RESEARCH General Arts

FRANCO-AMERICAN RELATIONS
Book chronicles cultural wars between France and United States

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

5/1/2001

Photo by Bill Wiegand In his new book, "French Resistance: The French-American Culture Wars" (University of Minnesota Press), Jean-Philippe Mathy offers a salvo-by-salvo analysis of the culture wars now being fought by the intellectuals and journalists of both countries.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — While nearly 3 million Americans travel to France each year, and more than a million French citizens come to U.S. shores annually, it is unlikely that many of the tourists realize that they are entering enemy territory. In his new book, "French Resistance: The French-American Culture Wars" (University of Minnesota Press), Jean-Philippe Mathy offers a salvo-by-salvo analysis of the culture wars now being fought by the intellectuals and journalists of both countries.

Focusing on several controversies that have rocked influential factions in both nations, Mathy, a professor of French at the University of Illinois, explores the ways in which each culture "represents" the other – whether it be in the media, in films or in dense academic tracts. He is particularly interested in how different conceptions of liberalism, democratic pluralism and republicanism figure into these representations.

The great proliferation of American culture into France by means of language, McDonald's, blue jeans, etc., has been a major thorn. According to Mathy, American consumer culture has turned Europe "into what some describe as a simulacrum of the American experience." But the problems go deeper.

Americanization now threatens French society on all fronts, he wrote. "Economically, it turns citizens into individualistic consumers and subjects the national economy to the whim of transnational corporations; culturally, it debases the high standards of the indigenous aesthetic canons, displacing Versailles with Disneyland; politically, it dissolves the shared values of citizenship into a neoromantic celebration of diversity. " Diversity and multiculturalism are now chief areas of tension.

The French, with a growing immigrant population, are seen by many Americans as being indifferent to ethnic identity – even developing a "neoracist consensus," while the Americans are seen as being ultra-sensitive to diversity. Mathy concedes that the disparate critics of Gallic universalism agree on one thing: "French culture is incompatible with a tolerant multiracial liberal democracy of the kind that is currently being experimented with in Britain and the United States."

Thus, Mathy wrote, although "liberalism" and "differentialism" have replaced "capitalism" and "imperialism" as "the labels of choice to stigmatize all that is wrong with the American way of life," the complaint remains much the same: "Anglo-American obsession with individual rights has finally reached a point where it undermines liberal society, threatening individual freedom itself."

Still, Mathy argues that the two countries "not only face similar challenges, but also mobilize similar, often identical, philosophical and political resources when it comes to closing the gap between their republican-democratic principles and national histories of persecution of individuals and groups on the basis of ethnicity, religion, national origin and past colonial status."

He sees signs of growing liberalization in France, for example, in the decline of communism, the end of government monopoly of the electronic media and the growing independence of the judiciary. These developments "have aligned France more than ever with North American democracy," he said.