March 21, 2006, 7:41 a.m.
Croak, Monsieur
Mon Dieu! Why are Americans allowed to live?

By Denis Boyles

Beating up on France is an amusement that, while still immensely popular among young French Muslims, has lost its charm for most Americans. As the author of what I think is a first-rate bash of the French élite, I say this with tremendous sorrow. Yet I recognize that while there may be 50 million French jokes, we've heard them all. Besides, it takes more than one weasel to make an axis. We've moved on, as they say.

That is not true for the French, of course. For while your run-of-the-mill French roast is now passé to us, the French passion for anti-Americanism is still very much alive and well and living in Paris: French politicians still parade behind the anti-American banners. French diplomacy still is based on undermining American interests. Cartoons in French newspapers still routinely portray Uncle Sam as a baby-killer and worse. One can't help but feel that in view of the recent Islamic interest in caricature if we could only adjust our religious traditions and our taste in headgear, French cartoonists, at least, would tone it down. But even then, it would never happen. To see why, turn to Philippe Roger's robust, erudite, and depressingly detailed survey, The American Enemy: A Story of French Anti-Americanism.

A French State of Mind

What melancholy slapstick it is: In Roger's brilliant, chronological retelling, the permanent and quasi-official hatred of America has many, many chapters, each zanier than the last, each stretching reason farther and farther until the whole enterprise snaps and caroms off into the present-day silliness we all feel every time we see smiling Jacques Chirac looming in the background of an international summit looking for all the world like an office-party drunk. These bouts of irrationality shouldn't surprise us, of course. After all, as Roger shows, French anti-Americanism isn't predicated on a critique of a specific policy — say, tariffs or Iraq or cultural theories — nor even on a particular parsing of history or politics. Instead, it's a general, all-over, feel-good kind of hatred, one that lives in a state of sublime emotional inebriation on several levels at once.

On a personal level, French people who hate America are like American people who hate TV — and not just a particular program, but the invention itself: They loathe it because loathing it makes them feel superior.

On an economic and cultural level, it's the deep jealousy felt by a failed pessimist when confronted by a successful optimist. This is why France is the special love of American liberals.

On a political and social level it has more in common with anti-Semitism, since it's based on a kind of racial hatred of a people and a place: Perhaps hating America is for those for whom hating Jews just isn't enough.

But on any level, it's just goofier than a Sponge Bob weekend. As Paul Johnson noted not long ago in Commentary, "Among academics and intellectuals...[anti-Americanism] has more of the hallmarks of a mental disease."

Americans had to be convinced to even notice. In fact, it took the blow-up over Iraq to make most of us even aware that for more than two centuries anti-Americanism has been the prevailing European intellectual motif, adding a flourish to all those other nihilistic continental contributions to modern thought, including fascism, atheism, socialism, and Communism, all of which have been packaged at one time or another and delivered with the bundle of goods and services — ranging from exotic radio programs to free health care to free funerals — that Europeans have come to expect from their governments.

Parisians in America

That notion finds a certain sympathy on this side of the Atlantic. Government-as-provider is the default position of the disgruntled American left, for whom France often holds high the dim, plastic night-light of leftwing virtue. Betting on the French pony has caused the American left to pretzel itself around the obvious inanities of French political "thought" and to defend Yank-bashers in Paris with a tenacity unthinkable in defending, say, American GIs in Baghdad.

Why? Because American leftists, and especially our academic slackers, instinctively know that guys smart enough to think up existential atheism and deconstructionism must be right about the wrongs of American mainstream political philosophy and its attendant evils: individualism, faith-based morality, free markets, and the view that the government's job is to be as scarce as possible, since wherever government intrudes, incompetence follows. Many Americans work on the distinctly un-French assumption that making people too dependent on government competency as a means of staying alive is unwise, since inevitably something will come along that's so big, it overwhelms government services — say, a heat-wave like the one that killed 15,000 elderly French people in 2003, or the hurricane that struck New Orleans last August and sent hundreds of thousands running for their lives.

To think otherwise forces the Left to subscribe to the French translation of the social contract, and that's not easy. For starters, Francophiles must ignore the consequences of the country's century-long affection for serial insanity, including fiscal policies that induce financial stagnation and social policies that cripple self-reliance and diminish personal responsibility. Those who find ideological comfort in French anti-Americanism must remain silent on rampant racism and rising anti-Semitism. Above all they must remain indifferent to a foreignpolicy that's contingent on arms-peddling and undermining the international institutions they pretend to admire most — the EU, NATO, and, most spectacularly, the U.N. — while supporting genocide and famine in places like Rwanda and Darfur (and in pre-war Iraq, for that matter).

Breeding Madness

Certainly Roger, a professor at one of France's grandes écoles, doesn't pretend to defend something as hollow as anti-Americanism: In fact, if anything, The American Enemy is a 500-page case-study of a national madness. Or maybe it's a "genealogy," which is how the book's subtitle described it in 2002 when it was published in France (where it was a surprising, if ineffective, best-seller). After all, what began for Roger as a curious look at a rather narrow slice of anti-Americanism begat a full-blown family tree of Gallic lunacy, rooted firmly in French crackpot science of the 18th century — in which leading figures such as George-Louis Leclerc and the Comte du Buffon argued with Darwinian precision that life-forms originating in the New World were inferior. This notion was nourished by the European political and military collapses of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it continues today in the current Euro-obsession with moronic conspiracies, such as that described in Thierry Meyssan's French bestseller L'Effroyable imposture: Aucun avion ne s'est écrasé sur le Pentagone (The Horrifying Imposture: No airplane crashed into the Pentagon) "whose title sums up its absurdity," observes Roger, who was finishing his book in Manhattan the morning of September 11, 2001, and looked up to see one of the hijacked jets zooming over his 3rd Street flat.

After generations of elitist anti-Americanism, the United States is widely despised by every last farmhand and factory-worker in France. As Roger points out, the vigor of French anti-Americanism is now so "self-sustaining and self-sufficient" that when the U.S. led the invasion of Iraq, American popularity plummeted everywhere on the planet — except in France, where it was already so low there was no perceptible change in public opinion.

Moreover, as Roger's catalog makes clear, that hatred has existed whether the president is George Bush or George Washington. It exists regardless of where one sits on the political spectrum and it's not significantly affected by American interventions on France's behalf. Indeed, Roger spends a great deal of time examining how the insistence by the Americans on French repayment of World War I debt (debts France still refuses to honor, by the way), coming on the heels of the Spanish-American war, which was seen by France as a war on Europe, gained the U.S. enduring hatred, along with the anti-Semitic sobriquet "Uncle Shylock."

Today, the French despise us because we force-feed them cheeseburgers and mp3s and torture them by making them watch Angelina Jolie topless and also just because. "In its repetition and perpetuation," Roger writes, "French anti-Americanism must be analyzed as a tradition. It is a chain thrown across history: through it we are shackled, unbeknownst to ourselves, to a whole past of repugnance and repulsions." "Repugnance and repulsion" sounds like a French double-feature down at the art house, oui?

A French Solution

Anti-Americanism is invariably the way in which France defines itself. What it is to be French may be up for grabs, but for sure France is the non-America — thus Chirac's recent fascination with a French version of Google and a French version of CNN. Roger's hope is that if "French intellectuals" would abandon their habitual anti-Americanism, the thing might die of boredom. You can forget that, however, since Roger's solution would require French intellectuals not only to cease being French, but also to become intellectuals.

A more logical salvation for France lies in embracing those French thinkers who have long had an influence on America — Montesquieu, for example, and Tocqueville, both of whom have a great deal to say about the repugnant, repulsive sickness at the heart of France, and both of whom would be interested in the persistent elitism of French politics and what Tocqueville called the "degrading" consequences of using government as a vehicle for charity.

But unfortunately French eggheads don't read Tocqueville to see what he might have to say about France. So a more likely outcome is that over the next century, as Islamic immigrants over-run the Continent, French anti-Americanism will simply become a subspecies of Eurabian anti-Americanism — even while its mullahs shout from the minarets at Notre Dame that they are America's "traditional allies."

— Denis Boyles is author of Vile France: Fear, Duplicity, Cowardice and Cheese. He is presently working on a book about midwestern politics.

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