By João Ruy Faustino
The evident American cultural dominance throughout the globe invites many parallels and contrasts with the countries that constitute it. One could even point to this phenomenon as yet another manifestation of imperialism, as every nation in the whole wide world is compelled to compare itself to the United States. What is a modern economy? A modern culture? A modern society? Many will point to the US as the answer to these questions—or, at least, most have so for many years.
Having said this, there is no place where a comparison with the United States is taken more heavily, and contested more persistently than in France. The origins of such fierce dispute over France’s cultural identity in opposition to America are well-known: France is the country that most contributed to the founding of the United States—not just through the military and financial aid generously handed out during the Revolutionary period.
There’s something quite interesting regarding this neurosis over a country situated on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. One wonders what it is that makes the relation with the US appear to be so particularly traumatic. On the surface, France has the pretension of being America’s anti-environment. In the epilogue of his last book, The Global Village, Marshall McLuhan employed a similar framework in his description of Canadian Culture. While America was a country that wholly belonged in the 20th century, Canada remained in the 19th. Despite possessing a similar intention, France often cannot help but be a simulacra – or even a hyper version – of the North American country. The United States flag is cut from the same cloth as the French one. Both countries are experiments—with one being the scientific control of the other.
The roads of the cultural exchange between these countries are constantly busy, and moving to different points. Throughout more than two-hundred years of history one sees a pattern: The countries alternate between receiver and transmitter. It’s cyclic, and it is shifty. America is far from ever being a Francophilic nation, just as much as France will never truly be a home for Americanophiles.
Here are some points of contention between the nation’s cultures that cause great discomfort—especially between the French, the only ones who truly care about their national identity.
Complex no.1
Over la Culture
J’aime New-York. J’ai appris à l’aimer. Je me suis habitué à ses ensembles massifs, à ses grandes perspectives.
– Jean-Paul Sartre, in ‘New York: Ville Coloniale’
Sartre’s account of his trip to New York in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War is an essential document of the era. The French author feels genuinely dazzled by the sight of Manhattan, the skyscrapers and the neons. His chronicle reads a tad bit innocent, even for someone who has no particular animosity against the United States. A relic of the past, perhaps, when Europeans uniformly kissed America’s feet in gratitude for the Marshall Plan. A brief pause in the European snobbishness towards the Americans, a truce before the advance of Anti-Americanism.
Two works come to the fore when reading New-York: Ville Coloniale, as one pictures Sartre walking down NY’s streets.
Firstly, the soundtrack to his stroll: Serge Gainsbourg’s own love letter to the city, New-York USA. Another taste of the same European amazement towards the modernity that the city symbolised during that period.
Secondly, what could well be the recordings of some of the sights that Sartre witnessed during his stay: William Klein’s Broadway By Light (1958). The short film freezes forever in time a bygone Broadway. It consists of images of all the neons and ads that used to adorn the famed neighbourhood. Only visions of that calibre could’ve rescued Sartre from his deep pessimism – certainly compounded by the horrors of six years of total war in Europe – and make him write the piece in such a tone.
Such an enchantment could only lead to disillusionment, of course. William Klein eventually became an American expat in France, where he directed a film that is almost a parody of those expressions of homage towards America. A hyperbolic caricature made for France’s changing tastes, a manifesto of the Anti-Americanism that replaced the naïve bowing. Mr. Freedom (1969), which stars Gainsbourg in a secondary role, is essentially the art-house version of Team America. It includes the same criticisms: world police; imperialism; capitalism; consumerism; hyper-sexualisation; and so on and so forth.
But films are a thing in and of themselves…
Complex no.2
Over le Cinéma
The two decades between the end of the war and May 1968 marked the apogee of these countries' cultural inter-exchange. The hallmark of this era is, arguably, the Nouvelle Vague films of Godard, Truffaut and others.
For six years prevented from watching American movies, the gang of Parisian cinephiles had their re-introduction to cinema through the blossoming Hollywood of the 40s. The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944) and all the other noir films were their door to cinema as culture. They founded a magazine, Cahiers du Cinéma, to write about the films directed by Alfred Hitchcock and those starring Humphrey Bogart. Eventually, they began to produce their own pictures.
Their first short-films, Tout les Garçons s'appellent Patrick (1957) and Une Histoire d'Eau (1961), are largely conventional but already include some of the idiosyncrasies that would make the movement famous. Their films are right from the outset self-referential, with their magazine appearing in the scenes shot at Parisian cafés. The love stories portrayed in the films don’t follow a ‘round’ arch—the norm at the time. Not much time is wasted in the exposition of characters. The characters appear to be more than aware that they’re in a movie, etc.
À bout de souffle (1960), their first full-length film, could well be a metaphor for the relationship between the two countries. In fact, a reason why the romance between the native Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and the American exchange student Patricia (Jean Seberg) is mismatched is because each doesn’t quite follow the stereotype. Michel – an ardent Americanophile who models himself after Bogie and thrives for a Chrysler car – expects Patricia to be the free-wheeling, daring American woman he sees in movies. Patricia – despite enjoying Michel’s virile demeanour – strives for the romantic, cultured man she imagined she would meet in Sorbonne.
Masculin Féminin (1966) and Made in U.S.A. (1966) are two other films likewise infected by Godard’s fixation with American culture. Large amounts of the running time of these films are spent showing people playing pinball machines, talking about Coca-Cola, shooting guns, committing crimes… debating over the pertinence of terms ‘left’ and ‘right’.
Another exponent of French cinema during this period are the comedies of Jacques Tati, who likewise owes much of his work to American filmmaker Charles Chaplin. Mon Oncle (1958) not only takes cues from the character Charlot and the film Modern Times (1936) but to a whole subset of architecture and design that had its birthplace in the US…
One could go on and on and on… going back to the times of Edison, the Lumiére Brothers and George Méliès, or detailing how the Nouvelle Vague eventually came to influence New Hollywood. These two countries were the two cradles of the seventh art, competition is inevitable.
Complex no.3
Over la Révolution
A recent Renault ad made for the Olympics advertises a car with the slogan “Revolution is a French Thing”. It’s a good slogan, but there’s some doubt about that affirmation.
Despite the fame of being a birthplace for revolutions, France is equally a graveyard for them—contrary to America. A handful of the New York Intellectuals stressed the argument that the United States – not France – is the land of Revolution. Their case is that the US was the nation that fostered the last unambiguously successful one. France is, instead, the land of turmoil and failed dreams:
Dr. Arendt makes an important distinction between "rebellion" and "revolution." By her criteria the French and Russian revolutions should more properly be called "rebellions," whereas only the American Revolution is worthy of the name.
– Irving Kristol, in The American Revolution As a Successful Revolution
In France almost every single revolution has stumbled, forcing the need for consecutive upheavals for the shift to finally materialise. People often forget how the 1789 Revolution – the one famous for the fall of the Bastille – didn’t cause the definite end of the monarchy—far from it. Not only the coronation of Napoleon happened after that but in 1814 there was the Bourbon Restoration, then another monarchy amid the turmoil of pre-1848 and eventually the hubristic Napoleon III imperial pastiche.
There’s a case to be made that a serious definition of Revolution doesn’t necessarily include turmoil on the streets or any shedding of blood. The Scientific Revolution was just as much a Revolution as the 1789 one. A Revolution occurs in the mind, it triumphs when large swaths of people are capable of thinking in terms that were not possible before. In that sense, the 1789 Revolution was undoubtedly a success—as we today live more under the realm of the Rights of Man than Absolutism.
This doesn’t exclude the fact that for many years, when people looked around for examples of the success of universal rights and democracy, they didn’t look to France—but to America. Just because the impact of The Federalist Papers and of the work of Founding Fathers such as Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin is understated it doesn’t mean that they didn’t make the Democratic idea possible after centuries of not being so. Yes, students of political philosophy today read Montesquieu, Rousseau and Robespierre and overlook Hamilton—but this might be a mistake. As Irving Kristol wrote:
It is certainly indisputable that the world, when it contemplates the events of 1776 and after, is inclined to see the American Revolution as a French Revolution that never quite came off, whereas the Founding Fathers thought they had cause to regard the French Revolution as an American Revolution that had failed. Indeed, the differing estimates of these two revolutions are definitive of one's political philosophy in the modern world: there are two conflicting conceptions of politics, in relation to the human condition, which are symbolized by these two revolutions. There is no question that the French Revolution is, in some crucial sense, the more "modern" of the two. There is a question, however, as to whether this is a good or bad thing.
– Irving Kristol, in The American Revolution As a Successful Revolution
Think what you think about this. But surely this is something that lies in the subconscious of French cultural identity.
Complex no.4
Over la Langue
Here the two countries couldn’t reflect more distinct approaches. America is bottom-up, France is top-down. America is decentralised, France is centralised. America is comfortably un-hierarchical while France is grudgingly hierarchical.
There’s no official dictionary for American English. Merriam-Webster is worth just as much as MacMillan, or Oxford. Dictionary publishers have full autonomy over what goes in and what doesn’t, making much of the discussion over language superfluous.
The closest thing to ‘official’ in American English is Merriam-Webster. However, this is just because it is the oldest dictionary publisher in America and its founder was the one who invented the American spelling of words. The spirit that Noah Webster wanted to instil in the American strand of the English language promotes that exact informal paradigm. He wanted American English to be mouldable and agglutinative. It was with that objective in mind that he opted to simplify words such as ‘labour’ or ‘colour’, made the written form closer to the spoken form (switching ‘s’ for ‘z’) and added expressions that were far from ever being considered ‘official’.
Meanwhile, in France the extreme opposite occurs. Each and every word must be analysed by a council of druids before someone ever thinks to even write it on the corner of a napkin. Even spoken French is tightly regulated by a vast informal army of fusspots. Any other approach could apparently result in the absolute destruction of the language.
Your name doesn't need to be Ludwig Wittgenstein or Noam Chomsky to be able to understand how these two different approaches have drastically distinct effects on the nation’s cultures. Also in The Global Village, McLuhan wrote on how language is naturally considered by humans an authoritarian instrument because it consists of something ‘foreign’ to the individual. It is for this reason that one feels compelled to always mould it in order to make it something of their own. This inevitable phenomenon makes the efforts of the Académie Française quite futile—especially due to the large immigrant population in France that lives secluded in ghettos.
The US also has a large ghettoised immigrant population, but the different approach towards language leads to contrasting – mostly better – outcomes. Despite both countries having civic nationalism, the integration of immigrants in the US is an infinitely more peaceful process—it is, in fact, a process that occurs at all. How can anyone say that the higher degree of transmutability in American English isn’t a factor?
Complex no.5
Over la Politique
We come back to the alternance between receiver and transmitter. Louis Althusser wrote somewhere that politics was something invented by the French. But as the aforementioned quarrel over Revolution demonstrated, Americans are never far behind. Therefore, the two countries still learn a lot from each other, for example, France is today the one absorbing all the trends animating the American political scene.
The French left has absorbed much of what can be called the values of diversité—or wokeisme, depending on whom you ask. The French right, meanwhile, is nowadays mostly drinking from the post-liberal Kool-Aid coming from the US. Less than a decade before today it was the complete opposite… The American left was buried deep inside the books of French Theory authors (Foucault, Althusser, Baudrillard, etc.), and before that it had made a mini-May 1968 in the Chicago Democratic National Convention. Also ten years ago, the American right used de Tocqueville more than any other political philosopher to ground its neoconservatism.
The interexchange is far from linear: All the currents mentioned above were only possible due to previous cultural shocks arriving from the other country. Would Anti-Oedipus ever be possible without Henry Miller or William S. Burroughs? No. The same way that post-liberalism wouldn’t quite be what it is today without the work of a select number of French authors and philosophers.
* * *
Despite having been an English colony, the US is far from being a country where a clear Anglophilic tradition (in the Hegelian sense) reigns. Similarly, regardless of the many marks left from German immigration to the country, it is also far from being a hotspot of Germanophilia. Almost all German authors with significant following in the US are naturalised Americans coincidentally (Adorno, Strauss, Voegelin, Arendt, Maria Remarque, not to mention those descendants of Germans). The Founding Fathers pondered the selection of German as the official language of the country for a reason.
The historical – more direct – connection with France is far from being meagre, but isn’t as significant as those mentioned. Yes, there was the aforementioned aid, the territories that it used to possess around the Mississippi River and the political philosophers that served as an addendum to the Founding Fathers. But even that doesn’t account for how strong the connection between the US and France is. The two countries occupy a relevant amount of space in each other’s collective minds. The US doesn’t have a Quebec, wasn’t ever the destination of a large wave of French immigration and it never had a Porfirio Díaz figure at its helm… What then justifies such a bond?
Je ne sais pas. Go figure. May it continue to bear fruits while people figure it out.