Preface

"Great Britain is an island, France the cape of a continent, America another world," Charles de Gaulle once observed.^[1] The nation's most celebrated modern statesman aptly voiced the common Gallic opinion that America was more than different. It was something new and momentous, but not necessarily admirable.

Among Western European nations France has been known for its anti-Americanism. Recently, in contrast, it has drawn equal notice for its fascination with America and American material and cultural products. Now the American way has apparently seduced the French. Curiosity as to why the French once perceived America so harshly and later seemed to succumb to the American way of life is a natural response for an American historian who has studied and lived in France. Attempting to answer the question led me to realize that profound historical issues are involved. For the answer depends on a particular French understanding of America. The French response to America in the twentieth century derives, in large measure, from an assumption that the New World is a social model of the future. Thus investigating Gallic attitudes toward America and discovering the layers of meaning and how they have changed led me to understand how French people think and feel about themselves, their identity, and the process of modernization. Examining the Gallic response to America gave me a way to comprehend French perceptions of how modernity endangered "Frenchness." It also revealed ways to explain the fundamental socioeconomic and cultural changes of the postwar years or what has been called the "new French Revolution."

My aim is not a comprehensive examination of all the ways America touched postwar France. I make no effort to investigate how America may, or may not have, influenced such fields as education, science, music, or film. Such a study, for the present, is an impossible task, a project too vast and diffuse. While a comprehensive survey might give us more to think about, it would only marginally advance our conception of French struggles with modernity. For we need to understand not only how the French assessed the American social model, but also why they perceived America as they did and how they actually reacted to what came to be called the "American challenge." Answering the "why" means learning about what, according to the French, were the stakes of the game. Equally important is deciphering the various ways the French responded—resistance, selective imitation, adaptation, and acceptance—and how these responses changed during the postwar period. Knowing how and why they reacted to America helps us understand how France became modern or "Americanized" and yet remained French. Or, put differently, understanding the French response tells us how and why France moved along a path parallel to, yet different from, that taken by the United States.

My approach to the problem is to abandon any pretense of comprehensiveness and to select several encounters between the two societies in which the issue of modernity was paramount. Each encounter raises a different aspect of Americanization, for example, in the arrival of American consumer products like Coca-Cola, dollar investments, or mass culture; and each encounter elicits the response of different strata of French society. In some instances the protagonists will be politicians and government officials. In other instances they will be businessmen and trade unionists. In still other encounters they are the denizens of St-Germain-des-St-Germain-des-Prés, the Parisian intelligentsia. And in some cases we hear from ordinary citizens. The voices available to us at present are essentially elite voices, but whenever the evidence permits, we also hear the grass-roots response toward America and Americans. Taken as a whole these encounters and their different audiences explain how the French perceived America and how they responded to Americanization. They also tell us why responses in France were what they were. If my method succeeds, this study will provide an accurate picture and an explanation. Like an impressionist painting my text will convey the whole without covering the entire canvas.

This project began with my determination to avoid the superficial and inconclusive commentary that has often passed for interpretation of

French views of America. I hoped to move analysis beyond the jottings of transient French visitors and Parisian literati who knew us only at a distance. To this end I looked to direct, intensive encounters between the two peoples, especially those of a socioeconomic and political character where the American way was best displayed. Thus I chose the Marshall Plan, economic missions, foreign investment, and American consumer products as arenas where the French met us, our ways, our policies, and our institutions, so to speak, face-to-face. These encounters, I assumed, would provide real tests of how the French viewed the American way.

Yet as I pursued my historical research for "hard" evidence, I realized that the Gallic reaction to America included the attitudes and preconceptions that the French brought with them to such meetings. The American way was what the French thought it was. There was a cultural dimension even to encounters of a basically economic or political character. Industrial experts, for example, touring factories in the United States under the aegis of the Marshall Plan, responded to American prosperity as a challenge to the French way of life. These hardheaded industrialists and trade unionists, it became clear, were projecting on America their fears for France and, to a lesser extent, their hopes as well. Believing that French national identity was at risk, they expressed their reaction most generally and abstractly as the defense of civilisation . In consequence my study of economics and politics also required a serious examination of cultural preconceptions. I was led by my search into the realm of culturally conditioned constructions of an American reality.

My voyage of intellectual discovery took me into the choppy waters and cross-currents where politics, economics, and culture meet. Such a broadening of my research, however, did not lead me to subordinate economics and politics to culture. I did not conclude that the French response to America was purely imagined: America was not simply Gallic invention, not mere cultural construction. If we were a mirror before which the French saw themselves, we were also a tangible social landscape that the French experienced. If anti- (and pro-) Americanism was, at one level, a reflection of French thought about personal identity and the future, it was also a confrontation with the content of postwar America. America and Americanization were realities that the French—politicians, visitors, or those surveyed by opinion polls—had to face after 1945. The United States was a superpower that provided security and exerted enormous influence on postwar Western Europe. Americanization was

a process of economic modernization, and America was the first consumer society and possibly a harbinger of Europe's future.

What this study explores is the interconnectedness of economics, politics, and culture in postwar Franco-American relations. These dimensions are juxtaposed rather than ordered in some hierarchical fashion that assigns priority of either explanatory power or meaning to one element or another. The phenomenon of anti-Americanism, or for that matter of philo-Americanism, is multidimensional in its causes and its meanings. It derives from French encounters with an American reality as well as from Gallic preconceptions, anxieties, aspirations, and sense of self-identity. Anti-Americanism, in short, was (and is) about both America and France.

My voyage led me to one other discovery. The French generations that I studied, those of the middle to late twentieth century, carried with them in their response to America a keen sense of national identity—an identity they were quick to defend. They believed in such categories as "the French" and "Frenchness" and "the French way of life." We need not debate whether such social and cultural abstractions were real or invented. What is certain is that such assumptions determined how our Gallic cousins viewed us. It was this "Frenchness" that they perceived to be at risk because of the emerging power, prosperity, and prestige of the New World. Thus I refer to a category like "the French," often without nuance of class, religion, region, generation, gender or any other such qualifier, not as a handy rhetorical device but because I accept these generations' strong subjective sense of national identity. Since, with rare exception, the French of these years, be it labor organizer or businessman, diplomat or intellectual, responded to America as representatives of a civilisation at risk, I employ their collective categories and refer to "the French." What follows is my attempt at understanding what, in all its variety, "Frenchness" was and why it was seemingly put at risk by America.

This project has benefited greatly from fellowships granted by the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. These fellowships, along with support from the State University of New York, provided the time and assistance for the research and writing of this book in Paris, Washington, D.C., and Stony Brook.

In Paris, thanks to Louis Bergeron, Pierre Nora, and Patrick Fridenson, the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales hosted several

seminars at which my work-in-progress was presented. In Washington, D.C., thanks to Samuel Wells and Michael Haltzel of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, and to David Calleo of the School for Advanced International Study, these institutions sponsored sessions at which my work was discussed. Victoria de Grazia organized a similar session in Florence sponsored by the European University Institute.

I wish to express my special appreciation to Pierre Nora, Stanley Hoffmann, Patrick Fridenson, Herman Lebovics, William Keylor, Chiarella Esposito, and Jacqueline deWeulf who have read all or parts of this book and contributed important suggestions for its improvement. Whatever deficiencies remain are my responsibility.

I am also in the debt of numerous archivists and librarians—especially Hélène Volat of the Stony Brook University library, Mme Bonazzi of the Archives nationales, Mme Dijoux of the Service des archives économiques et financières, Mme Genès at the Commissariat général du plan, Philip Mooney at the archives of the Coca-Cola Company, John Butler at the Economic Cooperation Administration archives in Suitland, Md., Claudia Anderson at the Lyndon Johnson library, and Sally Marks (now my wife) at the National Archives, to whom this book is dedicated. The publishers Denoël allowed me to use their private archives for research.

I also wish to acknowledge the various forms of assistance given me by Bernard Cazes, Jean-Marie Domenach, Pierre Grémion, Jean-Jean-Noël Jeanneney, Denis Lacorne, Edgar Morin, Michel Margairaz, Marc Meuleau, Diana Pinto, Anton DePorte, William Friend, Jacqueline Grapin, Simon Serfaty, Nicholas Wahl, Lenard Berlanstein, Charlotte Thompson, Irwin Wall, and Henry Rousso. William Becker and the History Department at George Washington University generously provided a place to work for a visiting scholar. Sheila Levine, Dore Brown, and Edith Gladstone, at the University of California Press, by their careful attention to my manuscript made important contributions. I wish to express, however belatedly, my special debt to the late Jean Bouvier, who encouraged me to believe an American could write French history. Finally, I want to thank the mentor who has served as my model for historian and teacher, Gordon Wright.

Versions of several chapters of this study have appeared in French Historical Studies, French Politics and Society, The Tocqueville Review, and L'Histoire .