In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The French Way: How France Embraced and Rejected American Values and Power by Richard F. Kuisel
  • Gino Raymond
The French Way: How France Embraced and Rejected American Values and Power. By Richard F. Kuisel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. xviii + 487 pp., ill.

The fundamental paradox that Richard Kuisel addresses in The French Way is one that constantly fascinates and sometimes amuses cultural observers of France: how can the country be so susceptible to Americanization while at the same time succumbing to waves of anti-Americanism? Kuisel chooses as his time frame the last two decades of the twentieth century and reminds us of the powerful strands of anti-Americanism that for different reasons were woven into both Gaullism and left-wing ideology in France until the mid-1970s, when Gaullism’s natural bourgeois constituency adopted the consumer lifestyle that had been pioneered across the Atlantic, while the workers of France could no longer be persuaded to invest their faith in the Soviet socialist utopia. Thereafter, the paradoxes that characterize the Franco-American relationship accumulated as the era of socialist power under François Mitterrand was marked by the turn towards economic liberalism, after the failed experiment in state-led economic growth in 1981–82. The shift towards transatlantic solutions to the conundrum of slow growth was matched by the Americanization of cultural tastes. By 1984 the Culture Minister Jack Lang had rowed back from his castigation of American cultural imperialism in his speech at the 1982 UNESCO conference in Mexico City: opening a French film festival in New York, he admitted to having made a mistake and assured his audience that President Mitterrand was an avid viewer of the US series Dallas. Moreover, the decision by the Disney Corporation in 1985 to site its European theme park just outside Paris was greeted as a victory for France. The asymmetrical reality of France’s relationship with the USA was illustrated in 1989 with the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Mitterrand’s attempts to prevent the new Europe falling under the tutelage of an American-dominated NATO failed, and under his successor Jacques Chirac the challenge of positioning France vis-à-vis the world’s only ‘hyperpower’ was coloured by the anxiety that France was ill-equipped for the challenge of globalization, and this found expression in the popular campaigns against American multinationals like McDonald’s and Monsanto. Kuisel offers a highly engaging and meticulously documented analysis, but admits that there are risks for a historian in focusing on such a recent and narrow period. The love–hate relationship took another notable twist after the low point occasioned by the second Iraq War, when, in Nicolas Sarkozy, the Fifth Republic had its most ‘American’ of presidents, in both style and economic orientation, until, of course, he rediscovered the virtues of French dirigisme after the financial crisis that had started in Wall Street. In spite of France’s increasing European preoccupations, Kuisel is, however, very persuasive in elucidating why the USA serves as an [End Page 297] indispensable foil for France. No country other than the US has the ‘manifest destiny’ of imparting freedom and democracy to the world, and no country other than France is imbued with a universal ‘civilizing mission’.

Gino Raymond
University of Bristol
...

pdf

Share