The French Way: How France Embraced and Rejected American Values and Power - Hardcover

Kuisel, Richard F.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691151814 ISBN 13: 9780691151816

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2011

Synopsis

There are over 1,000 McDonald's on French soil. Two Disney theme parks have opened near Paris in the last two decades. And American-inspired vocabulary such as "le weekend" has been absorbed into the French language. But as former French president Jacques Chirac put it: "The U.S. finds France unbearably pretentious. And we find the U.S. unbearably hegemonic." Are the French fascinated or threatened by America? They Americanize yet are notorious for expressions of anti-Americanism. From McDonald's and Coca-Cola to free markets and foreign policy, this book looks closely at the conflicts and contradictions of France's relationship to American politics and culture. Richard Kuisel shows how the French have used America as both yardstick and foil to measure their own distinct national identity. They ask: how can we be modern like the Americans without becoming like them? France has charted its own path: it has welcomed America's products but rejected American policies; assailed America's "jungle capitalism" while liberalizing its own economy; attacked "Reaganomics'" while defending French social security; and protected French cinema, television, food, and language even while ingesting American pop culture. Kuisel examines France's role as an independent ally of the United States--in the reunification of Germany and in military involvement in the Persian Gulf and Bosnia--but he also considers the country's failures in influencing the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations. Whether investigating France's successful information technology sector or its spurning of American expertise during the AIDS epidemic, Kuisel asks if this insistence on a French way represents a growing distance between Europe and the United States or a reaction to American globalization. Exploring cultural trends, values, public opinion, and political reality, The French Way delves into the complex relationship between two modern nations.

About this title

About the Author

Richard F. Kuisel holds a joint appointment at the BMW Center for German and European Studies and in the History Department at Georgetown University. His books include "Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization"

From the Back Cover

"Richard Kuisel once again blazes a clear path through the thickets of emotion and invective that tangle French-American relations. Why, he asks, did good relations in the 1980s worsen in the 1990s under Chirac-Clinton? Examining the United States' emergence from the Cold War as an assertive hyperpower and the French government's opposition to American companies and policies, Kuisel presents a balanced view of French-American relations in which neither side is entirely blameless."--Robert O. Paxton, Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science, Columbia University

"Richard Kuisel has spent a lifetime explaining 'the French way' with superb scholarship, style, and compelling humor. This is the culmination of his work: an outstanding and deeply felt contribution to our comprehension of America's complex relations with one of our most demanding, yet least dispensable allies."--Simon Serfaty, Old Dominion University

"With elegant and sleek prose, Kuisel tells the forgotten history of France's perceptions of the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. He vividly paints the portrait of a France actively seeking to adopt American culture and techniques, while at the same time trying to adapt, resist, and compete with the overpowering ally. A pleasure to read."--Sophie Meunier, Princeton University

"No one knows better the ins and outs of Franco-American relations in the twentieth century than Kuisel. In this terrific and persuasive book, he analyzes a broad range of materials--public opinion polls, intellectual argument, business practices, and foreign-policy debate--handling them all with lucidity, a fine sense of nuance, and scrupulous good judgment."--Philip Nord, author of France's New Deal

From the Inside Flap

"Richard Kuisel once again blazes a clear path through the thickets of emotion and invective that tangle French-American relations. Why, he asks, did good relations in the 1980s worsen in the 1990s under Chirac-Clinton? Examining the United States' emergence from the Cold War as an assertive hyperpower and the French government's opposition to American companies and policies, Kuisel presents a balanced view of French-American relations in which neither side is entirely blameless."--Robert O. Paxton, Mellon Professor Emeritus of Social Science, Columbia University

"Richard Kuisel has spent a lifetime explaining 'the French way' with superb scholarship, style, and compelling humor. This is the culmination of his work: an outstanding and deeply felt contribution to our comprehension of America's complex relations with one of our most demanding, yet least dispensable allies."--Simon Serfaty, Old Dominion University

"With elegant and sleek prose, Kuisel tells the forgotten history of France's perceptions of the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. He vividly paints the portrait of a France actively seeking to adopt American culture and techniques, while at the same time trying to adapt, resist, and compete with the overpowering ally. A pleasure to read."--Sophie Meunier, Princeton University

"No one knows better the ins and outs of Franco-American relations in the twentieth century than Kuisel. In this terrific and persuasive book, he analyzes a broad range of materials--public opinion polls, intellectual argument, business practices, and foreign-policy debate--handling them all with lucidity, a fine sense of nuance, and scrupulous good judgment."--Philip Nord, author ofFrance's New Deal

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE FRENCH WAY

How France Embraced and Rejected American Values and PowerBy Richard F. Kuisel

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15181-6

Contents

List of Illustrations...........................................................................................ixPreface.........................................................................................................xiAcknowledgments.................................................................................................xviiA Note on Anti-Americanism......................................................................................xix1 America à la Mode: The 1980s.............................................................................12 Anti-Americanism in Retreat: Jack Lang, Cultural Imperialism, and the Anti-Anti-Americans.....................453 Reverie and Rivalry: Mitterrand and Reagan-Bush...............................................................994 The Adventures of Mickey Mouse, Big Mac, and Coke in the Land of the Gauls....................................1515 Taming the Hyperpower: The 1990s..............................................................................2096 The French Way: Economy, Society, and Culture in the 1990s....................................................2717 The Paradox of the Fin de Siècle: Anti-Americanism and Americanization...................................329Reflections.....................................................................................................377Notes...........................................................................................................391Index...........................................................................................................473

Chapter One

America à la Mode: The 1980s

America, and much that was associated with America, was in vogue in France during the 1980s. Ralph Lauren fashions, California wines, Hollywood blockbuster movies, and venture capitalists were all chic. One Parisian couturier served McDonald's hamburgers at the opening of his fashion show. The socialist president of France, François Mitterrand, paid a visit to California's Silicon Valley and also admitted that he was a fan of the television show Dallas. U.S. president Ronald Reagan, after initially facing a cool reception, became so popular that many French wanted him reelected in 1984. President George H. W. Bush, especially after the success of German reunification, was even more highly regarded than his predecessor. And anti-Americanism, which once was synonymous with the cognoscenti of the Left Bank, was now unfashionable. By the end of the decade America, Americans, American society, and American popular culture were more warmly received than at any time since the GIs marched through a liberated Paris in 1944.

This narrative of French perceptions of America at the fin de siècle begins with an era of relative good feeling from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. The major aims of this chapter are, first, to describe and explain the warmth of these years as a prelude to the creeping chilliness in perceptions and relations that followed while watching the underlying rivalry that generated controversies and, second and more specifically, to examine how the French responded to the American model—principally Reagan's domestic policies.

Why were the two decades of the fin de siècle apparently different? The answer lay in an unusual conjuncture of circumstances in the 1980s. Among the reasons for transatlantic amity was the admirable way Washington navigated the end of the Cold War. The splendid performance of the U.S. economy in the mid-1980s and the personal appeal of Reagan enhanced America's reputation. French domestic politics also contributed when the attempt at advancing socialism crashed and "Reaganomics," at least to some French conservatives, briefly seemed attractive. Then there was the craze for American popular culture, especially among young people, and the spectacle of the French government courting the Walt Disney Company and showering awards on Hollywood stars. But one should not be deceived by appearances: these were not two completely different decades.

The contrast at the fin de siècle cannot be described simply as a shift from the balmy 1980s to the chilly 1990s or from America as a model to America as a pariah. This story is too complex for such simplifications because history, in this case, did not occur in neat decadelong packages; because perceptions were complex, nuanced, and fluid; because attitudes varied among different social and political groups; and because when it came to specific issues—such as American television programs—there was a range of responses, some of which were quite hostile. Amiability at the level of state-to-state relations, which itself was rather staged, existed only for brief periods, such as the years 1982–85 or 1989–91, and even these times were marred by serious quarrels. Moreover, Reagan's popularity was ephemeral and his domestic policies failed to inspire. At the same time transatlantic rivalry obstructed French efforts at combating the AIDS epidemic and cost over a thousand lives. Finally, favorable opinion was often informed by basic ambivalence about America and even about Americans. In short, the historian should be cautious in making generalizations about the decade, with one important exception: that of the public's general welcoming posture toward America, Americans, and American popular culture. This seems indisputable. If the general mood was more comfortable during the 1980s than either before or after, it was nevertheless fragile and, as we shall see, easily upset.

* Before France could become more welcoming to America there had to be fundamental changes in politics and society. The French had to be liberated from two older narratives about their destiny and they had to come to enjoy the benefits of a more open consumer society. Political change as well as deep socioeconomic transformations opened the way to an appreciation of the American way in the 1980s.

Up to the 1970s Gaullism and communism—two entrenched political ideologies that defined what loyalists believed constituted France's identity, and both remnants of the early postwar era—together commanded the loyalty of roughly half the French electorate. Both, in their own ways, were pillars of anti-Americanism. The peaks of French anti-Americanism following the Second World War occurred in the early 1950s and the during the 1960s: the first was largely the work of the communists and the second that of the Gaullists. The 1970s were something of a transition as these two sources ebbed: their demise was crucial to the transatlantic affability of the Reagan/Bush/Mitterrand years.

Gaullism lost much of its allure after General Charles de Gaulle retired as president of the Fifth Republic in 1969. His call to grandeur seemed rather passé once France had lost its empire, and his plans for remaking Europe lost credibility. He was unable to persuade either the United States or the USSR to end their bipolar hegemony and his effort at reinforcing the Paris-Bonn axis stumbled over the preference of West Germans for the Atlantic Alliance. De Gaulle's attempts at reshaping the incipient European Community, even though he succeeded in vetoing admission of the British, had not brought France the leverage he sought. From the U.S. government's perspective the general was notorious for removing France from NATO's integrated command and challenging the pax Americana. After his departure the Gaullist credo based on national independence, an autonomous nuclear force, balance among the superpowers, and continued presence in traditional French preserves like Africa survived and formed a consensus among the French political class, but there was little enthusiasm for appeals to grandeur, threats to withdraw from the Atlantic Alliance, pronouncements aimed at embarrassing Washington, D.C., or pretensions that France should be present at every international crisis. Ironically, once de Gaulle had restored some distance between Paris and Washington there seemed to be less need to taunt Uncle Sam. The French people slowly accepted the reality that their country had become a middling power rather than a competitor with the superpowers and a candidate for grandeur. By the early 1980s less than a quarter of the French believed their nation was any longer a great power. De Gaulle's successor Georges Pompidou quietly retreated from the Gaullist creed by admitting the United Kingdom into the European Community; and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who followed Pompidou to the Elysée in 1974, was not even a Gaullist. Giscard refrained from baiting the Americans and, in the eyes of diehard Gaullists, abandoned France to Atlanticism.

The decline of the Gaullism carried with it a domestic message—that state direction of the economy or dirigisme had reached its limits. The Gaullist approach to macroeconomic management and modernization, a strategy that was in great part responsible for the reconstruction of the economy after World War II, seemed to many to have become heavy-handed and out-of-date by the 1970s. De Gaulle's presidency featured national economic planning; tightly regulated financial markets; protection of "strategic sectors," especially from American takeovers; the elevation of "national champions" (i.e., high-tech companies that could show the tricolor in global competition); resistance to the hegemony of the dollar; shelters for agriculture and certain noncompetitive industries; and an integrated Europe closed to Anglo-American influence. Critics from the center and right of the political spectrum and much of the business community had come to see Gaullist economics as flawed. France, in their view, needed relief from suffocating state dirigisme that curbed healthy competition, denigrated private profitability, subsidized lame-duck industries, distorted investment, and stifled entrepreneurship. The pendulum of political economy needed to swing back toward deregulation and the free market—the direction Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were to head. This, however, was not the view of Gaullism's other critics, Mitterrand's socialists—as we shall see.

A moderation of Gaullist dirigisme was underway in the 1970s. Presidents Pompidou and Giscard d'Estaing advanced deregulation, marginalized economic planning, and made state intervention conform more closely to market criteria of profitability. Giscard infuriated traditional Gaullists by exposing vital industrial sectors to American multinationals. During the administrations of Pompidou and Giscard the French economy benefited from the expansion of trade within the new European Community and rapidly opened to markets outside the continent. When De Gaulle came to power at the end of the 1950s the share of imports and exports in gross domestic product (GDP) was less than 10 percent, but by 1980 these shares had climbed to 25 percent. The realities of the global economy would, in time, teach the socialists that France needed to streamline dirigisme and take a dose of market medicine.

To a great extent Gaullism depended for its verve and appeal on the status and vision of a heroic wartime leader, and the cause lost momentum once the great man left the political scene. The Gaullist party survived, but as a conventional right-wing organization, one among several conservative parties run by career politicians like Jacques Chirac rather than as a national movement above partisanship, a rally of all French men and women, which had been the general's intention. Like an old Napoleonic battle flag in a military museum, the colors in the banner of Gaullism had faded by 1980.

The rival grand narrative to Gaullism, that heralded by the French Communist Party, which formed the hardcore of anti-Americanism on the far left, was also in disarray by the 1970s. The red star symbolized by the Soviet Union was no longer at the apex of the firmament: it had dimmed as the hope of progressives. Revelations of Stalinist gulags and economic failures, repression of dissent, and sclerotic political leadership had tarnished the reputation of the Soviet way. Equally damaging was Moscow's oppressive control over other communist regimes in Eastern Europe including armed intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Even the vaunted Red Army was humbled in Afghanistan after 1979. In France the Communist Party suffered from similar sclerosis under the leadership of Georges Marchais and from the weight of a nineteenth-century political program featuring the dictatorship of the proletariat. As France deindustrialized—that is, closed coal mines, docks, textile mills, and iron foundries—the industrial working class, the proletariat of Marxism, shrank. Radical student activism and the events of 1968 made the party appear to a young generation as a leftover of a Stalinist past. For intellectuals alignment with the communists was no longer de rigueur. Locked in a sociopolitical ghetto the party suffered from sagging electoral support and in the 1970s faced a revived rival on the left, the rebuilt Socialist Party of François Mitterrand. Because he was afraid of it becoming a junior party, Marchais abandoned what appeared to be a winning electoral alliance with the socialists in 1977. The heroic days of communism were long past.

By the 1970s the ability of traditional Gaullism and communism—two pillars of anti-Americanism—to intoxicate the French polity had crumbled. The path was open to alternatives. The Jacobin socialist model advocated by Mitterrand would be tried in the early 1980s, but it would fail to inspire economic growth and the socialists would be forced to make a right turn toward the market. The American model, our subject, was the other alternative. It became more attractive not only because Gaullism and communism had waned but also because of long-term economic and social changes—in particular, the arrival of consumer society.

What had been derided and dreaded by anti-Americans of earlier generations had become French social reality by the 1970s. The signs were everywhere: consumers possessed the purchasing power to buy consumer durables like automobiles and the latest home appliances. For example, in 1960 only one of four households owned a refrigerator, but fifteen years later nine of ten did; they spent less of their income on necessities and more on comforts, health, communications, and leisure; they shopped at supermarkets, franchise stores (including American outlets), and discount marts; bought on credit; and enjoyed vacations abroad including tours to the United States. And advertising, much of it speaking in American English, was ubiquitous. Affluence, which arrived in the late 1960s, also brought American brand products like Tide detergent, Levi's jeans, Hollywood chewing gum, Marlboro cigarettes, Tupperware, and Hertz rental cars. To the dismay of at least one American couple, by the mid-1970s the French had sacrificed their quaintness: they had adopted frozen food, carpeted floors, dishwashers, shopping centers, and Kleenex. Social mobility accompanied consumer society making the old class distinctions of bourgeois and paysan seem like archaisms of the last century. Distinct social stratification—though far from absent—had eroded, and sociologists spoke of the new French society, one that was more informal, open, and fluid. Classe moyenne replaced bourgeoisie just as agriculteur ("farmer") replaced paysan. Advances in transportation and communication like television brought new physical mobility and easy access to national and world events to the rural populace and eroded parochialism. What modernizers criticized as "the stalled society" of the 1950s was on the move. Traditional markers of identity like the village, the peasantry, and the Catholic Church lost ground, and in this new French society of openness and movement American society seemed closer to home than ever before. Social status, according to the chic set who flirted with Americanization, consisted of the muffled sound of a closing car door. As the Atlantic narrowed, the American model became more relevant.

The clearing of the way for increasing interest in America as sketched here formed the background for amiability. In the foreground, as we shall see, were developments in international affairs, economic policy, intellectual life, and popular culture. The net result was a decade or more of relaxed attitudes.

* In the 1980s the French said they liked Americans, their society and culture, and they also approved of the United States as an actor in world affairs—even if they harbored reservations and made distinctions among Washington's policies. How the French perceived America was registered in opinion surveys as well as in newspapers, magazines, and other forms of the media. But surveys are the best source for what the public thought given the representative nature of their sampling, the specificity of questions, the connection of attitudes with categories like age and occupation, and the professional and systematic way the material was usually collected. These surveys were mainly conducted by local polling organizations often under contract with newspapers or U.S. government agencies.

When asked to describe themselves, approximately three times as many of the French said they were "pro-American" as those who admitted they were "anti-American." Americans, in the eyes of most, were a generous, industrious, energetic, inventive, decisive, trustworthy, and friendly people who appreciated French history and culture. They were praised for their achievements in science, technology, and information processing and virtually every French person who claimed to have had direct contact with Americans—for example, through travel, education, or friendships—described the experiences favorably.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0691151814
• ISBN 13: 9780691151816
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 544