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The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism Paperback – November 1, 2006

by Philippe Roger (Author), Sharon Bowman (Translator)

4.2 10 ratings

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Georges-Louis Buffon, an eighteenth-century French scientist, was the first to promote the widespread idea that nature in the New World was deficient; in America, which he had never visited, dogs don't bark, birds don't sing, and—by extension—humans are weaker, less intelligent, and less potent. Thomas Jefferson, infuriated by these claims, brought a seven-foot-tall carcass of a moose from America to the entry hall of his Parisian hotel, but the five-foot-tall Buffon remained unimpressed and refused to change his views on America's inferiority.

Buffon, as Philippe Roger demonstrates here, was just one of the first in a long line of Frenchmen who have built a history of anti-Americanism in that country, a progressive history that is alternately ludicrous and trenchant. The American Enemy is Roger's bestselling and widely acclaimed history of French anti-Americanism, presented here in English translation for the first time.

With elegance and good humor, Roger goes back 200 years to unearth the deep roots of this anti-Americanism and trace its changing nature, from the belittling, as Buffon did, of the "savage American" to France's resigned dependency on America for goods and commerce and finally to the fear of America's global domination in light of France's thwarted imperial ambitions. Roger sees French anti-Americanism as barely acquainted with actual fact; rather, anti-Americanism is a cultural pillar for the French, America an idea that the country and its culture have long defined themselves against.

Sharon Bowman's fine translation of this magisterial work brings French anti-Americanism into the broad light of day, offering fascinating reading for Americans who care about our image abroad and how it came about.

“Mr. Roger almost single-handedly creates a new field of study, tracing the nuances and imagery of anti-Americanism in France over 250 years. He shows that far from being a specific reaction to recent American policies, it has been knit into the very substance of French intellectual and cultural life. . . . His book stuns with its accumulated detail and analysis.”—Edward Rothstein, New York Times

“A brilliant and exhaustive guide to the history of French Ameriphobia.”—Simon Schama, New Yorker

About the Author

Philippe Roger is professor at l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, editor-in-chief of Critique, the author of numerous books on French history and culture, and a member of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique. Sharon Bowman was awarded the Prix Amic de Soutien à la Création Littéraire by the Académie Française in 2002.

Print length

536 pages
Language

English
Publisher

University of Chicago Press
Publication date

November 1, 2006
Dimensions

6 x 1.1 x 9 inches
ISBN-10

0226723690
ISBN-13

978-0226723693
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press (November 1, 2006)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 536 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0226723690
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0226723693
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.62 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.1 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,811,832 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #7,945 in European Politics Books
- #17,947 in Literary Criticism & Theory
- #24,584 in Literary Movements & Periods

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Hat5678

Seller had good prices and fast shipping

Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2021

Seller was excellent

academic study of anti-americanism

Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2005

It is important to note that this book is written by a Frenchman, but one who is very sympathetic to the US. It is written in an academic style, and at times assumes a knowledge of French history and culture that may be lacking in the American reader. Nevertheless, it is a fascinating study of the subject, particularly the first bits concerning French attitudes during the 18th century about North America's degenerative qualities, and the French sympathy for the Confederacy. Some of the later bits were a bit drawn out, but all in all, very interesting.

20 people found this helpful

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FrugalDutchman

Brilliant

Reviewed in the United States on April 18, 2012

For Phillipe Roger, anti-Americanism existed before it was identified. While Roger shows that the term anti-Americanism entered the French vocabulary only during the Cold War, he traces it's antecedents back to the eighteenth century, thus forming a genealogy of an idea. Once anti-Americanism had a label attached to it, its various strains could be bound together into a common thread, forming a more tangible discourse which has played an integral role in French culture.

The genealogical great-grandfather of French anti-Americanism was born in the Enlightenment. Here, scientists sought to catalog and categorize America, rejecting earlier reports of a land of abundance and forming a new idea of the new world as an unfortunate, God-forsaken land of homogeneity and degeneracy. This position served to repress European emigration which mercantile states feared as a tangible sign of decline. Essential to the formation of this prejudice against America was the idea that geography and climate were responsible for shaping the physical health of living beings. European scientists thought American skies were gray and cold, the air salty, the vegetation poisonous. The result was degeneracy in all things living. Animals were small, much smaller than their Eurasian equivalents according to the taxonomic system of the era, and men became weaker, shorter, dumber, and more cannibalistic with each succeeding generation. Even the eminent Benjamin Franklin could not readily convince French scientists that they had missed the mark. At a dinner in France, Franklin had all the guests, Americans and Frenchmen, stand to show that the shortest American was taller than the tallest Frenchman.

But as these scientific hypotheses crumbled, an aesthetic and cultural anti-Americanism took their place. America, it seemed, was progressing materially (those Americans surely were good at their favorite occupation, chopping down trees) but America was also losing its culture and its intellect, indeed its mind. This was the Turner thesis in reverse. American culture did not develop at the frontier's edge, but gradually evaporated as barbarism and savagery took hold. For the French, this was the worst conceivable enemy, a foe who was both British and savage! In addition, Americans took on their own irritating behaviors. They were so simple in their dress that they almost invited criticism for being pharisaical. As well, Americans' demigod Democracy created mob rule and crushed individual expression. America's example of materialism threatened both the cultural and spiritual.

But America kept getting stronger and was on the verge of becoming an economic and political world power. Thus the French hoped the American Civil War would lead to a Divided States of America; French political theorists assured that such a large Republic could not last. France sat in waiting for a Confederate victory, unable to justify any interference. Meanwhile, the French began to see the struggle in America as a contest between Anglo-Saxons and Latins, made all the more visible by the Monroe Doctrine, America's claim to dominant the entire Western Hemisphere. Beginning with their support of the Confederates, France now sympathized with the "other America", the marginalized others (Indians, Blacks, Laborers, etc.) in the crumbling real America. The originally pro-America traveler Frederic Gaillardet, for example, saw American democracy as a failure, unlike the France which the Americans no longer respected. As far as Gaillardet was concerned America was run by an aristocracy of wealth, nothing but WASP's and a strain of Puritanism.

The Spanish-American War, 1898. It is at this point which French anti-Americanism solidified, or came of age. Now it was obvious to French eyes that the American enemy was on the offensive. This war provided a political justification for French stereotypes developed in the nineteenth century. The French had built up the idea of an America run by Anglo-Saxon Yankee shopkeepers turned industrialists and monopolizers bent on conquering the Latin American world first and the rest of the world thereafter. Manifest destiny had overrun its natural borders and became blatant imperialism. What if American culture spread? The French saw American men as overworked, undersexed, and ruled by their women. Southerners, they realized, were not Latin, but "white trash", while new waves of European immigration to America meant the nouveau-riche homogenous Anglo-dominated America was now mixing with the riffraff of cast-out Europe. This mixture made the country even more hideous to French cultural eyes: a moral and cultural cesspool. Marxists also opposed immigration because it was a system to abuse the worker and delay the proletarian revolution.

In the twentieth century, Anglo-Saxonism meant a possible alliance between the U.S., Great Britain, and Germany. The U.S. could not be controlled in international affairs. American religion and idealism were epitomized in Woodrow Wilson, whom the French considered a self-important neurotic. U.S. aid for France in WWI was insufficient, the U.S. response too late. When a declining France couldn't pay its debt to the U.S., the country rebuked American demands for repayment. Formerly a debtor, the U.S. was now a creditor. After WWII the Marshall Plan was an over-the-top gesture of sympathy. Before the war, America had done too little to stop the rise of Hitler. After the war, America was greedy and run by Jews and businessmen (the U.S. presidents had little real power); it subjugated the world through usury and indenture, and was the worst of totalitarian states. As America became associated more with Capitalism, French leftists (both Marxists and Liberals) had an added motivation for opposition. In the inter-war period, French intellectuals looked to pan-Europeanism as a cultural and economic alternative and a counterweight to American world hegemony.

But America kept growing. American skyscrapers symbolized the insidious nature of this unbalanced growth. American cities were hellish and dehumanizing, stretching forever into the former American wasteland. America had never had civilization. It knew only barbarism, like the slaughterhouses of Sinclair Lewis, and technocracy, the subjection of mankind to the machinery of Henry Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor. Everything American seemed artificial, conforming, or restricted, while France was organic, personal, open and public. The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre went so far as to cease correspondence with American all together. The country had lost its soul. It had sold out to Hollywood, mass culture, anti-intellectualism, and false religion.

Roger doesn't seem very sympathetic to the French, and I suppose he is right to mark a lot of the French anti-Americanism as absurdities formulated in fear of American power. It was the perception of power which lead the French to draw Americans as beasts who built up their jaw muscles with chewing gum, and who looked with hunger at gobbling up foreign countries. He shows how French intellectuals cited bogus statistics, contradicted each other and themselves, and helped steer an anti-Americanism that was as real as it was essential to being French.

4 people found this helpful

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Robert Mielbrecht

Hard Read

Reviewed in the United States on October 31, 2007

Verified Purchase

My college calculus text book was light reading compared to this book. If it is ever translated into English, I may try it again.

2 people found this helpful

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booklover

Brilliant scholarship, and a good read

Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2005

Roger had an original idea and executed it perfectly: Rather than engaging in the endless debates pro or con about America, he takes a clue from Nietzschean geneology and traces the origins and historical path of the anti-American discourse in France. This is a refreshing change of pace from the recent controversies, replacing polemic with superb historical and cultural study. This great idea is backed up with wit and good writing, making it already an indepensible book on this topic. Roger's courage and originality have certainly paid off: His book was critically well-received in France--no light feat in nation with a tradition of historical analysis--despite its obvious contrarian critique. I recommend this book highly to anyone interested in France, the US, or how prejudices are historically constructed.

31 people found this helpful

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Cassandra Redux

Quite revealing book about the French/Euro attitude

Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2008

The reaction of Monsieur Buffon to Thomas Jefferson's proof of Buffon's ignorance is but one minor example of the depth of France's, and by extension Europe's, pathologically irrational attitude toward America/things American....and it gets worse further on. The bad part, as authors such as Markovits and Revel exposed in their books, is that the anti-American psychosis of France's/Europe's "elites" has spread to a large part of the general population. It'll be interesting to see how long the French/Euros will continue to hold on to their illusion of America being the threat to their civilization & culture as their Muslim populations become increasingly Talibanized.

4 people found this helpful

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