Is Paris Seething?
Anti-Americanism is on the rise — with the
help of the French press
If you want to know what an influential sector of French opinion currently thinks of the U.S., look at the October issue of Le Monde Diplomatique — a succursal of the famous Paris daily with a circulation of about 400,000. You could compare it to the New York Review of Books, except that LMD is driving an increasingly powerful movement that aspires to reshape the French Left, which is searching desperately for ideas that might bring it back to power. The central idea here is that what's happening in the U.S. better not happen to France.
Le Monde Diplomatique hardly pulls its punches with the U.S. A front-page editorial by the journal's director, Ignacio Ramonet, cites George Bush's justification for war with Iraq and comments, "This doctrine re-establishes the right to ‘preventive war' that Hitler applied in 1941 against the Soviet Union, and Japan the same year at Pearl Harbor against the U.S." This issue, themed "Tempting Precipice," contains article after article denouncing the U.S., for its imperial designs, its absence of social security and justice, and so on, in an appalled — and, for an American, inescapably appalling — litany. Is that all there is to us?
Saying a kind word for the U.S. is an increasingly risky business in Paris these days. After the World Trade Center attack, a whopping 70 percent of the French sympathized with the U.S. The general mood was caught by Le Monde's director Jean-Marie Colombani in a front-page editorial that deliberately paraphrased John F. Kennedy in Berlin: WE ARE ALL AMERICANS. But that remark, from a journalist who is often unsparing in his view of U.S. policy, also generated some sharp criticism in France. (Colombani did not return calls and e-mails asking for comment.) And less than a year later, a Taylor Nelson Sofres survey reports that two-thirds of the French are against war with Iraq, and fully 78 percent of them think that America's overthrowing Saddam Hussein would do nothing to abate international terrorism, or could even increase it. Numbers like that leapfrog France's Left-Right divide, which is why the political analyst Alain Duhamel concluded: "Everything indicates that in France, the U.S. has lost the battle of public opinion."
That battle is now raging everywhere, from the business pages, where the daily Libération gives prominent play to ANTI-AIDS MILITANTS IN GLOBAL STRUGGLE AGAINST COCA-COLA, to arts and culture supplements, as Le Monde's arts supplement, Aden, gives its cover page to the American theater director Peter Sellars's charge that the U.S. response to terrorism "simply creates more and more refugees and exiles." America-bashing is something it wasn't even a year ago: utterly pervasive.
The culture pages are where this battle started heating up, twenty years ago. That was when a former minister of culture, Jack Lang launched his crusade against American "cultural imperialism," with the enthusiastic backing of France's filmmakers, terrified by Hollywood's encroachment on their turf; and Le Monde's arts pages, which on one occasion approvingly quoted French film critics who compared Hollywood's quest for market share to the Nazis' dreams of domination. Among the beneficiaries of this panic is Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the extreme right National Front. Long before his party rode fears of foreigners into the final round of France's 2002 presidential election, his ideologues redefined imported American TV shows as "cathode-tube immigration."
The notion that French culture and identity face extinction from foreign (and mainly American) enemies is now an unquestioned cliché in the French press — including the food supplements, where the center-right weekly Le Point characterizes provincial cuisine as "resistance" (as in World War II) to globalization. That theme was forged by the farmer-activist José Bové, who has just been sentenced to fourteen months in prison for destroying crops of genetically modified grain. He has appealed to President Jacques Chirac for a pardon with the editorial support of Le Monde, which argues that he has "encouraged a wide reflection on grave questions, from GMOs to ‘malbouffe'" — American-style junk food. By the way, Bové previously tore down a McDonald's.
There is still some sympathy for us in France's tightly-woven intellectual and media circles, as shown by the historian Jean-François Revel's bestselling book, L'Obsession anti-Américaine. Writes Revel: "This is what the U.S. does for us: It consoles us for our failures by supporting the fable that it's doing even worse than we are — and that what goes wrong here comes from there." (The bizarre circumstances of George W. Bush's election, for example, covered in Paris with paperback-thriller lingo — A CALAMITOUS SCENARIO THAT REVEALS THE RIPS IN THE HYPER-POWER, headlined the leading newsweekly, L'Express — offered distraction from a massive electoral fraud in Paris.) And even Ramonet and his colleagues at Le Monde Diplomatique have gone out of their way to defend American critics of France — including this writer, when my investigative reports here angered powerful people.
I mention this to make the point that what's happening here can't always be reduced to knee-jerk anti-Americanism — what one Paris intellectual calls "the racism of cretins." There is some of that in Paris, certainly. During the war in Kosovo in the spring of 1999 — when suddenly our planes were not just parked around Europe, but bombing it — the director of the Picasso Museum, Jean Clair, identified Pentagon doctrine with the Nazi annihilation of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War in a front-page article for Le Monde. U.S. policy, he wrote, was that "civilians will be the first attacked and destroyed." Clair thus inversed the gulf war strategies of Colonel John Warden: bombers should first target enemy leaders and infrastructure, not civilians.
The "N" word, you may notice, is coming up often. It came up again in April 2000, when Yahoo! Inc. was charged in a Paris court with allowing access to online auctions of Nazi memorabilia, the sale of which is illegal from France. In Libération, plaintiff Marc Knobel blasted Yahoo! for "normalizing Nazism on the Net." U.S. support for Israel is likewise increasingly taken as sympathy for barbarism. Watching the state-owned France Télévision's coverage of the antiglobalization rally at Florence in November, I saw, without narration, an image of a protestor holding a sign that read: "U.S. and Israel: The Real Terrorists."
I met Ramonet — a mustachioed guy in professorial corduroys — just after the Kosovo war. His journal did an excellent job of exposing Slobodan Milosevic's war crimes, while arguing that American motives for stopping him were based more on realpolitik than humanitarianism. I said: "I don't understand why you're helping me. You're not exactly tender with Americans." He replied, "But I'm not anti-American."
But he's certainly against the world the U.S. is shaping. Ramonet believes that globalization, driven largely (though not exclusively) by business in the U.S., is creating the prototype for a new form of totalitarianism. He writes: "This new hypnotizer breaks and enters into our thoughts and grafts ideas there that don't belong to us . . . not by the threat of punishment, but by betting on our thirst for pleasure." In other words, free enterprise promises to make everyone in the world richer and happier, if only they will become like America. But Ramonet and his colleagues do not want to become American, even if they could. They know our country well, and what they know frightens them.
The last generation of Americanophobes were mainly lofty philosophes and artistes who (like Clair) disdained boring facts, especially when they might make the U.S. look good. But the current generation speaks excellent English and works from firsthand knowledge of the American scene.
Ramonet's editor and commentator for American subjects, Serge Halimi, spent seven years in the University of California at Berkeley. (I worked with him on two articles for Le Monde Diplomatique, and found him a model editor.) Halimi says frankly that his real concern isn't the U.S., it is "the type of society we want to see taking root in France." Or more exactly, do not want to see, judging from a Taylor Nelson Sofres survey released in September that listed, in order, the five traits of the U.S. most prominent in the minds of the French: power, violence, inequality, wealth, and racism. Those same images recur constantly in Halimi's articles.
Halimi also wrote a famous book denouncing the failings of the French media to play their role of a counterweight to officialdom, ironically entitled Les Nouveaux chiens de garde ("the new watchdogs"). That made him plenty of enemies, but he claims that criticizing the U.S. doesn't add to his popularity. "It's difficult to exaggerate the influence of the U.S. right now," he says. "America breathes directly on our social life — from zero tolerance," which is now the official anticrime policy of Chirac's administration, "to privatization of state-owned enterprises and the culture of the individual. The U.S. is the image of modernism, of our future — and that gives them huge prescriptive power."
Does it? Philippe Val, the editor in chief of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and an on-air commentator for Radio France, thinks that the real intellectual power in Paris now belongs to the "critical Left," meaning Halimi and his allies. Emmanuel Todd, author of a highly regarded book on American power called Après l'empire (After the Empire), who did his studies at Cambridge in England, doesn't believe in America's prescriptive power either. Born in the Baby Boom, he remembers when American teenagers reached puberty two years before French kids, and stood a head taller. Europe had yet to recover from World War II, and the U.S. was the main force between Soviet tanks and the Eiffel Tower. Now the challenges facing the French are social, not military, and they see themselves as fitter than the merely fatter Americans. "We had a feeling of inferiority," says Todd. "But now, it's the opposite. To be European today no longer means being underdeveloped."
In many ways it means being ahead of the U.S. (as Boeing discovered in its competition with Airbus). It's been hard for American media to get a grip on this shift, partly because a big part of the story is in soft details. Thus The Wall Street Journal Europe's editorial pages denounce Brussels as a bureaucratic anti-business nightmare — but Brussels also contains bright people from the fifteen richest countries in Europe, plus Asia Minor, North Africa, India, and mainland Asia, come to get their piece of the world's biggest market. Their pooled energy didn't exist a decade ago, and it is radiating into capitals like Paris. Emmanuel Todd says that if Russia or Turkey had to choose between loyalty to the U.S. and the EU, they would pick Europe in a second, because their economies are far more dependent on the Europeans.
The EU member that has most conspicuously backed the U.S. in recent months, Tony Blair's United Kingdom, is also a historical enemy of France. At the right-wing Paris daily Le Figaro and provincial dailies like Le Telégramme, they still call England "perfidious Albion" in headlines. Todd thinks it very possible that France's centuries-old quarrel with the English — ever hear of the Hundred Years' War? How about Yorktown? — has been transferred in part to the U.S. In Paris media parlance, "Anglo-Saxon" indiscriminately describes both the English and Americans. Before the Reagan Revolution, there was a Thatcher Revolution in England, whose consequences — from de-nationalized trains that jump the tracks, to the front-page headline in Le Monde on November 3, IN LONDON, ONE CHILD OUT TWO ON THE THRESHOLD OF POVERTY — are given wide play in the French media.
A growing English-reading public is getting a much closer and more direct look at the U.S., as American media in Europe step up their competition for readers and viewers. The International Herald Tribune is losing its gatekeeper role for the French; you needn't read it anymore to get the American take on things. Le Monde now runs regular supplements reproducing original pages from The New York Times, Le Point translates coverage from Business Week, and CNN is widely available on cable TV. Halimi considers these marketing ploys an additional proof of French "subservience" to American values. But another effect is to make the locals more critical of the U.S.
Most important, the Internet provides Web-savvy writers like Halimi and his readers with what he calls "a mass of information direct from the U.S." He explains: "There is an American Left, not very present in the domestic debate in the U.S., but very present on Internet." Philippe Val has noticed it, too: "I think it's hard to criticize the U.S. better than the Americans do themselves."
There's one thing missing from this story so far, and we — you, me, and the U.S. — will someday have to deal with it. In a breathtakingly short time, the Bush administration has frightened the wits out of a country that used to be our friend — a picky, difficult friend, but a true one. Even Jean-François Revel, our outspoken ally, warns that "the necessity to contain the real or eventual excesses of the American superpower call for a critical vigilance on the part of the rest of the world, and the demand of participating in decisions that concern all countries." Revel adds that anti-Americanism is not the best way to get heard in Washington, but the implication remains that American power looks pretty excessive and exclusive lately.
Le Monde Diplomatique says it outright: "The campaign against Iraq is part of a global strategy, imposed in Washington by a small clique that misses the cold war, and founded on their vision of the strategic military, ideological, and economic interests of the U.S." Read: and only the U.S. A stunning 62 percent of the French agree with that sentiment, according to Taylor Nelson Sofres. Sixty-two percent of 60 million Frenchmen and women can be wrong, of course. We'll just have to see.
Meanwhile, don't hold your breath waiting for the French media to give us a break. They are telling their public what their public already believes. The anti-Americanism of the Paris media feeds that belief, sure — but if there were no audience for their stuff, writers like Ramonet and Halimi would not be the power players they are.
That doesn't mean we should ignore them, as we Americans
tend to do with hairy, badly dressed intellectuals. Paris is warning
that the whole world is watching us, now more than ever, and deeply
worries about what it sees. And that's new, too.
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