With anti-Americanism on the rise across the world, Philippe Roger's American Enemy is a timely inquiry into the historical roots of France's impression of America.

French Anti-Americanism

In American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism, reknowned French professor of history Philippe Roger traces the largely unexplored origins of French anti-Americanism over the longue durée in an effort to debunk claims that the phenomenon is “a recent fever we [can] use polls to chart” [1]. Arguing that the very term “Americanism” was historically ambiguous and ill-defined in its native United States, Roger skillfully shows the ways in the French intellectual community defined the term according to how they felt Americans defined themselves. This projection of meanings was often plagued by hypocrisy, generalization, and intellectual and cultural arrogance on the part of the French, and Roger’s personal opposition to French anti-Americanism is thinly veiled throughout the book.

Anti-American Discourse Evolves

By framing his inquiry over centuries, Roger avoids the narrow scope of many historians interested in French anti-Americanism. Claiming that the existing literature on the subject has too often sought answers to France’s enduring negative opinions of America in purely contemporary contexts, Roger believes that the origins of this phenomenon lie in centuries-old discourses beginning in the eighteenth century. Opening with an exhaustive survey of eighteenth century French intellectuals, artists, naturalists, and authors, Roger reveals the inherent bias in early modern discourse.

Europe's Views of the New World

For prominent French and Dutch naturalists, America was characterized as a land of “unspeakable desolation: miry waters, sterile land, [and] congeries of leaves that have been rotting since the flood” [2]. Genetically inferior plants, animals and peoples were all found in the America of French intellectuals. Also, the American climate and landscape was said to enervate the continent’s early settlers, resulting in a population characterized as culturally deficient, lazy, and uninspiring by European standards. For Roger, this intellectual foundation would shape the centuries of French anti-Americanism, adapting to fit particular political and cultural circumstances throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

French Anti-Americanism as National Solidarity

Drawing on a rich body of paintings, novels, and other cultural artifacts from the periods in question, Roger unravels multiple layers of imbedded and often contradictory anti-American discourse. From France’s support of the South in the Civil War to their subsequent condemnations of the region’s slavery, French anti-Americanism was an opportunistic and ever-changing way to reject American culture and a unifying force at home. As the author states, “At least they now knew whom to hate together” [3]. Liberals and conservatives in France were largely united in their views on American culture, which they characterized as aristocratic, provincial, and dangerously expansionist. The constantly changing definition of Americanization is also central to his argument; for early intellectuals it was “a mechanism for contamination and corruption” [4] while for twentieth century Frenchmen preoccupied with preserving France’s perceived homogeneity and cultural standards, Americanization represented “the United States’ capacity to absorb newcomers, [its] melting pot, and its inefficiency” [5].

Philippe Roger's Tentative Conclusions

For all its scope and depth, American Enemy is not without fault. Although the argument that French anti-Americanism dates back to the eighteenth century is backed by documented evidence, it is less certain that the later trends in French intellectual culture were indeed reflections of previous ones. Also, Roger almost exclusively focuses on a limited body of French intellectuals to which he returns throughout his chapters for continuity; there is only a limited glimpse of French or American popular opinion during most of the periods covered in the book. This weakens an otherwise superbly researched work, as even the author claims, “Intellectuals’ part in constituting and transmitting the discourse is eminent but not exclusive” [6]. As other critics of cultural influence have noted, it is problematic to assume that a popular audience’s reception of American influence necessarily corresponds to the reception of the intellectual community; while many of the novels in his analysis were widely read, this does not definitively imply that they were interpreted along purely anti-American lines.

Is Anti-Americanism to Blame?

While anti-Americanism certainly facilitated centuries of distorted perceptions of the United States, it is an overstatement to claim that French intellectual culture held absolute power over the masses. Could this discourse not also be a cyclical phenomenon which feeds off political and social events while simultaneously reinforcing itself? As his own book describes, events like the United States’ tepid reception of the Statue of Liberty impacted French society deeply; that this was purely the result of existing discourse is unlikely. It would appear that the mere disappointment of a rejected offer played as great a part in generating anti-Americanism as did previously established discourse.

A Timely Inquiry into French Opinions of America

But for these issues, American Enemy is a comprehensive and timely inquiry into a topic which continues to frustrate many Americans at home and abroad. One need only remember the ‘Freedom Fries’ of the recent past to know that U.S.- French relations continue to be particularly problematic nearly three centuries after their origin.

Sources:

[1] Philippe Roger. The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism. Translated by Sharon Bowman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), ix.

[2] Ibid., 50.

[3] Ibid., 141.

[4] Ibid., 124.

[5] Ibid., 213.

[6] Ibid., 449.