This winter's Franco-American split on Iraq is a political event of historic
magnitude. Yet, in some ways, it's only the culmination of two centuries
of simmering cultural antagonism between the old "allies." Anti-Americanism
has been a staple of French life since before America was a republic.
To be sure, George W. Bush, like Ronald Reagan before him, has a political
style that needlessly antagonizes "allies" and enemies alike.
The Bush administration's ham-handed policy on the Kyoto environmental
accord and the president's condescension toward the allied contributions
to Afghanistan have served to aggravate already inflamed European-American
tensions. With his down-home Texas style and seemingly simple-minded metaphors,
Bush is an easy man for politicians like French President Jacques Chirac
to despise.
Yet there's really nothing new about the latest wave of French anti-Americanism.
It long preceded Bush and Reagan, and often has had little to do with
the policies of any particular president. America annoyed the French from
the start. The recent runaway best-seller in France, 11 Septembre 2001:
L'effroyable imposture ("The Horrible Fraud"), by Thierry
Meyssan, which theorized that the U.S. military faked the 9/11 attack
on the Pentagon, has a long line of predecessors.
Anti-Americanism as a doctrine had its origins in the late 18th century
in the writing of the noted Enlightenment naturalist George-Louis Leclerc
de Buffon (one wonders whether an additional "o" is merited).
This master of Gallic clarity, an irrepressible theorizer, argued that
in the New World, all plants and animals, including humans, were necessarily
puny and pathetic compared with their European counterparts. The American
climate, he reasoned, was so damp and dank that plants, people, and animals
degenerated. American children were said to be incapable of extended thought -- this,
long before Hollywood and TV -- and (imagine this!) it was the New World
that was blamed for that most Parisian of ailments, venereal disease.
For instance, American dogs were said to be unable to bark. This drew
an angry rebuke from that famed cowboy Alexander Hamilton in Federalist
11, where he mocked "the arrogant pretensions of the European(s),"
who need to be taught "moderation." A similarly irate Thomas
Jefferson tried to refute Buffon by sending him a moose, but the Frenchman
died, notes historian James Ceaser, before "he could squeeze moose
into his belief system."
Yet Buffon's ideas prospered after his untimely death. Writing in his
Notes on the State of Virginia in 1781, Jefferson recounted that
while "the Count de Buffon has carried this new theory of the tendency
of nature to belittle her productions on this side the Atlantic. Its application
to the race of whites transplanted from Europe, remained for the Abbi
Raynal." The abbi, another certified philosophe, mocked
the young nation for failing to have produced a French-caliber genius.
When Raynal regaled some dinner guests, including Benjamin Franklin, with
tales of American degeneracy, the Philadelphian asked the guests to rise.
The six Americans were of the "finest stature and form," noted
Franklin, while the Frenchmen were "remarkably diminutive" and
the abbi himself "a mere shrimp."
But, no matter the evidence, America was necessarily a disappointment
to the French, who assumed that the American Revolution was but a pale
anticipation of their own entirely more glorious affair. What with the
absence of gallows and guillotines, the American Revolution had little
to teach the world about the path to progress. Even before the dawning
of the 19th century, French intellectuals had acquired, along with their
requisite Cartesian certainty, a set of anti-American hostilities that
have barely changed over two centuries.
Buffon's theories of degeneration were given a racial interpretation
by Arthur de Gobineau. Combining the romantic's hatred of the bourgeoisie
with fear of racial "mongrelization," Gobineau saw money-grubbing,
ethnically mixed America as the very "cesspool" of civilization.
The degeneracy thesis never really died -- as late as the 1930s, there
were still French intellectuals who believed that American dogs didn't
bark. But the Civil War gave French America-phobes a new worry.
Fearing the emergence of a powerful rival in America, French writers
and intellectuals rallied passionately to the Confederate cause, notes
Phillipe Roger in L'Ennemi amiricain: Ginialogie
de l'antiamiricanisme francais ("The American Enemy: A
Genealogy of French Anti-Americanism"). Hoping to see the United
States dismembered, they depicted the slavocracy as an innocent maiden
sullied by money-mad Yankees. French fears of a rising America fully crystallized
with the U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War. In the midst of the
Dreyfus affair, the imperial French monarchists and Republicans alike
took time out from their anti-Semitic tantrums to denounce Yankee imperialism.
"The ridiculous Yankee," writes Roger, "was succeeded by
the terrifying Yankee."
"It is impossible," he explains, "to understand French
anti-Americanism or its timelessness if you don't see the social-national
benefits it represents in manufacturing a tissue of consensus." In
the 1920s, when the United States asked the French to repay their World
War I war debts, the figure of "Uncle Shylock," combining anti-American
and anti-Semitic themes, was, then as now, helpful for national harmony.
It's not surprising, then, that in the 1930s, with Nazism on the rise
and the French largely divided between supporters of Stalin and fans of
fascism, American-hating came to the rescue by temporarily providing a
common enemy. In a run of best-selling books with such (translated) titles
as "America the Menace" and "The American Cancer,"
the United States was depicted, notes historian Eugene Weber, as a land
of "stupefied drudges steeped in materialism, conformism and uniformity."
"As the lights were going out on a continent overrun by dictatorships,"
the anti-Americans, writes Henri Astier in the Times Literary Supplement,
"focused their anger on the one country where the flame of freedom
was still burning bright."
In the 1950s and 1960s, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre would echo the
1930s themes when his hatred of America as the true enemy led him on a
merry ride on which he first embraced Stalin's Russia, and then -- when
that became too difficult -- pined for Castro's Cuba, Ho Chi Minh's
North Vietnam, and finally, Mao's China. He died a pure man, unsullied
by philo-American thoughts.
It is no accident, as Sartre's Soviet friends would have said, that today,
anti-Americanism has reached new heights in the wake of the embarrassing
election in which Jean-Marie Le Pen, the dodgy semi-fascist but full-time
anti-American and pro-Saddam apologist, finished second. Chirac's victory
over Le Pen kept the French president out of jail. But what was overlooked
was that Le Pen's anti-Americanism was -- as in 1898, during the Spanish-American
War -- shared across the spectrum, albeit with different intonations.
In the 2002 elections the resurgent French Trotskyists (who collectively
polled almost as well as Le Pen) and members of Chirac's Gaullist party
all joined in the roast of America.
What's to be done? Can we reason with the French? It will be difficult
because, just as French anti-Semites saw Jews as simultaneously arch-communists
and arch-capitalists, the Americans are, notes author Jean Francois Revel,
accused of being simultaneously "crass materialists" and "religious
fanatics," narrow "conformists" and "wild cowboys."
Jonathan Swift gave us an answer when he remarked, "It is useless
to attempt to reason a man into something he was never reasoned into."
France's current dyspepsia toward American policy is built on the old
attitudes, with a healthy dose of Gallic cynicism and economic self-interest
mixed in. Those are reflected in the nearly 30-year friendship between
Chirac and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Chirac, who has been known
in France as Mr. Iraq, and much of the French political class have benefited
mightily from the inflated profits they have made on their trade with
Baghdad. That trade is perhaps best summed up by an event in the late
1970s. When the French told the Iraqis that the nuclear equipment the
French were providing was illegal, Saddam responded by doubling what he
was willing to pay. Delighted, the French closed the deal.
