EUROPEAN/AMERICAN RELATIONS: WHO LEADS?
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which it offers to share freely, but President Chirac warns that without
such a system of its own Europe will have "vassal status"
to
the United
States . Asked by an interviewer, "Why does the image of France as anti–
American persist?" former prime minister Lionel Jospin replied in the
best Delphic style, "There is confusion." Jean-Pierre Chevenement, a
presidential candidate, holds that the United States is aiming at the "cre–
tinisation" of France. No chance is lost to generalize unfavorably about
the uncouthness of Americans and their presidents in particular,
to
den–
igrate American presidents as cowboys or worse, or
to
generalize unfa–
vorably about Americans as obese, ignorant rednecks or whatever. In a
typical sneer, Jospin went so far as
to
say that President Bush's election
will "always be in doubt."
One of the pleasures of life used
to
be a visit
to
a French bookshop.
Within living memory new works were
to
be found by writers such as
Mauriac, Malraux, Sartre, Camus, Anouilh, Rene Char, Ionesco, Ray–
mond Aron, and many other household names. The cultural arm of the
French government has lately sent me the modern fiction it recom–
mends, listing novels by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, Jean Teule, Anne Bra–
gance, Tonino Benacquista, Franz Bartelt, Brigitte Giraud, Jean
Debernard, and others, all of whom may be estimable, but none have
reached beyond the boulevard St. Germain. (Incidentally, slightly over
two-thirds of the books published in Germany are translations from the
English, and the disproportion is only slightly less in Italy.)
Stacked up in French bookshops are anti-American tracts. Panic
about American cultural hegemony goes back
to
the early twentieth cen–
tury, perhaps to the German writer Paul Dehns's essay with the title
"The Americanization of the World." Such a panic was then rare in
France. Even so morose and murderous a character as Celine enjoyed
his stay in the States between the wars. Saint-Exupery and Andre Mau–
rois praised New York. But this opinion reversed in postwar France. In
large proportion, criticism of America stemmed from the Communist
Party, which dictated the intellectual climate of the times. But such crit–
icism had its right-wing Gaullist input, too. The campaign against Hol–
lywood films is waged with real nationalist intensity in a form of
protectionism, as though the French themselves were incapable of mak–
ing better films by way of demonstrating cultural vitality. (Alain
Besanc;on's remark should never be forgotten, however, that a thousand
Hollywood films could never match the damage wrought by one French
philosopher on campus.) Jean-Marie Messier, former chairman of
Vivendi Universal-originally a water and sewage business transformed
into a global media and filmmaking group with headquarters in New
