...we hope Mr. Giuliani has also calculated the potential legal risks of such a high-profile financial venture. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has positioned himself to be the Giuliani of this era by making capitalists a special target. The folks who want to see Mr. Giuliani run for President in four years don't want his bid spoiled by another ambitious prosecutor.

Opinion polls show that anti-American feeling has long been evident in France but that it has rocketed under Bush. But what exactly does it mean to be anti-American? Is anti-Americanism a political belief, a passion, an ideology, or a tradition?

In L’ennemi Americain, a fascinating genealogy of French anti-Americanism, Philippe Roger argues that the phenomenon is best viewed as a recurrent discourse that has periodically surfaced in French thought. At different times, anti-Americanism has been trumpeted by the hard right in French politics and then by the hard left. But this discourse has been constantly sustained by a corps of French intellectuals, for whom anti-Americanism has almost become a defining feature. ...According to Roger, French disillusion with the US set in soon after American independence, in spite of the fine rhetoric about the two sister republics’ devotion to liberty and the rights of man. Talleyrand, the French foreign minister who visited the US in the 1790s, was an early and harsh critic. “America is completely English,” he complained. With mounting frustration, he realised that the weight of past ties, a common language and national interests would more likely push the newly independent America towards Britain than France.

That early French disappointment with America crystallised into concern in the 1890s. It was then that the French public latched on to the image of the Yankee as a rampant capitalist at home and a budding imperialist abroad. The Yankee violently suppressed workers’ rights in the US and aggressively pushed American products abroad as his economic might grew. “America is invading old Europe, she is flooding her, she is going to submerge her,” wrote Joseph Emile-Barbier in 1893. US successes in the Spanish-American war of 1898 only fuelled those fears. The capture of Cuba and the Philippines convinced French politicians of the “American peril”, and also encouraged a sense of solidarity with a fellow European power. Not for the last time, the assertion of American interests abroad led to calls for a more unified European counterweight. Even the much-derided British were finally considered to be European.

The French were temporarily infatuated with President Woodrow Wilson for bringing the US into the first world war on their side. Two million people turned out to greet Wilson when in Paris to negotiate the settlement with Germany. But French politicians quickly grew to detest his stubborn rejection of their own views and his moralising ways. “Wilson speaks like Jesus Christ and conducts himself like Lloyd George,” they grumbled in the corridors of Versailles.

Washington’s subsequent retreat into isolationism and its lack of support for the League of Nations allowed another wave of anti-Americanism to wash over France in the late 1920s and 1930s. France’s “philosopher-writers”, many of whom came under the intellectual sway of Moscow, denounced the “American cancer”, even though they remained almost wholly ignorant about the country. As Roger notes: “The US could be weighed and judged without ever having been visited.”

Roger contends that France’s distrust of the US was bound up with a sense of European decline after the collective madness of the first world war. Perhaps in fear of their own future, the French cavilled at the mechanisation of American society and the homogenising effects of its culture - in much the same way as anti-globalisation campaigners complain about the US today. The first French quota on US films was imposed as early as 1928.

These intellectuals’ prolific writings permeated French public opinion and laid down a thick sediment of anti-American feeling that has been mined by opportunistic politicians to this day. Even the cartoon character Tintin (also a Belgian creation) took a dismal view of the US when he “visited” the country in the 1930s.

Thanks to reader Beth Cleaver for the heads up.

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:00 PM | link    

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 1:11 AM | link    

Wednesday, December 01, 2004