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Philippe Roger, L’ennemi américain. Généalogie de l’antiaméricanisme français (Paris: Seuil, 2002);
Jean-François Revel, l’obsession anti-américaine (Paris: Plon, 2002);
Emmanuel Todd, Après l’empire. Essai sur la décomposition du système américain (Paris: Gallimard, 2002). For a discussion of these works, see chapter 1 by Tony Judt in this volume.
Denis Lacorne and Jacques Rupnik, “France bewitched by America,” in The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism. A Century of French Perception, edited by D. Lacorne, Jacques Rupnik, and Marie-France Toinet (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 2 (trans. from the original French by Gerald Turner, L’Amérique dans les têtes. Un siècle de fascinations et d’aversions [Paris: Hachette, 1986]).
Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu, Décadence de la nation française (Paris: Editions Rieder, 1931), pp. 107–108.
See José Bové and François Dufour, The World is not for Sale. Farmers against Junk Food (London: Verso, 2001)
and Jean-Marie Messier, J6M.com. Faut-il avoir peur de la nouvelle économie? (Paris: Hachette, 2000).
According to an IPSOS poll for Figaro Magazine of May 26, 2000, well analyzed in Philip Gordon and Sophie Meunier, Le Nouveau défi français. La France face à la mondialisation (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2002), pp. 143, 154 (trans. from id., The French Challenge. Adapting to Globalization [Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2001]). According to the same poll, 35% of the French believe that “globalization is not a good thing for France” and 46% consider that it is not beneficial to workers (against 36% contrary opinions). Furthermore, 51% of the French questioned by the CSA on June 30, 2000 declared themselves favorable to José Bové’s views on globalization (p. 143).
For widely differing analyses of the “multiculturalist danger,” see the writings of Jean-Claude Barreau, Paul Yonnet, Alain Peyrefitte, etc., all analyzed in depth in D. Lacorne, La crise de l’identité américaine. Du melting-pot au multiculturalisme [The American Identity Crisis. From Melting Pot to Multiculturalism], 2nd revised edition (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Tel, 2003), pp. 31–36.
Linda Colley, Britons. Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). See also Denis Lacorne, “Les dessous de la francophobie,” Le Nouvel Observateur, February 27, 2003 (interview).
Cornelius de Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, in Œuvres Philosophiques de Pauw (original edition: 1768) (Paris: Jean François Bastien, an III de la République, 1792), vol. 1, p. 2.
See James W. Ceaser, Reconstructing America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 19–65 and
D. Lacorne, “L’écartèlement de ‘l’homme atlantique’,” in L’Amérique des Français, edited by Christine Fauré and Tom Bishop (Paris: François Bourin, 1992), pp. 169–175.
Roger Vailland, La Tribune des Nations, March 14, 1956, quoted in L’Amérique dans les têtes, op. cit., p. 29.
Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu, Décadence de la nation française (Paris: Rieder, 1931), pp. 107–108.
The expression is borrowed from François Furet, Le passé d’une illusion (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1998), p. 504.
Mounier, Revue de culture générale, October 1930, pp. 14–21,
quoted in Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les non-conformistes des années trente (Paris: Seuil, 1969), p. 258. On Mounier and America, see especially Seth Armus, “The eternal enemy: Emmanuel Mounier’s Esprit and French anti-Americanism,” French Historical Studies, no. 2 (spring 2001), pp. 271–303.
The influence of Heidegger on the editors of Ordre nouveau is well documented by J-L Loubet del Bayle, ibid., p. 90. Another probable source of inspiration is the essay by Gina Lombroso, La rançon du machinisme (Fr. trans.) (Paris: Payot, 1931).
Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics [1935] (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 45. (Based on a lecture delivered in 1935 at the University of Freiburg. “I have made no change in the content,” explained Heidegger in his Preface to the 1953 German edition.)
Alain de Benoist, quoted in D. Lacorne et al., L’Amérique dans les têtes, op. cit., p. 33. Curiously, the same argument was defended by more moderate politicians, strongly inspired by the Gaullist political tradition, such as Michel Jobert, Jacques Thibau, or Jean-Marie Benoist. Other major intellectuals like Maurice Merleau Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, or Etienne Gilson defended comparable viewpoints at the end of the 1940s. See Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
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Lacorne, D. (2005). Anti-Americanism and Americanophobia: A French Perspective. In: Judt, T., Lacorne, D. (eds) With Us or Against Us. The CERI Series in International Relations and Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980854_3
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