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The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 15 (2004)

From Model to Menace:French Intellectuals and American Civilization
Reiji MATSUMOTO*I
The international debate about the Iraqi War once again brought tolight a difference between Europe and America. Particularly striking was
the French initiative to criticize American unilateralism, which aroused
the resentment of the American people and provoked the Secretary of
Defense to speak of “punishing” France. Jacques Chirac’s determined
resistance to the Bush Administration’s war policy was countered with
Donald Rumsfeld’s angry complaint against “old Europe.” Not only did
the diplomats and politicians of the two countries reproach each other,
but also in public opinion and popular sentiments, mutual antipathy has
been growing on both sides of the Atlantic.
The French government questioned the legitimacy of the Iraqi War
and criticized American occupational policies. As far as these current
issues are concerned, a diplomatic compromise will be possible and is
to be reached in the process of international negotiation. The French government’s bitter criticism of U.S. diplomacy, however, raised a moregeneral question about the American approach to foreign affairs. In spiteof the unanimous sympathy of the international community with American
people after the disaster of September 11th, the Bush Administration’s
Copyright © 2004 Reiji Matsumoto. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
*Professor, Waseda University

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strategy of war against terrorism and its rhetoric about “an axis of evil”
were regarded from the European perspective as simplistic and dangerous. Against this background of growing worry about U.S. hegemony,
President Chirac’s challenge was enthusiastically welcomed by most
French people, whether on the right or on the left, and supported by public opinion throughout Europe, especially in Germany.
Moreover, it is not only the current foreign policies of the UnitedStates and the Bush Administration’s unilateralism that have aroused
French antipathy. In fact, long before September 11, 2001, American
predominance as an unparalleled superpower engendered frustration andresistance among French public opinion and sometimes gave rise to areemergence of the anti-Americanism that is deeply rooted in French
intellectual history. Apparently, this rise of anti-American sentiment inFrance is one of the repercussions of the globalization of the economy,
which has been going on under the overwhelming hegemony of theUnited States since the end of the cold war. Afraid of a loss of national
identity, many French people have become cautious about globalizationand some, resolutely anti-American.
Thus, anti-Americanism or antipathy to American predominance has
been a notable intellectual tendency in France since the 1990s. The
Franco-American controversy about the Iraqi War was just the mostprominent occasion on which it attracted the world’s attention. The
recent publication of numerous books dealing with the French image ofAmerica1 shows that America is still a controversial topic for the Frenchpeople. Of course, it would be wrong to say that the entire French population is anti-American. Not only resolute anti-Americans like Régis
Debray but also friends of America like Jean-Francois Revel are participating in the present debate about America.2 But, does not the latter’sworry itself suggest a rise of anti-Americanism at present?
The recent revival of anti-Americanism in France obliges us toreconsider its historical nature and social background. French antiAmericanism in the cold war era was closely bound to the political andideological context of the time. The anti-Americanism of intellectuals
was a consequence of the heavy inﬂuence of Marxism and, in some cases,
a natural result of their pro-Soviet attitude. That of Charles de Gaulle
and his followers was inspired by nationalism. Consequently, both typesof anti-Americanism were expected to fade away with the decrease of
the political and ideological tensions of the cold war. With the declineof Marxism and Communism in the French intellectual world and in theMatsumoto Reiji(p163)6/2 04.7.18 0:07 PM ページ 165

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euphoric atmosphere of the “détente” of the 1970s, this expectation
seemed to be realized. In the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the antiAmericanism of intellectuals in the preceding decades was largely
replaced by popular enthusiasm for things American. Richard Kuisel’s
narrative of French resistance to Americanization in the postwar era ends
with the opening of Euro Disneyland.3 Indeed, several observers of theFrench intellectual scene declared the death of anti-Americanism inFrance after the collapse of Soviet socialism.4 In retrospect, this declaration turned out to be premature. Anti-Americanism has survived andis very much alive today, as shown above.
So, it is not sufﬁcient to consider French anti-Americanism in the ideological context of the cold war era. Its intellectual origin should betraced back to earlier times, while new conditions for its growth are to
be explored in the recent development of the world. In order to understand this trend in 20th century France and its intellectual background,
it is necessary to place the subject in the broader context of the historyof the French image of America. This article tries to tackle this task.
II
First I shall discuss several characteristics of the French approach toAmerica, which distinguish it from other European perspectives, andexplain how and why the French literature has a privileged place in theEuropean tradition of discussion of America. Then I shall try to identify three epochs in which the French people were greatly interested in
America and inﬂuential books were written in France about the newnation. In the last part, I shall concentrate on the last epoch of the three,
the so-called interwar era, and show why it marked a turning point in thehistory of French discussion of America. In particular, I shall pick up as
the origin of modern anti-Americanism in France two typical works ofthe time and analyze their arguments: Georges Duhamel’s America, theMenace (the original French title is Scènes de la vie future) and AndréSiegfried’s America Comes of Age (Les Étas-Unis d’aujourd’hui).5
It is not exceptional at all that a culture or a nation is continuouslyinterested in some other culture or nation. For European people, however, America is not just one among a multitude of other countries, butanother self, an alter ego. On one hand, American civilization is a childof Europe. The ideals and principles on which American society was
founded, Puritanism, republicanism or Enlightenment philosophy, wereMatsumoto Reiji(p163)6/2 04.7.18 0:07 PM ページ 166

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all born in modern Europe and transplanted to the new world. The people who built the new civilization were descendents of Europeans. On
the other hand, Americans did not bear the yoke of the past, which they
had left in the old world. America had neither court nor aristocracy.
There were no feudal lords or privileged classes to arouse the resentmentof the common people. Emancipated from the bonds of tradition, theprinciples of modernity, liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness developed fully on the new continent and resulted in a wholly new society,which gave an equal opportunity to everybody and provided material
abundance for many. But, at the same time, Europeans have always wondered, has it given birth to a prosaic culture of materialism and conformism lacking in good taste?
Thus, for Europe, America is a unique stranger who, emerging fromits own womb, has grown up in a totally different environment. American
civilization is a mirror in which Europeans see their own future, whether
hopeful or terrifying. That is the reason why innumerable books on
America have been written by Europeans from the time of the American
Revolution to the present.6 And of that enormous collection of books
about America, the French literature forms a major part. In this genre,
not only does it surpass the literature of any other language in quantity,
but always dominates the European argument. The French voice is louder than any other European voice in applauding American idealism aswell as in denouncing the materialism of the society. Moreover, theFrench tradition of discussing America is remarkable for the intellectual
quality of its founders and developers. Most French classics on America
are not written by specialists or simple travelers but by philosophers andwriters of great fame. From 18th century philosophers like Diderot andCodorcet through Tocqueville to Siegfried and Duhamel, the list of
authors who wrote about America contains many major names in theintellectual history of modern France. Among 20th century intellectuals
following Siegfried and Duhamel are André Maurois, Jules Romains,
Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Maritain, Michel
Crozier, Jean Baudrillard and others. Many public intellectuals or literati
traveled the United States and wrote about America during the last century. In contrast, the French academic world is not so well-supplied withprofessional experts of American studies.7 This contrast eloquently
shows that, in France, the discussion of America is not monopolized by
specialists but is a common concern for all intellectuals.

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III
There are several reasons why the French viewpoint on America canbe regarded as somehow representative of the European.
The ﬁrst is the French universalist way of thinking. A French man,Louis Dumont says, thinks that he is a human being by nature and Frenchby accident.8 Other peoples, according to him, think the other way: fora German, he or she is German before being human. Although I do not
subscribe to this too overtly general view of the French anthropologist,
I do believe that no one besides a French intellectual would make sucha bold statement. At least, it suggests that the French people think ofthemselves as more universalist than any other people. They have a tendency to identify their own view with that of Europeans in general, notto say of mankind.
Second, there is a remarkable historical accumulation of cultural andintellectual exchanges between France and the United States, which cannot be seen in any other bilateral relationship. Since the enthusiasm of
18th century philosophers for the American Revolution, French liberals
and republicans have projected their own ideals onto the screen of
America. From the Americanism of La Fayette and Brissot to the gift of
the Statue of Liberty on the centenary of the American Revolution, admiration for the sister republic over the Atlantic was part of French republican political culture. American intellectuals’ enthusiasm for Frenchor Parisian culture also has a long history. From Franklin and Jefferson
to the writers of the “lost generation” in the 1920s, there was a continuous ﬂow of American intellectual tourists, who came to Paris to learn
European high culture. Even today, French modern or post-modern
philosophy, from existentialism to post-structuralism, attracts its mostenthusiastic followers on American campuses. Without a doubt, this cultural and intellectual sympathy between the two countries provided afavorable basis for their diplomatic relations, which were relatively
friendly as late as the beginning of the 20th century.
This does not imply, however, a permanent collaboration or alliance
between the two countries. In spite of the intellectual intimacy between
the two peoples, the Franco-American bilateral relationship was in general uneventful throughout the 19th century.9 The United States kept its
distance from European affairs and France had, since the Louisiana
Purchase, no important territories in North America except in Canada.

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There was neither a common interest uniting the two countries, nor aseed of serious conﬂicts between them. Napoleon III’s intervention in
the Mexican civil war was only an exceptional episode. This combination of political distance and intellectual intimacy characteristic ofFranco-American relations in the 19th century gave French observers ofAmerica a certain advantage of disinterestedness that British or Spanish
counterparts could hardly duplicate.
On the other hand, France is different from the other countries ofContinental Europe in her absence from the emigration race to the New
World. Apart from the existence of numerous descendents of Frenchcolonists and immigrants from French Canada, the French share in thegreat exodus from Europe to America in the 19th and 20th centuries wasvery small. Historically important were emigrants from revolutionary
France and political refugees during World War II, among whom there
were not a few political leaders and eminent intellectuals. The reasonsfor their emigration, however, consisted in a serious but temporary political crisis in Europe. Naturally, as the crisis passed and political stability returned, most of the people involved came back to France.10 It would
be of little meaning to speak of French Americans as an ethnic group,for, as distinct from other Americans of non-English origin, they havenever been oppressed as a minority, nor felt the need to band together as
an ethnic pressure group. They have had no experience comparable tothe political frustration of their cousins in Quebec, where Charles deGaulle once shouted, “Vive le Québec libre!”To sum up, the French have had an ardent curiosity about American
culture and society since the 18th century, but this has had little inﬂuenceon the diplomatic relations between the two countries, which were basically friendly but distant from the American Revolution up to World War
I. The relative insigniﬁcance of French immigrants in American society
left them out of its ethnic conﬂicts. This is the background against which
French observers look at American civilization. It can be summarized asa mixture of intellectual intimacy and diplomatic distance. Probably thatis the reason why the American people themselves welcome most French
works on America. They are accepted as impartial, though not uncritical. Paradoxically, the increasing diplomatic and military commitmentof the United States to Europe since World War I has aroused a strong
antipathy among French intellectuals, some of whom, feeling menacedby American civilization, have given an extremely negative descriptionof it, contrary to the traditional French image. After World War II, among

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Western European countries, which were increasingly dependent on the
United States, French public opinion was the most anti-American and
the Presidents of the Fifth Republic from Charles de Gaulle to Jacques
Chirac have always challenged American diplomatic hegemony.11
IV
Reviewing the French literature on America from the 18th century to
the present, we can identify three historical periods in which the Frenchpeople were particularly interested in the new country. The ﬁrst was theepoch of the American Revolution and the foundation of the UnitedStates. The second was around the 1830s, and the third was the so-calledinter-war era in the 20th century. Commonly recognizable in each of thethree periods is the historical coincidence of social and political crises
in both countries. This goes a long way toward explaining the rise ofFrench interest in America during the periods in question.
Of course, the American Revolution was followed by the French
Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Historians have argued about theinﬂuence of the American Revolution on the French and the differences
and similarities between the two, but no one has treated them as independent of each other. In the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment,
it was only natural that the French public opinion should cheer the astonishing news from North America. Not only those who, like Crèvecœur
and Chastellux, had lived in or visited America, but also those who had
never been there enthusiastically discussed the American Revolution andthe new republic. Raynal, Diderot, Mably and Condorcet were just a few
of the French ‘philosophes’ who wrote about America in the late 18th
century. Inevitably these political discourses on America had a huge resonance in public opinion under the Old Regime and helped pave the way
for the French Revolution. It is undeniable that the Declaration of Independence and la Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen had
some theoretical basis in common. The image of America which took
shape in French opinion on the eve of the Revolution had various echoes
in the later discussion about the new country.12
The age of Jackson, beginning in the 1820s, marked a decisive turning point in 19th century America. Jackson’s victory over John Quincy
Adams dramatically showed the transformation of American society
brought about by the rise of the common man. Universal male suffrage,
party politics with the spoils system and other practices of American

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democracy in the 19th century have their roots in this epoch. The frontier movement began to transform the Union into a huge continental empire. In a word, the Jacksonian era put an end to the classicalrepublicanism of the founding fathers and proclaimed the coming of a
new age characterized by equality of opportunity and the dream of success.
Simultaneously, from the 1820s to the 1840s, France also underwent
a rapid social change. The July Revolution in 1830, dethroning the
Bourbon and establishing Louis Phillipe’s ‘bourgeois monarchy,’ madeclear the political victory of the middle classes over aristocracy. In theturmoil of industrialization and social transformation, however, the“Trois Glorieuses” could not resolve the confusion of the post-revolutionary era: far from a French version of the Glorious Revolution, it was
simply a prelude to a bigger revolution in 1848. The democratization andindustrialization triggered by the ‘double revolution’ (the French and theIndustrial) of the preceding century, with all their effects on society, provoked various reactions that were difﬁcult to deal with. This was the situation in which Alexis de Tocqueville and Michel Chevalier looked up
to the example of America, thinking of the problems of France or Europe.
Both considered democratization and industrialization as decisive andinevitable for modern society, in Europe as well as in America.
World War I and its consequences had a profound impact on theEuropean mind and bred an acute consciousness of the crisis of Europe,
as shown by Spengler’s The Decline of the West. Haunted by the nightmare of the end of European civilization, many intellectuals became
sharply aware of the dissolution of their spiritual basis and lost self-conﬁdence. And this worrying consciousness about the future of Europe was
frequently coupled with a mixed feeling of fear and expectation toward
the two illegitimate children of Europe, the Soviet Union and the UnitedStates. Many European intellectuals in the inter-war era were terriﬁedby the rise of these new nations, ﬁnding in them either a barbarism arising from within Western civilization or an ultra-modernity far surpassing that of modern Europe. A minority, fascinated by them, expected
them to save European civilization from decadence. Whether terrifying
or mesmerizing, the United States and the Soviet Union, however different from each other, appeared in European eyes to be a pair of new
powers which had something in common in contrast to Europe. Many
European travelers in both countries in the 1920s and the 1930s observed
the new societies from this particular viewpoint.13

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What, then, was the situation in the United States at that time? After
ﬁghting in World War I in order to make “the world safe for democracy,” the American people were disappointed in the post-war arrangements of the Versailles Treaty and lost interest in Europe. Not only did
U.S. diplomacy return to isolationism, but also the whole nation, under
the slogan, “Back to normalcy,” began to concern itself almost exclusively with domestic affairs. At the same time, the American economy, now the biggest in the world, was approaching its zenith. Steadily
increasing wages under the remarkable stability of commodity prices
boosted popular spending and strikingly improved the living standard ofcommon people. Many families had a model T Ford and other consumer
goods, which made everyday life easy and comfortable. The new mediaof the time, radio and the movies, excited popular passions and commercial advertisements constantly stimulated consumers’ desires. In
retrospect, this economic prosperity in the 1920s turned out to be so precarious that it would abruptly be replaced by a long depression in the following decade. Nevertheless, the various aspects of American society inthe inter-war era, displaying an early phase of mass society, had a profound impact upon many European observers.
It would be wrong, however, to regard those aspects as totally new
and unprecedented. Indeed, materialism and economic prosperity had
been an integral part of the European image of America since the 18th
century, although the development of technology in the 20th century,
introducing many innovations in products and services, amazingly
changed the life style of the American people. Moreover, behind thehighly modern aspect of society, there were symptoms of the rise of fundamentalism deeply rooted in American culture such as the social andpolitical confusion caused by the 18th Amendment, the exclusion of thetheory of evolution from the school curriculum in southern states, andthe racism of the Ku Klux Klan. American society in the 1920s, then,presented a contradictory image. On one hand, it was a highly mechanized consumer society that might represent the future of all countries.
On the other, it was clear that the moral and religious fanaticism latentin American culture, awakened by the fear of new immigrants and urban
decadence, had a tendency to result in irrational popular movements. It
was in this double anxiety that some European intellectuals cast theirembarrassed eyes on America in the inter-war era: the American scene,dreadful or hopeful, predicted their own inevitable future, while some
aspects of American behavior were embarrassingly parochial andMatsumoto Reiji(p163)6/2 04.7.18 0:07 PM ページ 172

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anachronistic. Against this intellectual background, some French travelers in America brought back a very negative impression. The English
version of Georges Duhamel’s Scènes de la vie future, probably the mosthostile description of America ever written in French, was entitled
America, the Menace. André Siegfried’s Les Étas-Unis d’aujourd’hui,translated into English as America Comes of Age, was less unfavorable
and more objective, but the author’s perspective had many things in common with Duhamel’s. Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu, under the heavy
inﬂuence of the two predecessors and in fear of a world economic crisis
triggered by the Wall Street crash of 1929, wrote Le Cancer américain.14
According to the diagnosis of the book, not only was America cancerous, but the disease would inevitably spread to Europe.
V
Thus, French interest in America increased sharply at periods of simultaneous crisis in the two countries. In each case, not only were the twonations respectively approaching a historical turning point, but also somecommon ground or close relationship was recognized between the historical situations in which they found themselves. Most important French
works on America were the products of such a historical period.
By contrast, no matter how serious a crisis the United States was facing, if France was in a stable condition or the crisis was conceived as apeculiarly American affair, the French people did not take a keen interest in it. For instance, the Civil War was evidently the greatest crisis in
the history of the United States to that time. The main issues of the War,
however, such as slavery or the right of a state to secede from the Union,
were not matters of serious concern for Europeans. So, this catastropheof 19th century American history did not have any lasting impact on the
French image of America. No inﬂuential work on America was written
in France at the time and the young Clemenceau’s newspaper reports
about American politics in the Reconstruction era found no resonancein French public opinion. As for the problem of race in America,
Tocqueville’s pessimistic prognosis decades before was not supersededby new studies following emancipation. The American victory overSpain in 1898 and the takeover of the Philippines had an impact on the
French government and people and provoked a sharp reaction from journalists15, for these events spectacularly showed the emergence of a newimperial power and revealed the offensive aspect of the Monroe doc-

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trine. Until World War I, however, the French people had not taken seriously the rise of the United States as a world power.
After World War II, the relationship between the United States andFrance was far closer than before. The American presence in Europe
became permanent and the inﬂuence of American culture was palpable
everywhere. The disappearance of distance between the two countries,
however, did not introduce a fresh perspective into the French view ofAmerica. It is true that everyday contacts with American people andAmerican products nurtured in the popular mind various clichés orstereotypes about America and Americans. Jean-Luc Godard’s ﬁlm, Au
bout de soufﬂe, for example, vividly depicted those stereotypes prevalent in postwar Paris. But it was doubtful whether the common people’s
daily contacts with American culture would bring about a drastic revision of the traditional French image of America, which had been built
up by intellectuals. Postwar intellectuals, for their part, following thecourse of their predecessors, visited and wrote about America in great
numbers. But most of the new examples of this genre of French literature, from Jean-Paul Sartre’s to Jean Baudrillard’s, were not so muchoriginal studies as echoes of earlier writings. Sartre’s embarrassment at
American civilization was a reserved version of Duhamel’s bitter critique of it, and his remark about “la liaison profonde du conformisme
américain et de l’individualité”16 was nothing but a variation of
Tocqueville’s insight. Baudrillard’s semiotic reﬂection on America17, a
good text for learning the jargon of postmodernism, added nothing new
to the perception of American society. Michel Crozier’s sociologicalstudy18 on the American disease of the Carter era was much more objective, but the main line of his argument did not escape from the
Tocquevillian perspective. Raymond Aron, the Tocqueville of the 20th
century, did not discuss America in a systematic way. The only book hewrote about the United States treated American diplomacy and its cold
war policies.19 The greatest friend of America among 20th century French
intellectuals was probably Jacques Maritain, whose book, Réﬂexions surl’Amérique20, could be considered as a refutation of Duhamel’s. Maritain
spent many years in the United States and earned the profound respectof American scholars and intellectuals. But, paradoxically, his increasing
fame in America to some extent discredited him among his colleagues
in France. By contrast, François Mauriac, the highly respected Catholic
writer in postwar France, shared with leftwing intellectuals a haughty
disdain for the “mercantile” culture of America.21

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VI
Both Siegfried and Duhamel saw in America a vision of a new society
in sharp contrast to European realities. In seeking a vision of the futurein the New World, they followed their forerunners in the eighteenth century. But contrary to Enlightenment philosophers, who hung on the new
republic their hope of changing old Europe, the two writers had a greatfear of the emerging mass society in America.
In the Preface of America, the Menace, Duhamel began by refuting
Curtius, the German cultural historian, who asked all European intellectuals to throw away their national ideologies and to have a common
belief in universal civilization. Referring to his own experience as a medical doctor participating in the international community of science,
Duhamel argued that most European intellectuals had been free fromnational prejudice and obtained a universal idea of civilization as early
as at the turn of the century. In Europe after World War I, he continued,
the most serious task was not to save civilization from struggles among
nations, but to defend a true, moral civilization against the rise of a newcivilization of technology and materialism. Contrasting the concept ofmoral or “absolute” civilization, ﬁt to make people more human, withthat of another, material and mechanical, or “relative” civilization, which
was only instrumental and neither good nor bad in itself, he warned thatthe future would be threatened with the predominance of the latter overthe former. America represented that future for Europeans:. . . no nation has thrown itself into the excesses of industrial civilization moredeliberately than America. If you were to picture the stages of that civilization as a series of experiments made by some malign genie on laboratory
animals, North America would immediately appear to you as the most scientiﬁcally poisoned of them all (le sujet le plus savamment intoxiqué).22

Here we see the archetype of the viewpoint from which certain
European intellectuals of the 20th century approached American civilization. For them, America was a laboratory of modern civilization ofindustry and commerce, of technology and materialism, deprived of all
spiritual bases. This civilization, which Duhamel characterized also as
Baconian, had indeed its origin in Europe23, but the tradition of moral or
spiritual civilization was still alive there and restrained the excesses ofthe former. Without any historical restraints on materialism, he deplored,
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spending and consumption. In the ardent pursuit of convenience and efﬁciency, they had lost all the virtues and beauties of a quiet life. They
enjoyed the beneﬁts of modern technological civilization, but they wereits victims at the same time. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, who didn’tknow how to stop his own magic, they had lost control of the development of their own society.
Most of the things and phenomena that Duhamel described with greatfear as scenes of the future have now become commonplace not only inFrance and Europe but also all over the world. Present day readers would
be puzzled by the author’s virulent antipathy to motorization, radio andthe movies. The scenery of the Chicago abattoirs, which he called “thekingdom of death,”24 might seem to them more humane than that oftoday’s highly mechanized and hygienically well-controlled slaughterhouses. What is most interesting and striking, in retrospect, about thisbook published more than seventy years ago is the author’s uneasinessand fear about all the products of modern commercial society. It is aneloquent testimony to the early appearance in the United States of a society of mass consumption and mass media. At the same time, it tells how
strange and shocking that new society was to the eyes of a representative European intellectual of the time. It is true that, even today, not a
few intellectuals hate the vulgarity of mass culture and raise their eyebrows at the invasion of commercialism into society. But, who would
dare to say today that American movies would bring the nation’s moral
decadence to its extreme in half a century and seriously call for organizing an association against advertisements?25
The cultural phenomena that Duhamel found in the daily life ofAmericans were the products of 20th century technology and science,but in his disdain for the conformity and materialism of American society, he echoed and ampliﬁed the acid tone of contempt with which many
European observers had talked of American culture. His criticisms andwarnings about America were in many cases variations on his predecessors’ remarks. There was no art for art’s sake in America; higher education was poor; American products, which were manufactured easily
and rapidly, were imperfect; neither historic monuments nor masterpieces of craft could be found in the United States. These observations
about the poverty of American culture were repetitions of the argumentsthat Tocqueville had made more carefully in the Second Volume of
Democracy in America. On the other hand, Duhamel’s harsh statement
about American big cities (“Chicago is no more paintable than theMatsumoto Reiji(p163)6/2 04.7.18 0:07 PM ページ 176

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desert”26) would have resonance in Sartre’s remark about New York andBaudrillard’s description of California.
In a word, Duhamel looked at the new reality of mass society in
America through the old glasses of the European intellectual. His astonishment and fear about the new American civilization shockingly revealed the prejudices of the traditional European perspective, all themore because his worry about the future of Europe was serious. He wentso far as to say that the conformist way of behavior of the American people reminded him of insects.
In the United States, . . . what strikes the European traveler is the progressive approximation of human life to what we know of the way of life ofinsects—the same effacement of the individual, the same progressive reduction and uniﬁcation of social types, the same organization of the group into
special castes, the same submission of every one to those obscure exigencies
which Maeterlinck names the genius of hive or of the ant-hill.27

However unconvincing these lines might be to American readers,
Duhamel’s horrible vision of America obtained wide currency in Europe
at the time and provided a prototype of cultural anti-Americanism for
French intellectuals in later years. André Maurois, in his book about
America, which was a product of his residence in Princeton in the early
30s, presented the opinion of one of his friends in Europe. On hearingof Maurois’ reception of an invitation from Princeton University, thatfriend, “who had never crossed the Atlantic,” strongly advised him not
to go.
You don’t know America. It’s a country where people are too restless to havea minute of leisure time, a country of constant noise where you could neither
sleep nor take a rest, a country where men are killed at the age of forty byexcessive work and women leave home in the early morning to join the restless movement of society. . . . People talk of nothing but money. Since childhood, you have known the good taste of spiritual civilization. Well, you willﬁnd a civilization of bathroom, of central heating, of refrigerator. . . . Have
you read, my friend, the description of the abattoirs of Chicago? It’s a monstrous vision, say, apocalyptic. . . .28

Although Maurois suggested nothing, it is evident that this caricatureborrowed many motifs from Duhamel’s book.

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VII
The most serious trouble with America, in Duhamel’s view, was theabsence of intellectuals protesting against technological civilization andmass culture. Worse, in America, resistance to the excesses of technology and materialism took the form of irrational fundamentalism, religious or secular, denouncing the modern creed of human reason andspiritual liberty. Social confusions brought about by the Prohibition
movement, fundamentalist attacks on the theory of evolution, and theactivities of the Ku Klux Klan were the second theme of inquiry for both
Duhamel and Siegfried. These phenomena were in appearance in conﬂict with the urban life of pleasure and amusement celebrated by themass media and advertising, but, both asked, were they in reality theother side of the same coin of American culture?
As distinct from Duhamel’s impressionistic approach, Siegfried’s way
of inquiry was much more methodical. Born into the family of a leading
politician of the Third Republic, he spent a long time traveling all over
the world starting in his youth. Comparative study of different cultures
was his usual method of research. He had traveled many times in the
United States before he wrote The United States Comes of Age, which
was the result of long research and careful reﬂection. There is no question that, in the history of French literature on America, it was an important synthesis, second only to Democracy in America.29
Siegfried focused on the changing pattern of the racial and ethnic
structure of American society, which had in fact been greatly transformed over the years. As is well known, the continuous ﬂow of new
immigrants since the 19th century had a profound impact on the society
and brought about various social conﬂicts. Various groups of new immigrants, different in color, religion, language and culture, and difﬁcult toassimilate, formed their own communities in urban slums, resulting in a
prototype of what we now call multi-cultural societies. Behind the mainstreets of big cities, these new immigrants were integrated into American
society through the controversial activities of party machines. Even
maﬁa groups played a role in settling the newcomers, and they exerted
a considerable inﬂuence over immigrants’ communities. The WASP
middle class, representing the main stream of American civilization sofar, felt menaced by the rapid growth of new communities of immigrants
in New York or Chicago and reacted violently to it. They denounced as

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un-American all the ethnic cultures and ways of life that new immigrants
brought from their native countries. Underneath the social issues of thetime, Siegfried found an increasing tension between the descendants ofearly Americans and new immigrants. Indeed, the greater the number of
new immigrants such as Catholics, Jews and Asians in metropolitan
areas became, the more audiences were attracted in the Midwest and theSouth to fundamentalist doctrines, which emphasized the American
creed of the Bible and Puritanism. The basic problem of the time, in
Siegfried’s words, was the conﬂict between “two Americanisms,” or the
struggle of “native America vs. alien ideals.”30
Looking for an answer to the question of whether America would
remain Protestant and Anglo-Saxon, Siegfried examined the ethnic andreligious background of the political issues and social conﬂicts of thetime. Applying the mode of analysis that he had used in Tableau politique de la France de l’Ouest dans la III me République, he explained how
public opinion about Prohibition or Darwin’s theory of evolution wasdetermined by the geographical distribution of religious and ethnic
groups. In Southern and Mid-western States, where Anglo-Saxon or
white middle classes were predominant and fundamentalist sects wereactive, Prohibition was rigorously imposed and Darwin’s theory of evolution was violently attacked. In contrast, urban areas of the East, in particular New England, had a growing number of Irish, Italian and other
Catholic immigrants and had a tendency toward liberalism and permissiveness.
In order to acknowledge Siegfried’s contribution to the French discussion of America, it is necessary to consider three points. The ﬁrst is
his emphasis on the problem of ethnic conﬂicts and assimilation of new
immigrants. The second is the role of religion in American society. The
third is the problem of the intolerance of democracy and its remedies.
Put more precisely, do democratic institutions such as associations andlocal self-government effectively restrain the tyranny of the majority orthat of factions? All three issues had been discussed some way or other,in the long debate over America. What was new about Siegfried’s arguments?
Since colonial years, the American people have been made up of different racial and ethnic groups. The notion of the metamorphosis of various people of different origins into one American nation was born at the
moment of Independence. Crèvecœur’s discovery of the birth of “a newrace” of Americans anticipated the later notion of the melting pot. At that

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time, however, the larger part of the population was of British origin andmost immigrants came from a limited number of European countries.
The assimilation of minorities, cultural or religious or linguistic, did not
become a serious issue until the last half of the 19th century. Tocqueville
had made a prophetic argument about the destiny of Native Americans
and African Americans, but he excluded them from the democraticsociety of America. As for ethnic minorities within the society of white
Americans, he treated only Irish immigrants as part of the problem of
Catholicism in the United States.
Compared with these earlier works on America, Siegfried’s emphasison racial and ethnic conﬂicts introduced a new perspective from which
to analyze the heavy impact on society of the drastic change in the demographic structure of the country since the end of the 19th century. Indeed,
America Comes of Age was the ﬁrst exhaustive study in France of racialand ethnic problems in America. It is still worth reading, all the morebecause the problems of multi-culturalism are heatedly discussed in
America today.
The French have recognized the importance of religion in American
society since the time of the American Revolution. Eighteenth-century
philosophers were attracted to the liberal and tolerant co-existence of different churches in America. It was natural that they should lay their hopeon the American ideal of religious freedom, for they were involved in a
bitter struggle against oppression by the Catholic Church. Tocqueville’s
emphasis on the good effects of religion on American democracy had
the purpose of persuading both secular liberals and religious conservatives of the compatibility of Christian beliefs and the ideals of liberty
and equality. As a result, his description of American Christianity focused on its rational and utilitarian aspects. American Puritanism, hemaintained, was from the beginning connected with republican and democratic principles. Under the rule of the separation of church and state,
all American churches and denominations were excluded from party politics, and therefore exerted a healthy moral inﬂuence on every citizen.
American Catholics were enthusiastic republicans and promoters ofpolitical equality. It is true that Tocqueville took notice of the religious
excitement aroused by the Revivalists, but he explained it simply as theexcessive reaction of frustrated spiritualists to the predominant materialism and utilitarianism of society. For him, a typical American
Protestant was Unitarian, and he predicted that in the future of democratic society, many Protestants would take the way to atheism throughMatsumoto Reiji(p163)6/2 04.7.18 0:07 PM ページ 180

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deism, while a few of them, still believing in God, would convert toCatholicism.
Siegfried observed a wide variety of churches and denominations in
America, including the Jewish religion, and found in the background of
the Prohibition movement or the debate on the theory of evolution therise of religious fundamentalism and anti-intellectualism. His view ofAmerican religion urged revision of the traditional French understanding of it, which mainly celebrated its reasonableness and tolerance. In
sharp contrast to Tocqueville’s observation that religion in America, by
imposing a salutary control on the intellect, successfully restrained theexcess of individual liberty and the tyranny of opinion, Siegfried worried
about the irrational and anti-intellectual fanaticism of certain denominations of American Protestantism.
Finally, as for the problem of the majority’s oppression of the minority, which has been a favorite topic for French observers of America,
what is characteristic of Siegfried’s argument? In seeing intolerance
against alien ideals and a repression of minorities in the Prohibition
movement and the rise of irrational fundamentalism, he inherited
Madison’s worry about oppression by factions and Tocqueville’s warning against the tyranny of the majority. However, Siegfried’s understanding of the mechanism of the oppression of the minority was very
different from Tocqueville’s, for the former’s topics such as Prohibition
and the exclusion of the theory of evolution from the school curriculum
were examples of legislation imposed by the pressure of well-organizedassociations. In other words, according to Siegfried, the very activity of
association that Tocqueville had regarded as useful for restraining thetyranny of the majority provided a powerful weapon for those who wereintolerant of different opinions. Repeatedly he warned of the danger ofpublic opinion being manipulated by “organized minorities” or “vigorous associations with access to the local or national moneyed interests.”31
The serious trouble with American political life, according to him, was
not the tyranny of the majority, but that of associations.
VIII
After a rough sketch of the history of the French image of America,
we have examined the intellectual background against which the French
sentiment toward America underwent a rapid change in the 1920s andmade an analysis, in particular, of the arguments of the two representa-

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tive works of the time, Duhamel’s America the Menace and Siegﬁred’s
America Comes of Age. Different in size and style, both books were clear
expressions of the fear and anxiety about America felt by many French
intellectuals in the aftermath of World War I. Together with some otherbooks immediately following them, such as Aron and Dandieu’s Le
Cancer américain, they marked the starting point of the French antiAmericanism of the 20th century. It is not true of course that everything
began with Duhamel and Siegfried. Most of their topics, such as materialism, money worship, cultural poverty, restlessness of life, and so on,were all familiar issues in the long history of the French discussion ofAmerica. Although the dominant tone of the discussion was favorable
throughout the 19th century, discordant voices have always disturbed it
since the time of the American Revolution. Indeed, few French admirers of America failed to drop critical remarks about some aspects ofAmerican society and culture. What was new about Duhamel andSiegfried was not their particular motifs, but the whole picture they drewof America.
This negative picture of America found a tremendous resonanceamong French intellectuals in subsequent decades, all the more because
the American presence in Europe rapidly increased. Of course, succeeding crises in the Atlantic world had a great impact on the French imageof America: the depression in the 1930s, the war against Hitler and thedefeat of 1940, the cold war and the Atlantic Alliance. These major upheavals of the 20th century made France more and more dependent on
the United States, and, paradoxically, this increasing dependence of thecountry strengthened the anti-Americanism of many French intellectuals while producing a small group of friends of America. The argumentsof Duhamel and Siegfried should be reconsidered in the light of this later
history of French anti-Americanism.
What should we say, then, about the recent revival of anti-Americanism
in France, which was allegedly expected to disappear with the end of thecold war? Is it a simple repetition of the old song, or new music for the
21st century? The answer is that it is partly new and partly old.
In the present French discourse about America, we can hear many variations on the old themes, which have appeared many times in the former
movements of the score. This is not meant to deny, however, that afamiliar melody sounds different in a new arrangement. In conclusion,
I would like to identify some new sounds in the present chorus of antiAmericanism.

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REIJI MATSUMOTOFirst, it seems undeniable that present day anti-Americans are ﬁghting
a defensive engagement. One of the main battleﬁelds of anti-Americanism
has always been culture. Present day cultural anti-Americans, however,seem to have lost the absolute belief of their forerunners in universal culture, and are making efforts to defend their national culture against thecommercial penetration of American popular culture. This defensive
attitude is quite clear, for instance, in the debate about the protection of
the French ﬁlm industry against Hollywood.
On the other hand, the increasing globalization of the market economy
has been nurturing popular antipathy toward America. It was often saidin the cold war era that the anti-Americanism of French intellectuals was
not widely shared by the common people.32 The recent popularity of theanti-American national hero, José Bové, seems to discredit this old
assumption. Indeed, the growing globalization of the economy always
has the effect of generating anti-American sentiment among the common
people, for it is conceived, right or wrong, as a synonym of Americanization. This popular anti-Americanism is not limited to the French, butshared by many Europeans. So, the present day anti-Americanism as areaction to the global economy is becoming a European chorus of local
voices. French intellectuals’ anti-Americanism in the past was a negative
expression of their sense of European crisis. Aron and Dandieu, therefore, concluded their book with an appeal for the rebirth of European
consciousness: “Wake up, Europe!”33 It sounded, however, like a desperate attempt to regain a lost past. Today, European consciousness is
deeply penetrating into the mind of the common people. If there is anything that provides a solid basis for the present European attitude toward
America, it is this widely shared sense of European citizenship, which
has grown up through the long process of making the European Union.
Finally, one of the most popular terms in the present discourse about
America is “empire.” Of course, it is not a new word at all for describing America. From Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” to the Marxist chargeof American imperialism, there have been many examples of emphasizing the imperial aspect of the American nation. Raymond Aron has given
it a contradictory name, the imperial republic. What is new and characteristic of the present discourse of empire is its focus on the power of
information. Military supremacy and economic predominance are indispensable, but in the present state of affairs, the new theorists of empire
argue, both heavily depend on the power of controlling and managing
information. Thus emphasizing the new technology of information, theyMatsumoto Reiji(p163)6/2 04.7.18 0:07 PM ページ 183

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describe a picture of the new empire as a complicated network of nations,areas and organizations. The United States is the center of this networkand exerts overwhelming power in the interest of maintaining it, but
could never be identiﬁed with it.34 Consequently, it is sometimes questionable to call it the American Empire, for the network of this empire
is bigger than the United States. So, Tocqueville’s old dictum, “I saw inAmerica more than America,”35 is still alive in the current European discourse about America.
NOTES
1Among a number of recent French works, the most important are, Denis Lacorne,
Jacques Rupnik and Marie France Toinet (ed.), L’Amérique dans les têtes (Paris:
Hachette, 1986), Christine Fauré and Tom Bishop (ed.), L’Amérique des Français (Paris:
François Bourin, 1992), André Kaspi, Mal connus, mal aimés, mal compris, Les ÉtatsUnis aujourd’hui (Paris: Plon, 1999), and Philippe Roger, L’Ennemi américain (Paris:
Seuil, 2002).
2
Jean-François Revel, L’Obsession anti-américaine (Paris: Plon, 2002)
3
Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkley:
University of California Press, 1993), ch.9.
4
See André Kaspi, op.cit.
5
André Siegfried, Les États-Unis d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Armand Colin, 1927). The
English translation by H. H. Hemming and D. Hemming, America Comes of Age (NewYork: Harcourt, 1927). Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la vie future (Paris: Mercure deFrance, 1930). The English translation by C. M. Thompson, America, the Menace:
Scenes from the Life of the Future (Boston: Houghton Miﬂlin, 1931). Both works were
the products of the authors’ observation of American society in the 1920s, that is to say,before the Great Depression, but were widely read in the 1930s and 1940s in France aswell as in the United States. In particular, Siegfried’s book gained wide publicity all over
the world and became a frame of reference for thinking about 20th century America. At
least three different Japanese translations have been published, though none of them areavailable now.
I refer to both the French and the English versions of the two works and quote fromthe English. But the English translations are not so exact and sometimes misleading. So,
when necessary, I supply the original French text in addition to English quotations.
6
For a general survey of European writings on America, see Halvden Koht, The
American Spirit in Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949), Sigmund
Skard, The American Myth and the European Mind (New York: Harper & Row, 1961).
Some scholars explore European interests in America long before the American
Revolution and the foundation of the United States. Gilbert Chinard, L’exotismeaméricain dans la littérature française au xvi e siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1911), ibid.,
L’Amérique et le rève exotique dans la littérature française au xvii e et xviii e siècle (Paris:
Hachette, 1934).
7
Probably, France is one of the European countries where the academic discipline ofAmerican studies is least developed. This is clearly in contrast to the fact that French
studies are enthusiastically conducted in all major universities in the United States. Not
a few American experts on French history or literature are highly respected by their

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French colleagues. But it is difﬁcult to ﬁnd the French counterpart of someone like
Robert Darnton or Natalie Zemon Davis.
8Louis Dumont, L’Idéologie allemande, France-Allemagne et le retour: Homoaequalis II (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 15.
9Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, La France et les Étas-Unis des origins à nos jours (Paris:
Seuil, 1976).
10
Among francophone refugees in America in the 1930s and the 1940s were manyeminent scholars and famous writers: Jacques Maritain, André Breton, Jules Romains,
Denis de Rougemont, Alexandre Koyré, Georges Gurvitch and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Some of them (Maritain and Koyré, in particular) established a lasting inﬂuence inAmerica, but most of them returned to Europe after the War. This constitutes a striking
difference from German-speaking refugee scholars, most of whom settled in the UnitedStates. See, C.W. Nettelbeck, Forever French: Exile in the United States (1939–1945)(New York: Berg, 1991).
11
As for anti-Americanism in postwar France and its later disappearance, see, Richard
Kuisel, op. cit. Kuisel ﬁnishes his book by referring to the opening of Euro Disneyland,
but the recent conﬂicts between Europe and the United States show that the issue has
not disappeared.
12
Durrand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American
Society to 1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
13
A few years before he visited the United States, Duhamel had traveled the Soviet
Union and written a book about the country: Le voyage de Moscou (Paris: Mercure deFrance, 1927). He was not uncritical about Bolshevism, but his description of Soviet
Russia was much warmer than his gloomy picture of America. In the last part of America,
the Menace, he compared the two experiments, the Russian and the American, and founda greater menace in the latter, for, according to him, it was much larger than a politicalexperiment, while the former was purely political and ideological. America, the Menace,
211.
14
Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu, Le Cancer américain (Paris: Rieder, 1931).
15
Philippe Roger, op.cit., 192ff.
16
Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations, III (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 85.
17Jean Baudrillard, Amérique (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 1986).
18
Michel Crozier, Le mal américain (Paris: Fayard, 1980).
19
Raymond Aron, République impériale (Paris: Calman-Lévy, 1973).
20
Jacques Maritain, Réﬂexions sur l’Amérique (Paris: Fayard, 1959).
21
Tony Judt, Past Imperfect, French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1992), 262.
22
Duhamel, America, the Menace, xiii.
23
That the technological civilization of America has its origin in Europe is a remark
almost all European observers have repeated. The American people, it implies, lack originality even in their vices. Aron and Dandieu, designating Descartes as the prime moverof that technological civilization, wrote, “the American spirit, which makes practical useof the conquests of reason without having made any efforts to discover, is nothing but
the application of this degraded reason to a purely technical ﬁeld . . . Descartes andCartesians, in their creative fever and will of conquest, could not anticipate this degradation of their method. Coming down in the street and going up in buildings, Descartes
has completely lost his human value and sentimental eminence.” Aron and Dandieu,
op.cit., 83–84. This reminds us of Tocqueville’s classical statement that every Americanis a disciple of Descartes without knowing anything about his philosophical doctrine.
Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique II (1840), Œuvres de Tocqueville(Pléiade) II (Paris: Gallimard, 1992) 513ff.

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Ibid., Ch. 8. Duhamel’s description of the Chicago abattoirs made them widely
known to the French people and provided a popular topic for the subsequent French discussion of America.
25“The cinema is a pastime for slaves, an amusement for the illiterate, for poor creatures stupeﬁed by work and anxiety. . . . I assert that any people subjected for half a century to the actual inﬂuence of the American ‘movie’ is on the way to the worst
decadence.” Ibid., 34–35.
26
Ibid., 85.
27
Ibid., 194.
28
André Maurois, L’Amérique inattendue (Paris: Éditions Mornay, 1931), 6–7. The
translation is mine.
29
After the publication of The United States Comes of Age, Siegfried wrote two further books about America: Qu’est-ce que l’Amérique? (Paris: Flammarion, 1936) andTableaux des Étata-Unis, 1954 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1954). The former is nothing but
an extract of the ﬁrst book, but the latter is more than a revised version of it. He recognized so great a change in American society after World War II that he was not satisﬁed to revise the old book and wrote a new one. But the second synthesis did not ﬁnd
as wide a resonance as the ﬁrst.
30
America Comes of Age, 141ff. The French title of the chapter, “Deux américanismes” was changed in the English version into “Native America vs. Alien Ideals.” In
the present usage of the word, “native America,” meaning the America of Anglo-Saxons,
would be unacceptable.
31
Ibid., 242ff.
32
See Kuisel, op. cit.
33
Aron and Dandieu, op.cit., 246.
34
Representative arguments of this kind are seen in, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,
Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), and Emmanuel Todd,
Après Empire, Essai sur la décomposition du système américain (Paris: Gallimard,
2002)
35
Tocqueville, op.cit., 15.