Candace:

I’ve been working my way through the review copy of Monsieur Higonnet’s book as well. You can tell his specialty is not U.S. history: One of the most hilarious aspects of the book is how pervasive parenthetical asides about and comparisons to France are–as if it’s at the center of world history. (Did you know that James Fenimore Cooper lived in France for a couple years, and really just stole all his ideas from there?!)

While Higonnet is a perfectly good French historian, if a bit of a French chauvinist, you’ve got to wonder what planet he’s been living on to claim Bush as an the agent of “social exclusion,” and thereby ignore the centerpieces of his domestic agenda: No Child Left Behind and immigration reform.

He also claims Bush “seized on the idea of a ‘War on Terror’ in order to realize his dream of a softly fascistic America.” Riiiigggghhhttt. If this were true, wouldn’t Patrice Higonnet have been deported by now?

Also, I seem to remember Mark Molesky–co-author with PBCs’ own John Miller of Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America’s Disastrous Relationship with France–actually got Prof. Higonnet to read and offer comment on a draft of the book’s first chapter once!

People who can read French might check out (for their polemical humor value) his notes-from-the-inside style op-eds in the French paper Liberation. One is titled “Sooner or later, Europe must oppose American world politics”; another, “The Triumph of American Fundamentalism: Each day finds America more powerful, more hard-nosed, more religious, puritain, and nationalistic.”