Mick Hartley

The BBC’s Justin Webb, on anti-Americanism:

Anti-Americanism was born in France. And here’s a fascinating fact: it was born well before the United States existed. It was not caused by Coca-Cola, or McDonald’s, or Hollywood or George W Bush.

The prevailing view among French academics throughout the 18th Century was that the New World was ghastly. It stank, it was too humid for life to prosper. And, as one European biologist put it: “Everything found there is degenerate or monstrous.”

In their heart of hearts, many French people still believe that to be true.

A French intellectual once compared the United States with Belgium. Wounding. But you see what he meant: the French capital has a grandeur about it that demands attention on the world stage. Belgium does not, nor does most of America…

In the heart of Paris, there is the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt, the man who helped defeat Nazi Germany and liberate Parisian streets, is celebrated here. And the point many French people make is that they would celebrate George W Bush, too, if they agreed with him. The source of anti-Americanism is plain they say. As one interviewee told us: “It’s the policies, Stupid.”

Well up to a point: in Paris there is plenty of evidence to be found that anti-Americanism is way more than that, that it’s not simply reasonable opposition to the things America does.

The kind of anti-Americanism fostered by French intellectuals down the centuries revolves around intense dislike of what America is – not what it does.

I’m not sure that I buy this. The unspoken sentiment behind much French anti-Americanism, surely, is the more profound and more ancient dislike of the English. If the French-Indian war in North America had gone France’s way, I doubt we’d be hearing this stuff about the ghastliness of the new world. It’s the fact that the US is Anglophone and follows the British rather than the French model that sticks in the throat. French contempt for American mercantilism, and the small-minded pursuit of wealth and liberty instead of a more Gallic pursuit of la gloire, is just an echo of that old “nation of shopkeepers” jibe. The French have been hating the English for far longer, and with greater venom, than they ever hated the Americans.

Indeed, the French in many ways love American culture, from jazz to Hollywood, even if that love sometimes takes a bizarre Jerry-Lewis-like form. And, witness de Tocqueville, they’re perfectly capable of celebrating the particularly vibrant style of American democracy.

As for the Avenue Franklin Roosevelt, well, there’s also an Avenue Winston Churchill, but I’d bet that most French would be more willing to pay generous tribute to the US role in their liberation than to the British role. As, come to that, would most Americans. The key figure in here is of course De Gaulle, who, having spent the best part of the war feeling humiliated in London, decided that the way forward for France was to set itself politically against les Anglo-Saxons. Not les Americains – les Anglo-Saxons.