Category Archives: France

The meatiest book reviewed in Paul Berman’s lengthy article in The New Republic entitled France’s Failures, Hatreds, and Signs of a New Look at America: The Anti-Anti-Americans (free registration required) is Philippe Roger’s The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism. Roger reminds us of historic French grievances about American ingratitude during the 18th and 19th centuries, not just American grievances about French ingratitude during the 20th century.

Roger recalls the history of French grievances against America, the actual hard-fact history–this history that Americans know nothing about and can hardly even imagine, though its stages are easily identified. There was the French feeling of horror and betrayal at the secret Jay Treaty of 1794, in which, despite France’s crucial aid during the American Revolution, the United States made peace with the same Great Britain that was, at that very moment, waging war against revolutionary France. It is easy to see that, on this issue, the French had a point–especially so when you recognize that, whatever France’s imperial ambitions may have been (namely, to conquer Europe and the Middle East, and to re-name these regions “France”), the French were undergoing a terrible pummeling.

Then came the struggles of the Napoleonic wars, and the French navy seized a great many American ships (a total of 558, by the American reckoning). And the United States demanded compensation afterward, and not in a small amount. President Andrew Jackson pursued this demand, and the French eventually agreed to pay, if only because Jackson threatened to seize French property in the United States. But, as Roger tells us, the argument over compensation to the United States aroused a tremendous anger in France–tremendous because the French had aided the United States in the past, and America ought to have allowed its feeling of gratitude to linger a little longer. And the resentment was owed to something more. For what was the meaning of France’s revolutionary and Napoleonic wars?

France suffered. France’s army was destroyed. France ended up under European occupation. Huge portions of the French population were killed. The defeat was spectacular and enormous. And here was the United States in the wake of these tragedies, demanding a money transfer from a somber and defeated France to the cheerful shores of a prosperous United States. The French Chamber of Deputies eventually agreed to pay, but their assent was bitter. Even the pro-Americans among them–Roger points to the poet Lamartine, a solid republican with excellent pro-American credentials–burned with resentment. An echo of this turns up, I would add, even in Tocqueville, who remarks that in the American War of Independence, the Americans endured nothing on the scale of French suffering a few years later.

And the same can be said of American vs. French sacrifices during the Great War, the war of Europe’s lost generation.

By the turn of the twentieth century, it had become obvious that America was expanding its power all over the world, just as the European supporters of the old Confederacy had feared; and the sundry racial and cultural factors came to seem frighteningly dynamic. Woodrow Wilson seemed like a scary man, insane, imprisoned by his Christian fanaticism, and manipulated by Jewish financiers. The years that followed Wilson’s intervention in France produced, in Roger’s account, the high tide of anti-American literature. The United States was a racial horror, a machine-like menace, a disaster for the working class, a tool of the Jewish conspiracy, and so forth–all of which had a way of making America seem much more dangerous than Germany. These attitudes were upheld by people on the extreme right and by a number of independents who were neither right-wing nor left-wing, and, in the age of Pétain, these became the reigning attitudes.

Then again, Pétain’s defeat and the catastrophe of the extreme right in France merely ended up producing still another wave of anti-Americanism, this time promoted by the communists, whose left-wing feelings were just as virulent as the old right-wing version. The United States, no longer a greater danger than Nazi Germany, was now the heir to Nazi Germany. “Truman, Hitler’s authentic successor” was a communist slogan. The communists campaigned against blue jeans, Coca Cola, and Hollywood. The right-wing themes from between the wars were in these ways re-fitted for the postwar left, and the revised themes were massively disseminated….

In this fashion, a cultural tradition arose in which America was condemned for every possible reason and its opposite–condemned for being less advanced than Europe, which is to say, geographically and sociologically younger; and also for being ahead of Europe in its social development, which is to say, older. America was a country without values; and appallingly moralistic. Repulsive for being racist; and for mixing its races. America’s democracy was a failure and a sham; and America was repeatedly said to have lately fallen away from its admirable democratic past. America was governed by a dictatorship of millionaires; or by a rabble of corner grocers. Worse than Hitler; or Hitler’s heir; and either way a threat to humanism.

America was frightening because it was excessively powerful; and was repeatedly declared to be on the brink of collapse. America was bellicose; and its soldiers, cowardly. America was hopelessly Christian; and, beginning in the 1920s, America was, even so, dominated by Jews. Coldly calculating; and, at the same time, religiously insane. Talleyrand made the complaint about religious insanity at the very start of the American republic (he had fled to America in 1794 to escape the mass guillotinings that were mandated by France’s new religion of the Goddess of Reason) in his witty remark that America featured thirty-two religions and only one dish, which was inedible. The remark about food was significant in itself, and suggested, as well, a larger complaint about the unattractive thinness of America’s culture–a main theme of the anti-American accusation. And yet America’s greatest danger to the world was also said to be its culture, which, despite its lack of appeal, was dangerously appealing, and was going to crush all other cultures.

Yet, after such a well-crafted stream of ironies, Berman concludes on a note very sympathetic to France.

Anyone who visits Berlin will recognize instantly that Germany is a nation that has suffered stupendous and unbearable defeats–a nation that has been reduced to rubble repeatedly by events, even if the Germans have themselves to blame for some of those events. A visitor to France will come away with no such impression. Rubble, in France? And yet it may be that France, too, is a nation covered with scars–a wounded nation, different from Germany only in France’s gallant insistence that it is not a wounded nation. I turn the pages of Roger’s history and the other books, and I contemplate Glucksmann’s observations about the hatred that arises from a revulsion at one’s own weakness, and it occurs to me that, instead of rubble, which the Germans have aplenty, the French possess the very remarkable literature that Roger and the others describe. Not exactly rubble, but a kind of wreckage–the literature of a wounded culture, expressing more than two hundred years of conscious and unconscious injury.

Will America be any more gracious by the turn of the next century, when perhaps China will have taken over the role of colossus bestriding the world?

Paul Berman’s review article (free registration required) in The New Republic on several books by anti-anti-American French authors quotes a passage from Pierre Rigoulot’s L’Antiaméricanisme: Critique d’un prêt-à-penser rétrograde et chauvin that Berman characterizes as “pretty ferocious”:

Rigoulot … thinks that the French intellectual and political elite, by muttering constantly about the evils of the United States, has rendered itself numb to any of the pricks of conscience that ought to have stimulated France into playing a more responsible role in the world.

This numbing, this reticence to take action, this refusal to take risks has a name: it is the spirit of Vichy. The spirit of Vichy continues to haunt France despite the defeat of the French state and the expiatory trials conducted during these last years. Vichy is not just complicity with the genocide of the Jews: it is a pacifist and past-oriented vision of the world. And it is above all a refusal to participate in the troubles and misfortunes that are engendered by all resistance and by any pursuit of a “warrior adventure.” Vichy is the belief that one can remove oneself from history and from its necessarily tragic dimensions, the belief that one can evoke moral principles in order to avoid combat–yesterday against Nazism, today against radical Islamism. This spirit is stronger than ever.

And not just in France, of course. The normal response of most civilized people is not just to let sleeping dogs lie, but to keep rabid dogs outside the fence, beyond civilization. But fellow human beings also live out there, beyond the pale, down in the Gap. What is to be done about them?

Paul Berman has a long and fascinating review article (free registration required) in The New Republic on several books by French authors whom he characterizes as “anti-anti-Americans.” Here’s a bit of what he has to say about André Glucksmann’s Le discours de la haine (‘the discourse of hatred’):

The wildest of hatreds do not need a cause outside of ourselves. This is Glucksmann’s point. Hatred’s causes may merely be hatred’s excuses. We hate because we choose to hate. We could equally choose not to do so. And why choose to hate? On this question, Glucksmann reveals himself as the disciple, as no one could have predicted, of Sartre. In Anti-Semite and Jew, Sartre wrote that people who give in to the pleasures of hatred do so because they cannot abide their own frailties. Weakness and imperfection are the human condition. But weakness and imperfection leave us unsatisfied, maybe even disgusted with ourselves. Hatred, however, can make us feel strong. Hatred is thrilling. Hatred is reassuring. When we choose to hate, we discover that, by hating, we overcome our own disappointment at ourselves. We choose to hate because we want to feel the exhilarating vibrations of power instead of weakness, the perfect ideal instead of the imperfect reality. And so, in order to hate, we hold aloft a glorious vision that can never exist: the vision of a perfect mankind unstained by weakness and flaws, a vision of purity and power. And we give ourselves over to the satisfying pleasures of hating everyone who stands in the way of the perfect vision.

Chicago Boyz contributor Shannon Love identifies some misconceptions on rioting.

In reading a lot of commentary on the French Riots, I repeatedly see a lot of commentators repeating the idea that people riot because they feel weak, powerless and helpless. This is exactly backwards. The real pattern is that people tend to riot when they feel both entitled and empowered.

This counterintuitive aspect of rioters explains why in sports riots it is the fans of the winning team who are much more likely to riot than those of the losing team. The team’s victory creates both a sense of entitlement, “we won so we get to celebrate excessively,” and a sense of empowerment, “we can beat anyone!”

Other forms of rioting follow the same pattern. Until the 1960s, African-Americans were almost always the victims of riots, not the perpetrators. The race riots of the late-’60s did not occur because of increasing oppression of African-Americans but because of decreasing oppression. The political changes of the ’60s made African-Americans feel both entitled to strike against the larger society and strong enough to do so. The riots were expressions of strength, not weakness.

Political riots tend to arise from populations who follow the ascendent political doctrines of their times. Riots in the ’60s world-wide were almost always young leftists rioting against the rightist status-quo. Being in sync with the dominant political zeitgeist of an era gives the rioters their needed sense of entitlement (moral justification in the case of political riots) and their sense of empowerment (the people are with us!).

So what does all this tell us about the French riots?

First, the rioters feel entitled or justified in rioting. Perhaps they feel entitled because they feel economically cheated, but they may also feel entitled for cultural or ideological reasons. The mostly Arab and Islamic rioters may be striking out at the white French in a manner similar to the American race riots of the 1800s, only in this case it is a belief in cultural or religious superiority that drives them.

Second, the rioters do not feel desperate or afraid. Instead, they are rioting because they believe that a power shift has occurred in their favor. They are attacking less out of aggrievement than out of contempt. They feel ascendent. This suggests they do not perceive the French state as being willing or capable of opposing them.

This certainly fits the pattern of the anti-Korean riots after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923. A student paper in Compass Online suggests several factors that prompted Japanese citizens to riot against immigrant Korean laborers after the earthquake:

• The Japanese government proclaimed martial law, ostensibly to quell Korean riots.
• The postwar depression after 1918 caused Japanese workers to resent competition from Korean immigrants.
• Japanese citizens felt superior to Koreans, whose weak government had easily yielded to Japanese colonial control.
• Japanese feared their colonial subjects after the Korean nationalist uprising in 1919.

The Japanese rioters felt aggrieved, to be sure, but one would be hard put to prove they were more oppressed than the Koreans they slaughtered.

One could make similar observations about the countless instances of large demonstrations, whether violent or peaceful, led by students from elite universities in capital cities, some of which have toppled governments, while others have been violently suppressed. The students and workers who demonstrated for weeks in Tiananmen Square in 1989 didn’t do so because they felt weak. They felt empowered, on the crest of history, protected by the eyes of the world, and far more legitimate than the corrupt government they unsuccessfully challenged.

UPDATE: Shannon Love had an earlier post entitled Bread Alone that addressed issues of material vs. psychological welfare, the latter principally focusing on jobs and control of one’s own destiny.

In the modern developed world, the basic material needs of even the most poor are easily met. Even the most die-hard libertarian must give some attributes of the welfare state, such as universal education, some credit for getting us to this point. However, just because a concept met the needs of the past doesn’t mean it meets the needs of present or the future. The point of diminishing returns has long since been passed. What the poor now need, and what the welfare state cannot provide, is an environment that lets the individual gain control over their own destinies. The very degree of micromanagement that the welfare state requires to function means that it must strip the ability to choose from the individual. People in such situations do begin to feel like cattle, cared for but ultimately herded .

In the 80’s, a great shift occurred in American thinking about welfare. Americans grew less concerned about the material aspects of lives of the poor and instead began to pay attention to their psychological well being. We made the decision that long-term dependence on the state was destructive to both individuals and communities. Americans think it’s better for a community that 100% of people capable of work are able to get a job a $5 an hour than it is for only 50% of workers to get jobs paying $10 an hour. We have decided that giving people active control over their own lives is ultimately better than providing a higher level of material benefit. I believe that is why in recent years, when disasters like blackouts or massive hurricanes disrupted the functioning of centralized authority, America’s poor did not riot or prey on others. Instead, overall, they reacted with great civility, even when abandoned by the state.

Well, perhaps that understates American troubles a bit, but not as much as French coverage of Hurricane Katrina overstated the ensuing troubles.