THE AMERICAN ENEMY: The History of French Anti-Americanism
by Philippe Roger
translated by Sharon Bowman
When the two hijacked planes ploughed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, the admired French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard spoke of his “prodigious jubilation” at the sight. In the context of Philippe Roger’s painstaking history of French loathing of America, this reaction from the quintessential “French intellectual” comes as no surprise.
In the past 250 years or so, the United States has frequently given observers reason to dislike or distrust it; the achievement of Professor Roger’s book is to show that French hostility to the United States is different from the misgivings of other countries and is ultimately not much influenced by diplomatic disagreements or even by historical events. In France, hatred of America is the default setting of the majority and needs only occasional refreshment from “intellectuals”. It is more than a political opinion: it is a unifying factor at times of national division. And, like certain mental illnesses, it has a delusional system that is self-sufficient, uncoupled from fact.
Read the whole review here.
This is an important book, one that should be widely read in this country. It provides plausible explanations for many anti-American tropes of French political discourse that have baffled Americans, myself included. One interesting point I hadn't realized before is that anti-American sentiment moved from the margins to the center of French political culture in response to the Spanish-American war, which the French saw as a threat to their own empire. We should also note that the book was written before the Iraq invasion and its conclusions are in no way altered by that experience.
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