Chapter 3
Yankee Go Home
The Left, Coca-Cola, and the Cold War
In the early years of the Cold War America became the subject of heated political and ideological controversy that escalated rhetoric into action and even violence. There was pushing and shoving among deputies in the National Assembly, dock strikes against the transport of American military equipment, a mass demonstration against an American general appointed to head NATO, an effort to oust the editor of Le Monde for his anti-Americanism, and collective pleas from the Parisian intelligentsia to Washington on behalf of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Even that most American of consumer products, Coca-Cola, was drawn into the fray.
The strident complaints and accusations voiced in this chapter will be those of Communist party members as well as leftist journalists and intellectuals. Ideology and politics form the basis of this encounter with America. Here are the defiant shouts of Communist militants and the confident pronouncements of Parisian mandarins assessing in philosophical and ideological language the meaning of American policy and hegemony in the early 1950s.
The political and intellectual universe of Paris should not, however, be construed simply as anti-American. It was contested territory. The governing coalitions of the Fourth Republic had tied their fortunes to the Atlantic alliance; the French, as we have seen, wanted American protection and liked Americans and much of what America exported. Most visitors to the United States praised the New World's vigor and prosperity, avoided politics, waxed eloquent about "Americanism," or
refused to make simplistic generalizations about the "American character."[1] A pro-American element also flourished among the intelligentsia. Raymond Aron and François Mauriac, for example, championed the Atlantic alliance and André Maurois lauded the American way; there were pro-American reviews like Preuves . But on the left it was the anti-Americans who predominated and who captured the most attention.
A "civilization of bathtubs and Frigidaires" is how the Communist poet Louis Aragon described the United States in 1951.[2] Aragon was one of many writers and journalists who, along with Communist party officials, led the postwar attack on America. The party had been forced out of the governing coalition in 1947 yet remained the largest party in the National Assembly and commanded roughly 25 percent of the electorate. Beginning in 1947 Communist propaganda savaged every feature of the American presence in France.[3] The Communists coined such phrases as marshallisation and coca-colonisation to suggest the United States was trying to colonize France. Washington had supposedly ordered the ouster of the Communists from government in order to make France safe for "Yankee trusts." From the Communists' patriotic perspective the Fourth Republic was a servile regime unwilling to defend French independence.
The NATO pact, which faced ratification in 1949, raised Communist anti-Americanism to a fever pitch. In an effort to block American military aid, Communist-led dockers in Marseilles, Bordeaux, and other ports prevented the unloading of American war matériel. "Yankee Go Home" defaced walls (fig. 3). In 1949 the party launched a peace movement to mobilize support against the United States. Utilizing the Stockholm appeal of 1950 to ban atomic weapons and appealing to the widespread fear of war between the superpowers, the Mouvement des partisans de la paix organized peace marches and a "peace vote." Fifteen million French citizens signed the Stockholm appeal.[4] And when the government of Georges Bidault in March 1950 attempted to end Communist obstruction of the war in Indochina by passing a bill against "sabotage," Communist deputies in the National Assembly turned violent. One MRP deputy was beaten and the premier's desk was nearly overturned on him.
The heavy, polemical barrage that accompanied these actions was crude to the point of being ludicrous. Nevertheless, most of the charges had some basis. The Communists merely distorted programs and motives. A few examples convey the character of this polemic. According to
3. Communist magazine cover. (Démocratie nouvelle 12 [1951];
Bibliothèque nationale)
the Communists, the Marshall Plan aimed at opening France to American products and investments. Writing about such aid, one columnist asked: "Why do they prefer to feed wheat to the pigs and send us corn?" Because, he answered, if the United States has to choose between
animals—including pigs—and Europeans, it prefers animals.[5] And NATO was preparing Western Europe to resume "Hitler's war" against a peace-loving Soviet Union. When war came, American planes would drop atomic bombs on the Soviet Union while French troops would fight as infantry alongside a resurrected "Nazi army." The presence of GIs was another foreign "occupation" and the "Amerloques" (a popular pejorative term for Americans) were likened to the Nazis. With the Korean conflict Communist propaganda reached new heights, or depths, denouncing the United States government and military as "monsters" and "war criminals" and charging the United States army with the use of germ warfare.
Addressing life in the United States, the Communists accused American schools of ignoring European culture and of fearing science because they suspected it of atheism.[6] The prominent physicist and Communist, Irène Joliot-Curie, after being held overnight by immigration officials on Ellis Island, said her detention was a sign of weakness. The daughter of the discoverers of radium remarked that Americans preferred fascism to communism because they thought "fascism has more respect for money."[7] Even the much publicized American standard of living was a fraud. L'L'Humanité, the party's daily, ran a series of articles in 1948 with such rifles as: "One could starve with a telephone"; and "Not everyone has a bathroom." The Frigidaire, militants were informed, was a useless gadget most of the year, except for making ice cubes for whiskey cocktails. It was usually cool enough in France so that a traditional garde-manger "placed on the window keeps the leftovers of Sunday's lamb until Wednesday."[8]
Among the Left Bank literary and artistic elite, prominent figures like Aragon, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Eluard worked actively with the Communists. So many intellectuals aligned themselves with the Communists in the early postwar years that the PCF liked to think of itself as the "parti de l'intelligence."[9] The reasons for alignment were numerous and the relations with the PCF ranged from those of party intellectuals like Aragon to others of independence and a certain distance. Such engagé intellectuals were dubbed compagnons de route (fellow travelers) or philo-Communists. The circles of friendly writers, scientists, academics, actors, and artists included Claude Roy, Daniel Guerin, Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie, René Etiemble, Yves Montand, Vercors, Edgar Morin, and Frédéric Joliot-Curie; at the outer fringe were Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the staff around Emmanuel Mounier at the review Esprit who disapproved of Stalinism but refused to be anti-Communist.
For these compagnons de route the Soviets had proven themselves to be antifascists, and 1917 and 1789 were twin landmarks in the march of human progress. Such intellectuals looked with favor at the PCF not because they were captivated by the party's doctrinal eminence but because of its record in the Resistance and its strategic political position. Even if its program was a hodgepodge of Soviet-inspired homilies, the Communist party was the most powerful party on the left.
Anti-Americanism appeared in much of their writing. Daniel Guerin, for example, concluded after visiting the United States that the promise of a new mass society had been betrayed by American labor and checked by the domination of gigantic trusts.[10] Claude Roy contributed a far more sympathetic and apolitical account of his visit but remained convinced of American bellicosity.[11] Aragon, angered by the temporary substitution of a new Ford automobile for a missing sculpture from a Parisian square that honored Victor Hugo, wrote:
A Ford automobile, the civilization of Detroit, the assembly line . . . the atomic danger, encircled by napalm . . . here is the symbol of this subjugation to the dollar applauded even in the land of Molière; here is the white lacquered god of foreign industry, the Atlantic totem that chases away French glories with Marshall Plan stocks. . . . The Yankee, more arrogant than the Nazi iconoclast, substitutes the machine for the poet, Coca-Cola for poetry, American advertising for La Légende des siècles, the mass-manufactured car for the genius, the Ford for Victor Hugo![12]
Aragon's poetic diatribe revived prewar fears of America as a cultural menace. And by 1950, unlike 1930, the United States was a present danger. Party speakers railed against the American cultural invasion—sadistic comics and pulp literature. Edgar Morin, a member of the party who later became a prominent sociologist, called the Reader's Digest "a pocket-sized stupefier." According to Morin the magazine propagated the myths of American capitalist civilization. With its innocent optimism ("You're timid? Cheer up. Here are 148 ways to overcome timidity") Reader's Digest served as a "drug for little minds."[13] The novels of Hemingway and Faulkner, it was said, showed a society charged with violence, racism, injustice, despair, and misery. War, according to Hollywood, was an adventure; American soldiers were invincible. And English expressions like "toothpaste" and "surplus" were corrupting the integrity of the national language. This cultural colonization was particularly annoying since the United States was "intellectually in the cradle."[14] For a moment Marx was on the side of Racine, Rabelais, and the Académie française.
What was the purpose of the Communists' polemic? Preventing the integration of France into the Western bloc was its general aim. More specifically, it hoped to subvert the Marshall Plan by arousing resistance, among the working class in particular, and by dampening the generosity of the American Congress. It also sought to damage the reputation of domestic political rivals and prevent them from becoming too cozy with the Americans. Thus it called virtually every non-Communist party or leader in the Fourth Republic from the Socialists to de Gaulle an agent of the United States. In addition, it mobilized party militants and aroused the electorate. Without question Communist voters most consistently voiced anti-American sentiments. Almost 60 percent of PCF voters thought the United States was readying for an aggressive war and 95 percent disapproved of the presence of American bases in France.[15] Here was the most formidable and intractable bloc of French anti-Americanism.
But anti-Americanism was not confined to the Communist party or even fellow travelers during the Cold War. It found adherents among left-wing Christian progressistes and so-called neutralists.[16] For these intellectuals, relations with the PCF were fragile and attitudes toward the Soviet Union were checkered, but they judged the United States, or at least its policy, harshly. And they were often more forgiving and less afraid of the Russians than of the Americans.
The overriding issue was to avoid war and define the place of France in the emerging bipolar world. In particular what strategy best guaranteed peace and gave France security and independence? While the Communists seized the Soviet option, Christian progressistes and neutralists tended toward nonalignment in the struggle between East and West. They hoped to build an independent, unified, and socialist Europe. For these intellectuals Americans were the intruders. The American presence was palpable compared to that of the Russians, whereas the United States itself was remote and virtually unknown in these circles.[17]
Some rallied to the Communist-sponsored peace movement, as did, for example, progressive Catholics who wrote for La Quinzaine, a review launched in 1950 by the Dominicans that aimed at reviving French Catholicism, especially among the working class. La Quinzaine oscillated between neutralism and an unqualified pro-Soviet stance.[18]
Other, more influential, progressiste Christians, like Emmanuel Mounier and Jean-Marie Domenach at the review Esprit, also refused to oppose communism; they denounced the Marshall Plan and NATO for incorporating Western Europe into an American protectorate and
destroying hope for an autonomous and pacific Europe. Emmanuel Mounier, who had expressed his distaste for America in the 1930s, wrote to an American friend in 1948:
The Russians, the Russians for sure. But the Russians are still a long way away. And what we know, what we see are the tons of American paper and American ideas and American propaganda in our bookstores. . . . Our prime ministers must visit the American embassy before making their most important decisions; there is an American shadow over us just as there is a Russian shadow over the other part of Europe.[19]
The Esprit circle found some virtue in the PCF but maintained its autonomy.
The brilliant young writer Albert Camus also tried to find a third way between the superpowers even as his outspoken anti-Stalinism earned him notoriety among the community of fellow travelers. Yet Camus, who had been pleased with his visit to the United States in 1946, criticized Americans for their "worship of technology" and the enervating character of American radio and movies.[20] Still other neutralist intellectuals, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre and his celebrated team at the review Les Temps modernes, attacked American policy but came to the side of the Communist part), only when the Fourth Republic seemed poised to ban the party in 1952.
When Le Monde, which was obligatory reading for the Parisian intelligentsia, adopted a neutralist position on the Cold War, the United States acquired its most formidable critic.[21] The daily's thunder-editor was Hubert Beuve-Beuve-Méry, who harbored deep misgivings about America. The newspaper's position was most succinctly put by one of its columnists, Maurice Duverger:
Between a sovietized Europe and the Atlantic empire, the second solution is clearly preferable because in the first instance slavery would be certain, whereas in the second case war would only become probable. Should circumstance dictate this dilemma we would choose the least terrible alternative. But since we are not conclusively locked in, a third solution remains: that of a neutralized Europe.[22]
Beuve-Beuve-Méry and his staff ascribed to the United States an overweening desire to dominate Western Europe and yet no determination to defend it should a crisis arise. He retained the image of American troops retiring from Czechoslovakia in 1945, and leaving Central Europe to the Red Army. But above all, Beave-Beuve-Méry argued, if Western Europeans sided with the United States, they would only make war between the
superpowers more, rather than less, likely. He refused to choose between capitalism and communism. Nevertheless, he did not equate the competing ideologies: "It is not a question, whatever one thinks of the dollar, of mass production, and the Reader's Digest, of placing the United States and the Soviet Union on the same footing."[23] For free men would not choose a Soviet-dominated Europe.
Neutralism was most forcefully spelled out in Le Monde by Etienne Gilson, the eminent Thomist philosopher who had been Beuve-Beuve-Méry's teacher before the war. Gilson doubted that Washington would automatically protect France and chose armed neutrality over NATO; it was America's turn to host the next world war. The Catholic philosopher enflamed the debate when, in 1949, he accused Washington of wanting to dump its responsibilities onto Europe.[24] Gilson accused the United States of using dollars to buy off Europeans so that the continent would be the site of the coming American-Soviet conflict.
A debate that was ostensibly over neutralist foreign policy escalated into a nasty attack on America when Le Monde published a series of articles on "Imperial America" by Pierre Emmanuel, poet, journalist, and contributor to Esprit . Emmanuel was one of many leftists to whom American immigration authorities had refused a visa. He ridiculed President Truman as a "former suspenders" salesman" and derided American anticommunism as a sign of panic.[25] Afraid of its own emptiness—because it had nothing but a temporary advantage in industrial prowess—the United States adopted anticommunism as a pretext to expand its power. According to Emmanuel, Americans searched in vain for a raison d'être that would survive the astonishing power that history had capriciously awarded them. He noted that almost every European who had been to the United States was appalled by its social conformity and by the sight of humanity reduced to producers and consumers. A lack of political maturity predisposed Americans to fascism. The FBI might one day rival the Gestapo. To him, both the United States and the Soviet Union were totalitarian—"the one in power, the other in deed." He rejected the Communist solution but could find no consolation in the American way. In the end he could counsel Europeans only to defend their Christian values as the ultimate protection against both totalitarianisms. Europeans would outlast the Americans because they retained an "idea"; "should the new Holy Roman Empire take Washington for its capital, its heart and brains will remain in Europe."
Emmanuel's evocation of Christianity corresponded with Beuve-Beuve-Méry's sensibility. Behind the editor's neutralism was a stern Jansenist
temperament that was offended by the materialism that America embodied. Before the war Beuve-Beuve-Méry, trained by the Dominicans, had voiced his aversion for capitalist values. At heart the incorruptible editor was a Christian moralist who had a phobia about the corrupting powers of money; he was immune to the charms of America. A visit to the United States in 1945 failed to assuage his misgivings about the American way and only reinforced his worry about America's political ambitions.[26]Le Monde 's repugnance for américanisme was expressed by Maurice Duverger:
The American threat remains for the moment less urgent, less serious, and less dangerous than the Soviet menace. . . . Between the invasion of Gletkins and the invasion of Digests, we certainly prefer the latter; however, in the long run the civilization of Digests will kill the European spirit just as surely as the civilization of Gletkins .[27]
Beuve-Beuve-Méry's aversion for American society surfaced, as we shall see, in Le Monde 's treatment of the Coca-Cola affair.
Opponents, especially convinced Atlanticists like Raymond Aron, François Mauriac, and Paul Claudel, attacked the paper's neutralism as an illusion. French freedoms and independence, they argued, depended on American protection. Aron refused any equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union drawn by some neutralists and chided them for their leftist dogmatism. He pointed out the American socioeconomic system was far more democratic than that of most European countries.[28] And Paul Claudel, the noted Catholic author and head of the Association France-Etats-Unis, took exception to Pierre Emmanuel's labeling the United States an imperialist nation. America was, if anything, generous, according to Claudel. If Europeans should take pride in their past, as Emmanuel urged, Claudel suggested they also recognize that Americans had turned toward the future.[29]
Gilson's and Emmanuel's columns nearly led to Beuve-Beuve-Méry's removal as editor. From inside the paper René Courtin, a co-director, was outraged by Emmanuel's articles and found the neutralist line dangerous and unfair to the United States. Courtin tried without success to force Beuve-Beuve-Méry's resignation.[30] Others, from the right, debunked neutralism by pointing out it required an unprecedented rearmament drive. The most extreme opponents called Le Monde crypto-Communist and suggested that Beuve-Beuve-Méry deserved the Stalin prize.
Beuve-Beuve-Méry's response to the "realists" who embraced NATO was to advocate nonalignment and moral resistance to the superpowers.
"The task before us, as they used to say, is a labor of the Capetians. It offers more difficulty, more interest, and certainly demands no less virility than appeals to hatred and recourse to the atomic bomb or napalm."[31] Beuve-Beuve-Méry later observed that the term "nonalignment" would have served La Monde 's cause better, because "neutrality" wrongly suggested passivity or defeatism whereas he and Gilson proposed a strong independent position for France between the superpowers. Beauve-Beuve-Méry abandoned strict neutrality when he endorsed NATO in 1949 and unmasked the Communist-sponsored peace movement as a political gambit. But the newspaper's director sparked controversy by also declaring that the NATO pact would inevitably lead to German rearmament.[32] After 1950 Le Monde continued to try to escape the logic of submission to the United States and German rearmament by seeking an independent way to defend France.
Le Monde 's neutralism had the support of many of its readers and its position was shared by other left-wing journals like Esprit, Les Temps modernes, Franc-Tireur, and France-Observateur . The latter's formula was "Neither Washington Nor Moscow." Claude Bourdet, who edited France-Observateur, maintained his neutralist position long after others had surrendered one. In 1952 he wrote to an American review advising Americans to "leave us alone."[33] For a brief moment in 1948–49 the campaign for a third way, a European strategy, within the Cold War, crystallized into a new political movement, the Rassemblement démocratique révolutionnaire, led by such intellectual stars as Bourdet, Sartre, Georges Altman, and David Rousset. But the movement failed to find its following and quickly dispersed—in part because of disputes over relations with the United States. Nonalignment might have been a preferred stance for these mandarins but it attracted little support from the public who, while sympathizing with neutralism, preferred the security they had within the Atlantic alliance.
The leftist intelligentsia represented by Le Mond e scorned pro-American dissenters. Among the Parisian literati, Preuves was the principal advocate of the United States; the "American review" was what Le Monde dubbed it.[34] Communists and compagnons de route ostracized those who contributed to it as reactionaries or American hirelings (in fact, Preuves did receive subsidies from the Congress for Cultural Freedom). Among its contributors were such celebrated anti-Communists as Raymond Aron, Thierry Maulnier, Denis de Rougemont, Arthur Koestler, Herbert Luethy, and Ignazio Silone. And it received support from the Socialist and the MRP parties. The purpose of Preuves was to detach the intelli-
gentsia from its neutralism and its fascination with the Soviet bloc. It engaged in ideological warfare with journals like Esprit and France-Observateur and tried to nullify pressure from the PCF for intellectuals to join the peace movement. While Preuves unmasked Stalinism as a totalitarianism, systematically defended Washington's foreign policy, and praised American institutions, it was not uncritical of the United States. The review, for example, distinguished its anticommunism from that of Senator McCarthy, and it argued that if the Rosenbergs were guilty they should not be executed. Despite the eminence of its contributors Preuves achieved intellectual respectability only in the late 1950s after the passing of the harshest phase of the Cold War. Its American connection was a handicap. Reading Preuves openly, at an institution like the Ecole nor-male supérieure in the early 1950s, was generally considered to be an act of defiance.
Aversion to the American way, which was acute on the left of the political spectrum, also appeared (though to a far lesser extent) on the right—even among proponents of Atlanticism. Raymond Aron, who wrote warmly of NATO, had, as we shall see, his reservations about America. The Gaullists, who had organized themselves into a new political movement, the RPF (Rassemblement du peuple français), in 1947, were Atlanticists yet included those who disapproved of America. This complex stance is not unfamiliar within the tradition of anti-Americanism among French conservatives. André Malraux, the eminent novelist and arbiter of artistic taste, was the principal spokesman on cultural affairs for the RPF. In his appeal to the intellectual community in 1948 Malraux denied America's cultural claims:
There is no culture in America that claims to be American. That's an invention of Europeans. . . . And American culture, once its European element is removed, is a field of technical knowledge more than it is an organic culture. Besides America now sets the tone in popular culture, in radio, film, and the press.[35]
But the Soviets, unlike the Americans, according to Malraux, wanted to do away with European culture altogether. Menaced both by Americans and by Russians, the Gaullists preferred the protection of the United States, as most of their compatriots did. Thus the Gaullists were not a major source of anti-Americanism in these years. Malraux, for example, participated in the 1952 cultural festival sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. And de Gaulle might criticize the Fourth Republic for failing to guard French independence vis-a-vis-à-vis the United States, and he might disapprove the structure of NATO and denounce the EDC,
but need for American protection and militant anticommunism kept the RPF within the NATO camp. Only after the Korean War did de Gaulle and the RPF move away from Atlanticism.[36] In the depths of the Cold War, the major attack on America came from the left.
In 1952 the Communist party treated the capital to a violent celebration of anti-Americanism. The occasion was the arrival in Paris of General Matthew Ridgway to take command of NATO forces. The American general, according to the Communist press, was a "war criminal" and a "microbe general" because of the allegation that he had ordered the use of bacteriological weapons in the Korean War.[37]
He comes dripping with the blood of martyred Korean and Chinese women, children, and old people against whom he has committed crimes of the most unspeakable savagery. He is the war criminal whom history will always call "Ridgway the plague." He comes with the curses of the people ringing in his ears for having been the first to execute the hellish plans of the dollar princes: to kill human beings with bacteria carrying cholera, plague, and other contagious diseases.[38]
The Communists intensifed their effort to block the expansion of American "militarism" not only because of the wars in Indochina and Korea, but also because they wanted to obstruct the restoration of sovereignty to the German Federal Republic. The formula "U.S. equals SS" and comparisons between Hitler's Germany and Truman's America linked Germanophobia with the United States.
Confrontation with the Communists over General Ridgway grew likely once Antoine Pinay became premier in the spring of 1952. Pinay was the most conservative premier the Republic had had since 1946 and he was tainted by collaboration with the Vichy regime. L'L'Humanité charged Pinay with leading France toward a third world war that would make France an "atomic desert."[39] In the face of the government's prohibition of a demonstration organized by the peace movement for 28 May, the PCF decided to test Pinay's repressive intentions. As many as twenty thousand demonstrators paraded with placards reading "Ridgway Murderer," "Go Home!," "Americans belong in America," and "We Want Peace!" (fig. 4). Clashes with the security police left one demonstrator dead, two hundred wounded, and several hundred arrested, including party secretary Jacques Duclos. Those arrested and beaten by the police included two "worker-priests"; these were idealistic young priests who lived and worked among the proletariat in order to bear
4. Ridgway riots: police and civilians battle in Paris, May 1952. (Courtesy
AP/Wide World Photos)
witness to their faith and ended up associating with such Communist-sponsored causes as the peace movement.
At this point the Pinay government became overzealous in its drive to isolate or break the Communist party.[40] Some officials were looking for an opportunity, and the May demonstration seemed to deliver the Communists right into their hands. As well as violence, ideological hysteria made for comedy—in this case the story of Duclos's pigeons. On the night of 28 May the police stopped Duclos's car near one of the demonstrations and discovered two pigeons in the back seat. According to the police report, the birds were rolled in a blanket, smothered but still warm. The police concluded they were carrier pigeons that Duclos had used for communications during an illegal demonstration. They arrested the party secretary. Duclos spent a month in jail, though he claimed the fowl were meant for a casserole; others speculated they were part of a flight of "peace doves." But the government had to back down when an autopsy revealed the birds in question were simple domestic pigeons. The pursuit of Duclos had exceeded Pinay's intentions.
Wanting only to discredit the party, the premier intervened to dampen the zeal of the fanatics who had arrested the party leader.
The anti-Communist mania of the Pinay government had unintended consequences. It aroused Jean-Paul Sartre. Up to then Sartre had opposed the Marshall Plan and NATO, blamed the Korean War on the West, and espoused neutralism, but had not been an outspoken opponent of America. If forced to choose sides in the Cold War, he preferred the Soviet Union, which he believed represented progress toward human liberation, over the United States, which he deemed a reactionary force. But he was at odds with the PCF. And his views of American society and civilization were nuanced.[41]
Sartre was fascinated with American jazz, film, and literature. He had toured the country twice in 1945–46 trying to fathom its contradictions. He was delighted with America's vigor and the easy relations among social classes. He admired American devotion to freedom and human dignity. Sartre mused on how Americans reconciled conformity with individualism. New York symbolized this reconciliation—the streets were monotonous and uniform but the skyscrapers bold and unique. But he disapproved of the ugly racism, the harsh treatment of the underprivileged, and the effects of mechanization on labor. And he analyzed américanisme as a new form of social control. Writing to the New York Herald Tribune in 1946, Sartre stated that he was not anti-American because one could not be for or against such a complex society in the same way that one could be "antifascist."[42] But when the Fourth Republic began to hound Communists, as Senator McCarthy was doing in the United States, Sartre counterattacked.
In 1952 the celebrated leader of existentialism denounced America and became a compagnon de route of the PCF. His notorious attack on the United States as a country suffering from rabies was a response to what he called the "legal lynching" of the Rosenbergs in 1953.
Decidedly there is something rotten in America. . . . You are collectively responsible for the death of the Rosenbergs, some for having provoked this murder, others for having let it be carried out; you have allowed the United States to be the cradle of a new fascism. . . . One day, maybe, all this goodwill will heal you of your fear; we hope so because we have loved you. Meanwhile, don't be surprised if, from one end of Europe to the other, we scream: Watch out, America has rabies! We must cut all ties with it or else we shall be bitten and infected next.[43]
Sartre was expressing a visceral anger at American politics and policy. He saw himself fulfilling the intellectual's mission as he had defined it in
1946 to a New York newspaper—"to denounce injustice wherever it is to be found, and this all the more when he loves the country which allows this injustice to be committed."[44]
Sartre's companion, Simone de Beauvoir, who had been ambivalent about the United States during her visits there in 1947—she praised American dynamism and freedom but found it suffering from conformism, consumerism, anti-intellectualism, racism, and psychological ennui—joined Sartre in his new aggressive anti-Americanism. Seeing two American soldiers enter a hotel, she reflected how in 1944 these men in khaki had represented freedom but now defended a nation that supported dictatorship and corruption all over the globe—the regimes of Franco, Syngman Rhee, Batista, Salazar. Even though Sartre abandoned his alignment with the PCF in 1956, he and de Beauvoir continued to view the United States as the source of international political reaction and the Americans as a "people of sheep." Their interest in America subsided, yet Sartre and de Beauvoir continued to denounce American imperialism as responsible for the ills of the world.
During 1952–53 the Rosenberg trial, like General Ridgway's appointment, fueled anti-Americanism to the point that some took to the streets of the French capital. Most of the Parisian press argued for leniency for the convicted spies. Esprit said the Rosenbergs represented possible innocence crushed by patriotic passion, fear, and pride. Jean-Marie Domenach noted the resemblance between the spy trials simultaneously under way in New York and Prague (the Slansky trial). In both instances justice had submitted to political passion. In both instances fanatics had once again made the Jew the target.[45] Seeking a pardon for the condemned, Domenach and many other French intellectuals, including Sartre and de Beauvoir, sent telegrams to Washington and to Prague—to no avail. Le Monde noted that legal forms had been followed but that the judge's references to the Communist loyalties of the Rosenbergs had prejudiced the jury. The paper suggested that Judge Kaufman was unduly severe in sentencing the couple to death because he was trying to disassociate the Jewish community from the spies and thus had acted out of reverse anti-Semitism.[46] When President Eisenhower refused a pardon and the Rosenbergs were executed, Le Monde accused the president of succumbing to mass hysteria aroused by Senator McCarthy's witch hunt and to the frustrations of the Korean War. Beuve-Beuve-Méry wrote that justice was done but that the execution was a serious defeat for all the countries of the Western alliance because in it the cause of truth and humanity lost ground. Free peoples, he wrote, were "frightened of seeing a growing
shadow of gigantic idols fed by lies, terror, and denunciations. They fear the time, perhaps close at hand, when the choice will only be between the role of executioner or martyr . . ."[47]
To the Communists, the Rosenbergs had been declared guilty because they were pacifists, democrats, Jews, and partisans of Soviet-American friendship. When President Eisenhower decided against clemency, the Communist party, which almost alone believed in the Rosenbergs' innocence, turned out its militants to demonstrate before the United States embassy. There followed over eight hundred arrests and one shooting.
All the elements assembled so far in this analysis of Cold War anti-Americanism converge in a single episode—the strange affair of Coca-Cola. Here an American corporation unwittingly set off a furor that involved the Communist party, the Parisian intelligentsia, certain interest groups, the parliament, and the cabinet of the Fourth Republic as well as the American government.
Perhaps no commercial product is more thoroughly identified with America than Coca-Cola. One company official called it "the most American thing in America." Another wrote approvingly of this confusion: "Apparently some of our friends overseas have difficulty distinguishing between the United States and Coca-Cola."[48] When a magazine wanted three objects for a photograph that were peculiarly American it selected a baseball, a hot dog, and a bottle of Coke. This soft drink originated in Atlanta during the 1880s as a quasimedicinal, yet refreshing, nonalcoholic beverage. From the beginning the drink was associated with mass advertising, a high consumption society, and free enterprise. Since the soft drink satisfied no essential need, the Coca-Cola Company utilized extensive advertising: signs, special delivery trucks, articles like calendars and lamps that carried the distinctive trademark, radio commercials, and slogans such as "The Pause that Refreshes." The company carefully cultivated an image for its product: Coke was wholesome and pleasant. And the company's history exemplified the virtues of free enterprise. Robert Woodruff, the company's longtime president, once remarked that within every bottle was "the essence of capitalism." The founders of Coca-Cola became rich, powerful, and famous. Top company executives claimed presidents of the United States as friends. Up to the 1920s, however, the company confined its sales largely to North America. Only then did it begin to reach out for opportunities abroad.
The richest new markets lay in Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific. The Coca-Cola Export Corporation began in 1930 to handle overseas business and was soon operating in some twenty-eight countries. Technological advance (such as finding a way to concentrate the syrup that was the basis of the drink) facilitated exports. The export corporation normally employed a franchise system that allowed foreign nationals to own and operate bottling subsidiaries. Local interests provided capital, materials, and staff—almost everything except the concentrate—when they signed a contract to become a Coca-Cola bottler. The mother company helped the new bottling franchise get started and supervised product quality and advertising while non-Americans operated the franchise and earned the bulk of the profits. It was an ingenious system that minimized the Atlanta company's participation and furthered the product's rapid expansion.
In Europe this early multinational had made only a modest start by 1939, but the Second World War proved to be a boon. Woodruff stated the company's wartime policy: "We will see that every man in uniform gets a bottle of Coca-Cola for five cents wherever he is and whatever it costs."[49] The distinctive Coke bottle accompanied the GI into war. Company employees were assigned as "technical observers" to the military in order to take charge of new bottling plants set up close to the front lines. Coca-Cola, to some GIs, became identified with American war aims. One soldier wrote home: "To my mind, I am in this damn mess as much to help keep the custom of drinking Cokes as I am to help preserve the million other benefits our country blesses its citizens with."[50] As a result of the war, two-thirds of the veterans drank Coke and sixty-four bottling plants had been ferried abroad, most at government expense. The next step was to mount a systematic campaign for the European market.
The late 1940s saw Coca-Cola expand rapidly on the continent. Bottling operations began in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg in 1947; then came Switzerland and Italy, and France followed in 1949. The Olympic games in Helsinki became an occasion for promoting the drink. Since there was no bottler in Finland, company officials organized a quasi-military operation: they sent a rebuilt D-Day landing craft from Amsterdam to Helsinki loaded with publicity material such as 150,000 sun visors bearing the trademark "Coca-Cola" and 720,000 bottles of Coke. Salesmen even managed to get photographs of Russian athletes consuming the capitalist beverage. The cover of Time magazine showed the globe drinking a bottle of Coke with the caption: "World
and Friend: love that piaster, that lira, that tickey, and that American way of life."[51] Coca-Cola was fast becoming a universal drink.
The chairman of the board of the Coca-Cola Export Corporation at this time was James Farley, a former aide to President Roosevelt and a major figure in American politics. Farley used his political contacts to further overseas affairs and added some Cold War rhetoric to the product's commercial expansion. In 1946 after a global tour Farley declared that the peoples of Europe, Asia, and Africa "look to the American nation to lead them out of difficulties. They look to us for loans, for raw materials, and assistance."[52] Farley was a militant anti-Communist who warned in 1950: "We find ourselves in danger from an enemy more subtle, more ruthless, more fanatic than any we have ever faced. The rime has come for Americans to challenge the aggressive, godless, and treasonable practices of totalitarian communism." Coca-Cola was about to mix with Cold War politics.
Almost everywhere in postwar Europe Coca-Cola's arrival provoked opposition. In many cases local beverage interests tried to block the entry of the American soft drink. In Belgium and Switzerland they challenged the drink with law suits alleging that it contained a dangerous amount of caffeine. In Denmark breweries managed to ban the drink temporarily. In most cases the local Communist party led the opposition and described the drink as an addictive drug or even a poison. In Italy L'L'Unità warned parents that Coke could turn children's hair white. Austrian Communists asserted that the new bottling plant at Lambach could easily be transformed into an atomic bomb factory. These disturbances were trivial compared with the controversy that erupted when Coca-Cola arrived in postwar France.
In France the first bottles of Coca-Cola had been sold to American servicemen in 1919. Yet, except for some cafés in major cities that catered to American tourists, French establishments rarely served the beverage during the 1920s and 1930s. With the war sales stopped altogether. After the war the American firm tried to resume operations but encountered difficulties because potential bottlers lacked equipment and the dollars to import the concentrate from the United States. To overcome these obstacles Coca-Cola Export orchestrated an American-style marketing plan for France. The key was constructing a new manufacturing plant in Marseilles to produce the concentrate. A small fraction of this concentrate, the ingredients used for blending the secret formula called "7X," was to be imported from the United States. To promote sales the country was divided into zones with the Paris region
and the Midi targeted for initial operations. The company began signing contracts for bottling franchises and allocated a large budget for advertising. Within a few years, it was projected, each French citizen would consume six bottles of Coke annually. The concessionaires were to employ American sales and distribution techniques, including new trucks brightly painted in company colors, free tasting, and endorsements from cinema and sports stars (figs. 5, 6). The American multinational construed this strategy as a resumption of prewar operations, but this claim was rather disingenuous since business before 1939 had consisted of one bottler who imported syrup from the United States. The president of the export corporation was James Curtis and its representative in Paris was Prince Alexander Makinsky, a White Russian émigré, who had become an American citizen and was, like Farley, a staunch anti-Communist.
From the beginning there was trouble. Foreign investments required authorization from the Ministry of Finance, which was empowered to block ventures that might deepen the country's chronic deficit in its balance of payments. Since Coca-Cola Export offered to invest only a modest $500,000 and expected to repatriate its profits while requiring its Marseilles plant to buy certain ingredients from the Atlanta company, the rue de Rivoli denied permission in 1948. Makinsky admitted privately that "the trouble is . . . our investments are negligible."[53] The multinational offered to supply the ingredients temporarily without charge and to delay repatriating profits for five years—to no avail. The rue de Rivoli refused to budge.
The Fourth Republic's motives for obstructing the American firm were, as we shall see, far more complex than aversion to an unappealing foreign investment. Coca-Cola posed serious political problems and raised anxieties about Americanization.
The French Communist party reacted sharply to the news of the Coca-Cola Company's plans. L'L'Humanité asked: "Will we be coca-coca-colonisés ?"[54] The American company, it was alleged, intended to spend 4 million dollars on publicity and planned to sell 40 bottles of Coke per person annually. L'L'Humanité predicted "the Coca-Cola invasion" would further depress sales of wine, already damaged by tariff reductions demanded by the Americans, and would worsen the large trade deficit while the "American trust" siphoned away dollars. Communists also charged that the Coca-Cola distribution system would double as an American espionage network. And the rumor spread that Coca-Cola intended to advertise on the facade of Notre Dame.
5. Coca-Cola accompanies the Tour de France to Lourdes. (Courtesy the
Coca-Cola Company)
Communist propaganda exploited deepening anxiety among the French about the United States. It evoked the alleged submissiveness of the Fourth Republic toward its Atlantic ally and the threat of American economic and cultural domination. The Communists were not alone in expressing such worries. Le Monde and Christian progressiste journals also noted the first hints of a new danger as American private investment began to expand.[55] Dollars flowed into sectors like petroleum where American capital had existed for decades. But now there were also "bridgehead" investments like the new plants being built by Coca-Cola and the International Harvester Company. Coca-Cola was only one feature of a multifaceted American "invasion."
Besides the Communists and the progressistes, the government encountered heavy lobbying from those economic interests—wine, fruit juice, mineral water, cider, beer, and other beverages—who saw themselves directly threatened by Coca-Cola. Winegrowers were facing the beginning of postwar surpluses in 1949–50, which sharpened their anxiety about foreign competition. The Confédération des fruits et légumes, the Syndicat national du commerce en gros des vins et spiritueux, and similar associations charged the American soft drink with endangering public health and domestic industry. One such association asked: "Is Coca-Cola a poison?"[56] The organ of the Confédération
6. Billboard advertising, 1951. (Courtesy the Coca-Cola Company)
générale de l'agriculture warned that the drink could stimulate "addiction analogous to that observed in the use of drugs and tobacco," which was why, perhaps, the company encouraged free tasting.[57] Wine wholesalers asked that Coca-Cola conform to the health code imposed on all French beverages and complained about American customs' regulations on wine and liquors—a one-sided situation that "may explain, if not justify, the often bitter remarks heard in France when an American beverage enjoys free entry."[58] None of these interests openly demanded a ban on Coca-Cola, but they insisted that the product submit to existing French health regulations.
Pressured from the outside by the Communists and by a coalition of domestic beverage interests, the French government faced opposition from within as well. The Ministry of Finance, after conducting its own investigation of Coca-Cola's plans, advised against allowing a resumption of business by the American firm. As an investment the ministry concluded Coca-Cola would rapidly and permanently become "a disaster" for the nation's balance of payments with the United States.[59] Payments aside, the ministry called the bottling contracts "draconian" because they placed control in the hands of the Atlanta company and assured it the lion's share of profits. And when the ministry tried to force Coca-Cola Export to relinquish control over its Marseilles plant to
French interests, the Americans refused.[60] The treasury also suspected that the beverage, which made individuals loyal consumers after a few drinks, might be addictive either because of its caffeine or because of some secret ingredient. Politically, the ministry warned, the government should expect "extremely brutal reactions" from the winegrowers and from fruit juice and mineral water interests, who all believed they could not match the advertising and financial reserves of the Yankee newcomer. Such reactions would provide "powerful arguments to adversaries of the current majority."[61] Authorizing Coca-Cola, treasury officials implied, would only aid those who charged the government was subservient to America.
Other government bureaucracies were also suspicious of Coca-Cola. Starting in 1922 the beverage had faced a series of legal actions brought by customs officials and by the department for the repression of frauds, an agency of the agriculture ministry. At issue were alleged violations of the health code and deceptive labeling. These charges had reached a climax in 1942, when a court dismissed all the indictments by ordering a non-lieu (no cause for prosecution), which seemed to close the case. Yet after the war these legal tests resumed and officials pursued them so eagerly that Makinsky complained that the French administration had a "personal grudge against us."[62]
The incumbent governments, those of Henri Queuille (September 1948 to October 1949) and Georges Bidault (October 1949 to July 1950), rested on a centrist coalition of MRP, Radical, and Conservative parties and enjoyed Socialist support. Like other centrist cabinets of the years 1948–51 who tied their fate to the Atlantic alliance, these governments felt trapped. On the one hand it was essential to maintain good relations with Washington, especially if France expected generous treatment under the Marshall Plan. On the other hand Queuille and Bidault faced demands from their own ministries, the Communist party, and the beverage lobby to block a multinational that virtually symbolized the American way. Admitting Coca-Cola seemed to be a trivial issue and one that should not jeopardize American aid. Yet these governments succumbed to domestic pressures. When Coca-Cola Export applied in early 1949, for a second time, for authorization to import some $15,000 worth of ingredients for its Marseilles plant, the finance ministry again refused.
At this point Coca-Cola Export retaliated. In the summer of 1949 James Curtis, the head of the company, discussed the affair with Maurice Petsche, the minister of finance, who asked for clarification of the company's plans in order to help him "overcome the political considera-
tions which caused the official obstructionism."[63] Petsche promised to raise the issue with the cabinet. The government authorized bottling operations, which began in December 1949, but Petsche's ministry continued to obstruct the company's plans. Unable to obtain clearance for importing the "7X" ingredients, Coca-Cola Export suspended construction of its Marseilles plant and resorted to shipping concentrate to its Parisian bottler from its manufacturer in Casablanca. Since the American ingredients amounted to only 3 percent of the value of the concentrate, it was labeled as a Moroccan product and shipped without an import license.
By late 1949 intense legal battles supplemented the finance ministry's obstructionism. "Our major headache," according to Makinsky, were two suits over the soft drink's ingredients and labeling initiated by the agriculture ministry's agency for the repression of fraud.[64] Much of the argument centered on the presence of phosphoric acid, which the 1905 health code seemed to prohibit, the amount of caffeine, and the nature of the mysterious "7X."[65] Even if only a trace ingredient, "7X" was an unknown and raised the possibility that it contained toxic or addictive elements. There was also the charge that the trademark was fraudulent because coca leaves were not truly present and thus "Coca-Cola" misrepresented the product. Of all these charges, it was the presence of phosphoric acid and caffeine that caused Makinsky's staff the most difficulty. Under the existing code, Makinsky privately acknowledged, Coke was "pretty vulnerable."[66] The wine, fruit juice, and other domestic beverage lobbies joined the department of frauds in its suits. Once begun, these court actions assumed a life of their own, marked by hearings, wrangling, and contested scientific tests. To add to the Atlanta company's worries, the Ministry of Agriculture appointed a special advisory committee, which contained experts known to be hostile to the soft drink, for the purpose of clarifying the code on nonalcoholic drinks.
Blame for all these actions, according to Coca-Cola Export, lay with the government. Farley accused it of instigating criminal prosecution against the sale of Coca-Cola for political reasons, that is, to accommodate the Communists and the special interests.[67] Compounding difficulties for the soft drink company in the winter of 1949–50, major newspapers joined the attack on coca-colonisation, and parliament took sides in the affair.
The Communist party and the domestic beverage industry forced the National Assembly to take up the issue at the end of 1949. Parliamentary opponents of the American beverage pursued two paral-
lel, yet different, approaches. The Communist party sought an immediate outright ban on the sale of Coca-Cola for reasons of public health and on economic grounds, that is, to protect domestic beverages from the unfair competition of the "American trust." This proposal gathered little support outside the Communist party itself. Winegrowers, who would also have liked outright prohibition, took a more indirect approach to the ban. Paul Boulet, the deputy-mayor of Montpellier and spokesman for the winegrowers of the Hérault, proposed a general regulation of all nonalcoholic beverages made from vegetable extracts under the guise of protecting public health. Coca-Cola was not explicitly named as the culprit, but everyone recognized that the intent of Boulet's legislation was to extend the definition of harmful substances in nonalcoholic beverages in order to allow the government to prohibit the import, manufacture, and sale of the American soft drink. Boulet apparently omitted naming Coca-Cola because such a proposal would have violated trade agreements with the United States by discriminating against a specific product. His proposal assigned responsibility for determining whether or not the beverage was harmful to the minister of public health, who would act on the advice of experts from the Conseil supérieur de l'hygiène publique and the Académie nationale de médicine. Rather than openly defend the winegrowers, Boulet masked his purpose by stressing the probability that Coca-Cola was injurious to public health. That the Coca-Cola Company paraded its product's alleged wholesomeness and directed its appeal at youthful consumers seemed to Boulet and his supporters to be especially insidious. Boulet's project attracted far greater support than that of the Communists. The latter, preferring a disguised ban to no ban at all, supported Boulet as did some MRP deputies and those deputies representing rural constituencies.
The government's spokesman in the National Assembly was the minister of public health, Pierre Schneiter, who like Bidault and Boulet was a member of the pro-American MRP. The government did not want a ban on Coca-Cola, and Schneiter insisted that the Boulet proposal was unnecessary because existing legislation was adequate to protect national health in the event that the drink was harmful or fraudulent. The minister of health said the government had no precise stand on the issue but made light of the affair: "I would rather trust in the common sense of the country where we have always known how to choose the beverage that suits our taste and generally drink it under reasonable conditions."[68] Nevertheless, the government chose not to oppose the National Assem-
bly and elements of the MRP over this issue. Schneiter left the decision to the will of the assembly, knowing that at worst the legislation gave the government the authority to act but did not mandate it.
Opponents of Coca-Cola urged immediate action by the National Assembly, but the government managed to postpone debate until February 1950.[69] The assembly then rejected the Communist proposal for an outright ban but adopted Boulet's bill by voice vote. According to the legislation, if the experts found a nonalcoholic beverage injurious to public health, the minister of public health was empowered to ban it. The assembly submitted to the pressure of the winegrowers, the Communist party, and a small contingent of MRP and Gaullist deputies. The bulk of the deputies who acquiesced probably realized that, given its stand, the government was unlikely to invoke the ban: thus they could give a sop to the interested parties without any harm. Resisting Coca-Cola was a way of expressing latent French uneasiness about American domination.
The assembly's proceedings were an unedifying spectacle of disingenuous debate and weakness. The government and the parliamentary majority surrendered to the clamor of a determined minority of opponents composed of protectionist economic lobbyists and anti-American ideologues. The debate by and large avoided the real issue of growing American economic and political domination. Ostensibly the question was the protection of public health. Only the Communists raised the broader issue. One Communist deputy at the end of the debate complained: "We've seen successively the French cinema and French literature attacked. We've watched the struggle over our tractor industry. We've seen a whole series of our productive sectors, industrial, agricultural, and artistic, successively attacked without the public authorities defending them."[70] In the end the National Assembly, under the pretext of regulating nonalcoholic beverages and without daring to admit its motives, made a gesture of national assertion vis-a-vis-à-vis the United States.
The Bidault government tried to maneuver between the domestic opposition to the entry of Coca-Cola and the need to avoid a confrontation with the United States. During the winter of 1949–50 internal politics continued to weigh more heavily. In February 1950 customs officials in Morocco denied a routine application from Coca-Cola Export to ship a batch of concentrate to its French bottlers. Still trying to discourage the Americans, the government imposed a de facto embargo that thwarted the company's gambit of importing concentrate from Casablanca.
Surveying the opposition in early 1950, Makinsky concluded there was a formidable array of enemies that were "trying to 'get' us." They included not only the domestic beverage lobbies, the administration, the Communists, and parliament, but French public opinion as well. The Paris chief of Coca-Cola Export thought the French were "as a whole anti-American" chiefly because they resented being dependent on the United States.[71] But the Atlanta company had the will, the resources, and the influence to retaliate. It feared the precedent should its product be banned in France.
Coca-Cola Export relied on its legal staff, hired expert scientific advisers, and used its contacts within the French administration, including the prime minister's office and the Conseil supérieur de l'hygiène publique, to make its case. Those involved in the legal proceedings as well as legislators received memoranda outlining the company's arguments. This documentation stressed that the soft drink was being sold freely in seventy-six countries; that previous investigations proved it conformed to the health code; that its advertising campaign would be neither excessive nor provocative; that the manufacture and sale of the beverage were in French hands; that virtually all the supplies, from the sugar to the delivery trucks, were to be purchased in France; that experience showed its sales did not harm the markets of traditional drinks; and, especially, that there was no connection between Coca-Cola and the Marshall Plan.[72] In addition, the multinational took its case directly to the French government. As chairman of the board of Coca-Cola Export, Farley visited the French ambassador, Henri Bonnet, and, after accusing the government with harassing the company for political reasons, asked the foreign office to persuade the finance ministry and the cabinet to end the embargo.[73]
The Atlanta company also sought the intervention of Washington. Makinsky asked the State Department to take its part, charging Paris with "discrimination, hostility, and unjustifiable delaying tactics," and threatened to withdraw Coca-Cola's business from France.[74] After trying to stay aloof from fear of linking Coca-Cola with American aid, the State Department acted. David Bruce, the American ambassador in Paris, told Premier Bidault that the United States would resist arbitrary discrimination against any American product. Bruce also lodged a protest with the foreign ministry against the Bidault administration's interference with the import of Coca-Cola concentrate from Morocco.[75] The American ambassador warned of "possible serious repercussions" if the harassment of Coca-Cola were to continue and asked the French cabinet to take up the matter.[76]
Farley tried to rally the American public. He exploded before the American press.[77] "Coca-Cola was not injurious to the health of American soldiers who liberated France from the Nazis so that the Communist deputies could be in session today," he proclaimed. Farley noted that the drink was served everywhere in the world except in Communist countries. He complained that the French showed small gratitude for the Marshall Plan. Uncle Sam, he snarled, would probably not condone this insult and the American Congress might be moved to stop economic aid.
News of the affair was carried widely by the American press. Some newspapers were outraged and suggested retaliation such as barring French wines. One editorial said gravely:
France is under a solemn obligation to the United States, as a matter of honor and gratitude for our having saved her independence in two terrible wars, and our having expended so much American wealth for her sake in peacetime, to refrain from enacting any measure . . . that would disclose to us . . . that she is unmindful of America's immeasurable sacrifices and generosity.[78]
Another paper cast the affair as part of the global ideological struggle:
You can't spread the doctrines of Marx among people who drink Coca-Cola. . . . The dark principles of revolution and a rising proletariat may be expounded over a bottle of vodka on a scarred table, or even a bottle of brandy; but it is utterly fantastic to imagine two men stepping up to a soda fountain and ordering a couple of Cokes in which to toast the downfall of their capitalist oppressors.[79]
Others made fun of the affair and called it "a tempest in a glass of Coke." One member of Congress announced rather crudely that if the French would drink Coke it would give them just what they needed since the war—"a good belch."[80] More perceptive observers recognized that Coca-Cola threatened French sensibilities. One such editorialist who did not approve of the National Assembly's regulation also noted that the Coca-Cola Company had been tactless in presenting its product to a people who had become hypersensitive about their way of life since the war. The day when "opposite Notre Dame there is a poster of 'The Pause that Refreshes' and on restaurant tables one sees as many Coke bottles as carafes of red wine, it will be not only the French, but also Americans, who will feel poorer."[81]
From Washington the French ambassador alerted Paris about how the Coca-Cola affair, especially Farley's remarks, had enflamed American public opinion and might endanger economic aid. Outright prohibition, he warned, would be interpreted as "a sign of hostility toward the United States."[82] Indeed, the Quai d'Orsay took the American reaction to the
Coca-Cola affair seriously because of its possible impact on Marshall Plan credits.[83] The foreign ministry was aware that the Coca-Cola Company exercised powerful influence on American opinion.[84] In April 1950 the Bidault government quietly lifted the embargo but asked Coca-Cola Export to exercise discretion and limit such exports to reasonable needs.[85]
In the French press a few critics grasped the full significance of the affair. The neutralist Catholic newspaper Témoignage chrétien gave credit to the Marshall Plan for French recovery yet noted "the fear, the worrisome rumors that the Americans are taking advantage of their role as lenders to stick their noses in our domestic affairs."[86] "Not content with supervising the distribution and use of Marshall credits—which is normal—the countless army of ERP [Marshall Plan] bureaucrats has assumed the right to monitor—and to correct—all aspects of our economy and even our policies." The journal enumerated incidents of American threats that would "lead France straight, if we don't guard against it, to pure and simple subjection." "If we are a tired people, we are not an inferior people, a colonial people." How do the Americans treat us?
[as] children who know nothing because we are ignorant of the "American way of life." That the Americans teach us—like nursery-school children—about the civilization of chewing gum, Coca-Cola, and literature in the form of aspirin tablets would be childish if it weren't so exasperating.
Let's not exaggerate, Témoignage chrétien concluded. Coca-Cola is not a poison and it's less dangerous than Pernod. Yet "we must call a spade a spade and label Coca-Cola for what it is—the avant garde of an offensive aimed at economic colonization against which we feel it's our duty to struggle."
Le Monde, like the Catholic journal, explored the symbolic quality of the affair. Beuve-Beuve-Méry revealed his own aversion for American society in the attention his paper gave to Coca-Cola. Robert Escarpit, who often wrote for the paper, contributed a wry article entitled "Coca-colonisation" in which he observed:
Conquerors who have tried to assimilate other peoples have generally attacked their languages, their schools, and their religions. They were mistaken. The most vulnerable point is the national beverage. Wine is the most ancient feature of France. It precedes religion and language; it has survived all kinds of regimes. It has unified the nation.[87]
Here we have Frenchness defined as the fruit of the vine.
In its major essay on the affair, Le Monde argued that Coca-Cola represented the coming American commercial and cultural invasion. Already "Chryslers and Buicks speed down our roads; American tractors furrow our fields; Frigidaires keep our food cold; stockings 'made by Du Pont' sheathe the legs of our stylish women."[88] But why, Le Monde asked, given this profusion of American products, has Coca-Cola been singled out for such attention? The answer lay not with charges about spies or dangers to public health. "What the French criticize is less Coca-Cola than its orchestration, less the drink itself, than the civilization—or as they like to say, the style of life—of which it is the symbol." The marketing campaign for Coca-Cola submerged the consumer with American-style "propaganda," covering walls with signs and storefronts with neon lights (figs. 7, 8). America has already sent us several fads, mused the reading public, some of which are more threatening than others because they affect the life of the mind—the book digest and the sensational press. These bad habits have spread almost unopposed. What is now at stake is "the moral landscape of France." In mock solemnity the newspaper ran an article entitled "To Die for Coca-Cola" that noted: "We have accepted chewing gum and Cecil B. De Mille, Reader's Digest, and be-bop. It's over soft drinks that the conflict has erupted. Coca-Cola seems to be the Danzig of European culture. After Coca-Cola, holà ."[89]Le Monde admitted that the Coca-Cola Company could legitimately feel that it was being unjustly persecuted. Yet as Témoignage chrétien did, this paper expressed a sense of foreboding—Americanization was on its way and France might well be the worse for it.
The international quarrel over Coca-Cola subsided as quickly as it had begun. Before 1950 was over the affair, at least for politicians, officials, and the press, seemed forgotten. In June the upper house of parliament, the Conseil de la République, reviewed and unanimously rejected the assembly's proposed regulation of nonalcoholic beverages. The upper house found Boulet's proposal unnecessary and prejudicial to relations with the United States; in general the senators took a more dispassionate view of the affair than the lower house. Léo Hamon remarked, "When it's a question of beverages, it's wise to trust the palates of the French and it's desirable to conserve our energy for more serious issues."[90] Another senator noted that the assembly's bill made France seem singularly "disagreeable" after accepting so much American aid; he denounced the cowardly approach to banning the drink: "It's not worthy of France and will be no honor in the annals of parliament." The Conseil's rejection
7. A prominent ballerina sips Coca-Cola at the base of the Eiffel Tower.
(Courtesy the Coca-Cola Company)
forced a second reading of the bill in the assembly, which promptly passed the regulation once more and thus made it law in August 1950. The so-called anti-Coca-Cola bill authorized the government, acting on scientific advice, to draw up new regulations for beverages made from vegetable extracts. But the experts procrastinated in setting standards and subsequent centrist governments delayed issuing new regulations based on the Boulet bill.
In 1951 the Ministry of Agriculture issued its interpretation of the health code, concluding that the soft drink conformed to French law. But the Ministry of Public Health balked. Farley blamed Communist officials in the health bureaucracy for its continued obstructionism while the ministry refused to relent until the legal actions were settled.[91]
8. The "Pause that Refreshes" on the Seine. (Courtesy the Coca-Cola
Company)
After a series of scientific tests of the drink's ingredients found it to be neither fraudulent nor in violation of the existing code, a magistrate ordered a non-lieu in September 1952. The department for the repression of frauds, which had initiated the suit, accepted the decision; then the wine and fruit juice interests appealed and forced further tests, which again cleared the drink. Finally in December 1953 an appeals court confirmed the non-lieu and thus terminated legal action. Coca-Cola was found to be free from violating all existing codes and the company was convinced the Boulet legislation was not a serious threat.[92] Coca-Cola Export rejoiced in its "handsome victory" but refrained from publicity, preferring to let the matter rest as long as its opponents "hold their peace."[93]
Why did Coca-Cola's enemies fail? The Atlanta company generated enormous pressure to counter its opponents' efforts, mounting a press campaign, winning the intervention of the State Department, and convincing the French foreign office. It also lobbied forcefully within the government, the bureaucracy, and the legislature. The governments of the Fourth Republic tried to balance between the Americans and the domestic opposition generated by the Communists and the beverage interests and some of its own ministries, but eventually conceded to the Americans. Other than the Communists and the beverage interests there was not, despite all the noise, any serious support for banning Coca-Cola. Once the Communist party had exhausted the propaganda value of the issue and once the winegrowers and others had lost their fear of the American drink, no one remained to champion the fight. In addition, the Coca-Cola Company won all the battles waged against it in the courts. It also moved quickly to establish its operations in France and present its opponents with a fait accompli. By 1952 the drink had moved outside cafés and was available in offices and factories.
Nevertheless, at the cultural level the affair survived. A poll of 1953 reported that only 17 percent of the French liked Coca-Cola either "well enough" or "a lot" while 61 percent said "not at all."[94] Although Coca-Cola expanded in France after the affair, it was never accepted as readily as elsewhere in Western Europe. On a per capita basis the French, even today, continue to drink less Coca-Cola than any other Western European people.[95] Coca-Cola remained a symbol of Americanization and many French families continued to believe the drink was distasteful and possibly harmful. But the "Pause that Refreshes" ceased to be an economic, ideological, or patriotic issue that captured national attention. It became a matter of personal taste or private sentiments about America or consumer society. Even the Communist party eventually had a change of heart, or a loss of memory, and in time its publications carried ads that read: "Drink Coca-Cola: Coca-Cola is the One."
In retrospect the war over Coca-Cola was a symbolic controversy between France and America. Its emotional energy derived from French fear of growing American domination, in a political, economic, and cultural sense, during a bleak phase of French trade and a tense moment of the Cold War. The Communist party and beverage interests were able to exploit concern, at least among politicians, officials, journalists, and, to a degree, among the public about American intrusion into French affairs and American challenges to French traditions of consumption and culture. Coca-Cola aggressively announced the arrival of consumer
society at a time when the French were not ready to deal with it. Indeed the Coca-Cola Company was a forerunner of those American multinationals that were to descend on France and provoke another, similar, phobia about American economic imperialism in the 1960s. For all those who opposed the entry of Coca-Cola the affair was, in one form or another, a tiny effort at national self-assertion, a gesture that France might find a "third way" in the Cold War, at a time when the nation had little room to maneuver. As one journalist summed up, "For us fortunate tipplers, the wine of France will do. Neither Coca-Cola, nor vodka."[96]
The first wave of postwar anti-Americanism was a product of the early Cold War years. It did not represent the entire intellectual community since there were those who defended the Atlantic alliance and even the American way of life. But Communist militants and prestigious left-wing intellectuals, who were inspired by socialist or Christian principles and who edited key newspapers and reviews, tapped widespread uneasiness about American presence and policy; they perceived a popular desire for national assertiveness to mount a noisy show of independence from and criticism of the United States. Later in the 1950s, as Washington's influence over French policy weakened and as the Soviet Union's reputation as a progressive force diminished, these two sources of anti-Americanism declined.
But anti-Americanism survived because it had other roots and dimensions. The debate about the American model continued because this was a discussion among the French about their future. It was a debate about modernity, independence, and national identity—issues that would continue to trouble the French even as the days of McCarthyism and Stalin receded along with the danger of the Cold War becoming a hot war.