Ask old Normans what their most terrible memories of the Second World War are, they will answer unanimously: the American bombings of 1944. Around 20,000 civilians perished between June 6 and September 12, the day of the liberation of the stronghold. Le Havre, to which must be added 300,000 victims. On December 31, 1945, an article from life is alarmed that the GIs, “far from being acclaimed as liberators”, are considered by the people of Le Havre as “malicious emissaries” distributing “food and sweets to the only hungry women who could pay them in return” and treating the local population as “inferior beings”. The spectacle of the debauchery of mechanical machines, the organization and the speed of execution of the US Army further overwhelm the French, who see in the mirror their underdevelopment.
Alongside this circumstantial anti-Americanism, Vichy propaganda, and even more so the collaboration press, continue to stigmatize “Jewish America” and “the most distressing spiritual mediocrity” of this nation, adopting clichés which have their roots one hundred and fifty years earlier, in a mixture of fascination and repulsion. Because anti-Americanism is a “French tradition”, observes Philippe Roger in The American enemy (2002).
Between contempt and fear
The monarchy may have delegated its best officers, La Fayette and Rochambeau at the head, during the war of independence of the United States, the aristocracy has nothing but contempt for the inhabitants of “this infinite backwater” (Buffon). “To have elegance in taste, you first need it in morals,” laments Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville’s traveling companion. What are these people “without opera”, Stendhal indignantly? From rusticity to vulgarity, from rudeness to ignorance, there is only one step, quickly taken.
The future author of Democracy in America (1835) is one of the few to avoid clichés. He nourishes empathy for this society of simplicity and equality, where everything seems possible when, conversely, France is corseted in a society of orders and court. Rather than contempt, it is an anguish that Tocqueville feels. What if America was an anticipation of the future face of France, in its worst aspects: the cult of money, utilitarianism, standardization and, finally, boredom?
This mixture of contempt and fear continued to fuel the anti-Americanism of the interwar period. Two works illustrate this state of mind. In 1927, André Siegfried, one of the “fathers” of French political science, published The United States today. Dazzled by this society which invents “common consumption” and comfort, he is troubled by this “theocracy of performance” which risks annihilating the individual in the name of “standardization”. In turn, the future academician Georges Duhamel published Scenes from future life (1930), denouncing jumble the jazz of “monotone Negroes”, cinema, “leisure good for the ignorant”. This bestseller became the bible of anti-Americanism. She inspires Hergé for his Tintin in America (1931), then Céline for journey to the Edge of the Night (1932).
Animosity towards the former British colony took a new turn as it became a major player on the international scene: from 1898, after its victory in Cuba against Spain, a European power, then from 1917, when General Pershing’s troops landed on the Old Continent and, soon, President Wilson claimed to be regimenting the world order. But it was at the end of the Second World War that the United States fully became a target of choice. Until now, they had been criticized for intervening late, noted the historian Jean-Baptiste Duroselle. From now on, it will be to do it too often.
Anti-imperialist struggle
From 1945, in the midst of the Cold War, anti-Americanism was covered in political trappings. The communists are on the front line. Using clever subterfuge, they claim to lead the fight for pacifism, supposedly represented by the USSR, and relayed in Europe by the “useful idiots” of the Stockholm Appeal and the Peace Movement, against the “warmongers” of a “rotten” West. In 1952, the PCF organized a massive demonstration against “Ridgway the Plague”, the American general wrongly accused of using bacteriological weapons during the Korean War.
From the 1960s, anti-imperialist rhetoric was nourished by United States interventions in Vietnam and Latin America (Guatemala, Cuba, Santo Domingo, Chile, Argentina), but also by the fight against the plundering of the country’s resources. Third World. The far left takes up these themes. She will soon add that of the United States-Israel “collusion”, as the Palestinian question and hatred of “Zionists” becomes the ultimate cause.
Intellectuals are jumping on the bandwagon. In 1953, Sartre warned: “Be careful, America has rabies.” He denounces the “legal lynching” of the Rosenberg couple, accused of atomic espionage – of which they have since been formally found guilty. The extremism of the “witch hunt” launched by Senator McCarthy makes the task of the author of the Dirty hands, just as the abuses of the American army in the Indochinese peninsula prompted him to accept the presidency of the Russell tribunal in 1967 to judge American “war crimes”. However, Sartre admits his admiration for American cinema and writers like Dos Passos and Faulkner. This is not the case for all his peers, up to the socialist Minister of Culture Jack Lang who will defend “a French cultural exception”, all against American “mass culture”.
The intellectual far right is in tune. Between the “communist plague” and the “Yankee cholera”, Alain de Benoist chooses the first, because “the main enemy” is “bourgeois liberalism and the Atlantic-American West, of which social democracy does not is one of the most dangerous substitutes. “Having already reduced blacks to slavery, genocided the Indians, atomized the Japanese and napalmed the Vietnamese, continues the director of the magazine Elementsit was obviously logical that the United States would one day want to deal with the Arabs.” The political extreme right is not left out, but it focuses its detestation on America’s support for nationalism Algerian, against the colonial cause, in order to better exercise its power in the Mediterranean.
Political anti-Americanism in action is ultimately reduced to that of General de Gaulle. It is the least ideological and the least passionate. Based on the refusal of the condominium of the Russian and American “superpowers”, it translates on the military level into the policy of strategic independence based on French nuclear weapons, then the withdrawal of NATO’s integrated command (1966). In foreign policy, he encourages dialogue with Moscow and the Third World and denounces both the intervention in Vietnam and the hegemony of the dollar in the monetary system. Across the Atlantic, the General’s declarations are considered unfriendly, but Washington knows how to count on the loyalty of Paris in each crisis, whether it is the second Berlin crisis, in 1961, or that of the rockets, in Cuba, in 1962.
In turn the incarnation of nationalism against imperialism, of socialism against capitalism, of pacifism against warmongering, of the demand for identity against homogenization, anti-Americanism trades in masks, notes Philippe Roger. It is in this astonishing plasticity that this sad passion draws its durability.
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