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Quelle est donc l'intrigue de ce premier opus? Un animal de compagnie? Finalement, Kimiko aux Enfers est un roman en demi-teinte. N'est-elle pas, au contraire, destructrice? Par extension, une autre question se dessine: Gabriel Montfort est un illustre avocat dont le fils, Lucas, souffre d'une affection cardiaque le conduisant vers la tombe.
Son enveloppe corporelle biologique? Les sentiments dont il fait preuve? En revanche, une chose est certaine: Lwa Racine N'y descendez jamais! Abigail Richardson continue de nous interpeller afin de nous narrer la suite de ses souveni NB: Abigail Richardson continue de nous interpeller afin de nous narrer la suite de ses souvenirs.
La Liste de Miss Zapping. Ferrand et son fils, apporte un bel exemple. Pourtant, il ne s'agit pas de narration omnisciente, puisque aucune information ne nous est servie artificiellement sur un plateau. Ainsi, comme tout le monde, elle ne devrait pas subir ces jugements peu charitables. C'est donc un personnage en demi-teinte, comme beaucoup d'autres dans l'histoire. La jeune fille n'avait que sept ans et se moqua de Pierre. Le Roi des fauves. Mais j'y reviendrai plus tard. Aby N'y descendez jamais, 1.
Tout d'abord, le racisme. Le lecteur assiste donc impuissant aux mauvais traitements que subit la petite fille. Une fois de plus, ABY retranscrit une souffrance encore existante de nos jours. Vestiges de neige Chasseuse de cristaux, 1. La jeune femme rencontra la Reine qui lui confia une importante mission, retrouver trois cristaux de pouvoir afin de sauver son fils gravement malade. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon. Alexa Actionable Analytics for the Web. AmazonGlobal Ship Orders Internationally. Amazon Inspire Digital Educational Resources.
Amazon Rapids Fun stories for kids on the go. Amazon Restaurants Food delivery from local restaurants. ComiXology Thousands of Digital Comics. East Dane Designer Men's Fashion. Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands. Withoutabox Submit to Film Festivals. Even England, in temporary control of most American possessions north of the Rio Grande following its victory in the Seven Years War, was somewhat dubious about the value of its conquests. On the other side of the treaty table, such a trade, however, was totally unacceptable to a "France desireux de conserver Saint-Domingue, la reine des ties sucrieres, firent que les 'arpents de neige' du Canada revinrent a l'Angleterre" Braudel Early travellers' books, such as Moeurs des Sauvages Americains and Histoire et Description generale de la Nouvelle France, avec le journal d'un voyage fait dans VAmerique septentrionale, were notable Age of Enlightenment bestsellers.
Much of this success can be attributed to the "sensational" elements contained in these accounts penned by explorers and—especially—missionaries. Jesuit militants never tired of telling their superiors about the "nakedness" and "savagery" of the "lost souls" whom they were attempting to save. Even clothed Indians seemed shamefully bare to these Catholic zealots. As one Jesuit disapprovingly sniffed, even the natives' winter furs " If their descriptions of Indian "licentiousness" were cloaked in terms calculated not to provoke too many explicitly concupiscent thoughts, these missionary wanderers felt no such compunction in regard to scenes of physical torture.
With a cold-blooded detachment that would 1 4 have done credit to Claude Levi-Strauss, one observer described the following sadistic procedure in almost surgical terms: French fascination with the "horrific" novelty of America can be found with equal facility in this revealing but anachronistic the speaker, after all, is a Florentine nobleman speaking in speech fragment from Alfred de Musset's historical play, Lorenzaccio It was precisely the kind of semi-legendary land that John Mandeville might have visited a century or two earlier.
In any event, it was altogether different—which is to say, both weaker and coarser—than Marco Polo's China. In Tzvetan Todorov's words, the early American "Other" appertained to the class of " Despite these initial impressions and motivations, French attitudes towards the new World began to change towards the end of the eighteenth century. In the wake of Napoleon's economically motivated dumping of France's last major American possessions, "les Francais," J. Gautier reminds us, "pouvaient regretter 'd'avoir perdu ce nouvel Eden auquel ils avaient laisse le doux nom de Louisiane Around the same time, " According to biographer Henri Troyat, even Honore de Balzac—arguably the major French writer of the early s who was least demonstrably impressed by the American mirage—was inspired by the sylvan romances of James Fenimore Cooper to turn the peasant insurrectionaries in his historical novel Les Chouans into "Peaux-Rouges" in the "Bocage normand" Troyat If the romance of America was in the process of giving way to the Romance of Orientalism, the New World was simultaneously metamorphosing into a new and only slightly less monstrous shape in Gallic imaginations.
America the horrible and magical was about to be replaced by America the modern and implicitly dangerous. As Fernand Braudel observed in Le temps du monde, "Accarian de Seronne voyait, des , se lever un 'Empire americain': This change, however, occurred gradually, and in a decidedly non-linear fashion. The immense popularity of Atala was in large measure responsible for this. A relatively small part of Chateaubriand's magnum opus La Genie du christianisme, a polemic in favour of an ultra-conservative interpretation of Roman Catholicism, Atala relied heavily 1 6 on the Jesuit Relations for descriptive passages and background colour.
While opinions differ as to whether Chateaubriand ever actually set foot in America—the late nineteenth-century French literary critic Joseph Bedier remained firmly convinced that he did not—the author's decision to rely on missionary chronicles was not entirely conditioned by his religious convictions. As already mentioned in the introduction to this dissertation, that massive work was almost entirely free of "fantastic" descriptions.
Father Marquette's contributions were particularly appealing to Chateaubriand. In , this Jesuit wrote "La Riuiere sur laquelle nous nous embarquames s'appelle MesKousing, elle est fort large, son fond est du sable Such reports mingle the same seductive mixture of ethnological exactitude and Eurocentric romance that one finds first in Atala, and then—a century and a half later—in Tristes tropiques.
Regardless of Chateaubriand's own familiarity with the Mississippi river, Marquette's description would be repeated almost verbatim in Atala because its narrative power was far more evocative than anything the author's own imagination could conceive. Not until very late in the twentieth century would this Jesuitical ethnology be largely expunged from French literary consciousness.
Equally appealing to Chateaubriand and his successors were the already cited Jesuit accounts of the Indian science of torture. These gory tableaux were an absolute godsend to the interlocking genres of 1 7 melodrama and grand guignol. This interest would doubtless have turned the first Americans into one-dimensional villains if the Indians' "innate" propensity for physical cruelty had not been counterbalanced by the great tenderness which, the Jesuit fathers disapprovingly noted, all "savages" displayed towards their undeserving young: Chateaubriand's integration of these sentimental opposites in Native protagonists contributed greatly to the invention of the "noble savage," a type much beloved by Rousseau and other eighteenth century progressives.
The Indian was not a demon, after all; he was a sort of capricious child or innocently murderous kitten. Ultimately, neither the Jesuits nor Chateaubriand were fated to mark out the boundaries of French discourse vis-a-vis the United States. For one thing, their ultra-Catholic religious views made them questionable judges of Native character and Protestant intention.
Missionary emphasis on moral uplift and Classical fascination with sylvan romance were culturally-determined blinders that successfully filtered out such key historical events as the decisive French naval intervention on behalf of the thirteen revolted colonies during the American Revolutionary War, and Britain's earlier expulsion of the Acadians. Being the first European to see the New World in its true colours was an honour historically reserved for Alexis de Tocqueville, a literary traveller who is as much esteemed for his nineteenth-century observations by contemporary American scholars as Stendhal's writings 1 8 of the same period are by modern Italian academics.
Around the time when Romanticism was gradually effacing Classicism in Europe, de Tocqueville reinvigorated the still virgin field of Franco-American studies with some much-needed scientific detachment. The author's most famous book, De la democratie en Amerique, was predicated on four interlocking ideas.
The first of these concepts related to democracy as a political institution; the second addressed the nature of revolution; the third concerned the relationship of individuals to institutions within the binding framework of social style and national character; the fourth—and to modern readers, the least convincing—was the thesis that God worked on the doings of men within the confines of a fatal circle of freedom and necessity.
Unlike many later French travellers, de Tocqueville was favourably impressed by the things that he saw in America. He wrote admiringly of the checks and balances that were essential to the American system of government, of the intelligence and worthiness of the average citizen, of the innovative genius of U. With great foresight, he saw the future parcelled out between American and Russian spheres of influence, and accurately predicted America's coming war with Mexico.
If he was not quite so prescient in regard to the War Between the States, he nonetheless pointed out many of the less obvious evils of Southern slavery, and the friction that these ills caused within the body politic. De Tocqueville has never put American backs up; indeed, he tends to make U. This was at least partly because a faint current of disdain frequently flowed beneath the onrush of his diegetic enthusiasms.
In true Hegelian fashion, power had travelled westwards once again. If America was the hope of the future, it was 24 also a threat to the glories of the past; as a land of universal liberty, it was paradoxically a threat to the higher form of individualism that Europe's collapsing class system had once bestowed on its appointed thinkers and artists. Towards the end of her first travel book, the author somewhat belatedly conceded, "Nous avons d'autres fagons que les Americains d'etre malheureux, d'etre inauthentiques, voila tout: Unlike most French writers, who disembarked from plane or ship in New York, Duhamel decided to start his journey in New Orleans, la plus francaise des villes americaines In this way he could acclimatize himself to the local customs, just as Borgia princes once accustomed themselves to poison by consuming ever larger quantities of arsenic at dinner. On the level of high culture in particular, European intellectuals continued to feel like top planetary dogs.
Comparisons such as the following are ubiquitous: Not for the first—and certainly not for the last—time, de Tocqueville contrasts Europe's quality with the New World's quantity. Although generally in favour of an expanded franchise in his native France, and a theoretical advocate of democracy, this articled republican is clearly troubled by the cultural cost such a transition might entail; in this regard, his views eerily prefigure the twentieth-century forebodings of Theodor W.
Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Developing on their own on the fringes of civilization, "Les Americains n'ont point d'ecole philosophique qui leur soit propre, et ils s'inquietent fort peu toutes celles qui visisent l'Europe, ils en savent a peine les noms" De la democratie en Amerique. De Tocqueville grimly noted the absence of elegant public buildings and heroic statuary in U. Although abundant everywhere, American newspapers were not, it seems, of particularly high quality. For every admission of political inferiority in this book, there is a qualifying expression of cultural superiority.
The statement below is a good example of the former: A prime sample of the latter runs as follows: De Tocqueville's views on American racial problems were fated to make the most lasting impression on French literary travellers. Because of his non-dogmatic Christian beliefs and aristocratic background, de Tocqueville's appreciation of American religious toleration and economic egalitarianism is greatly exaggerated. It is, for instance, hard to imagine period American Catholics, for the most part impressed into the worst-paying jobs and largely shut out of the liberal professions, agreeing with the following statement: It is equally difficult to conceive of cellar-dwelling industrial workers accepting the ensuing formula as fact: So clear-sighted in so many ways, de Tocqueville was strangely blind to the existence of an American class system.
The religiously outcast and the working poor could only react to those cheerful over-assessments with mocking scorn. Contemporary Black and Native readers, on the other hand assuming literate communities of same then existed , could only reject the Frenchman's summation of their plight as part of a psychological survival mechanism.
To 2 1 acknowledge that things were truly as bad as this foreigner claimed was to run the risk of slipping into suicidal despair. There was a strong "noble savage" element in de Tocqueville's writings about America's original inhabitants. Indeed, it seems highly likely that they contributed to the nineteenth century annealing of an eighteenth century myth: Indians, de Tocqueville sadly noted, were steadily being pushed westward by America's small but genocidal army.
Steadily, they were losing their land: In possession of vast territories and lacking major enemies in their immediate vicinity, America was a land of few soldiers but an almost infinite number of militiamen. No one would intervene on the Indians' behalf; their ancient world was doomed. If American slaves were in no danger of being immediately exterminated, in all other respects their social situation was even less enviable: For Black Americans, there was literally no place to run: The fates of Blacks and Indians, though diametrically opposed, were inextricably interlinked: Tome I A cloud of dark irony surrounds their respective dooms: L'Indian pourrait jusqu'a un certain point y reussir, mais il dedaigne de le tenter" De la democratie en Amerique.
More than thirty years before the Emancipation Proclamation was enforced, de Tocqueville wrote of the anti-Black racism found in the so-called abolitionist states—a racism more intense and bitter than any to found in the slave-owning Southern states—and of the nascent inner city ghettoes, which he believed to be already more dangerous than the meanest urban environment in continental Europe.
Despite his unavoidable Eurocentric bias, de Tocqueville's gifts of observation were nothing short of extraordinary. In conjunction with his almost untrammelled admiration for the governmental apparatus of American democracy, this republican aristocrat was totally appalled by the enforced conformity which the myth of universal freedom engendered: Tome I - In his eyes, the spirit of had already ossified into a rigid catechism which no-longer revolutionary citizens could, like well-trained parrots, only repeat by rote.
This perhaps explains why " In the same vein, de Tocqueville noted with amusement, Americans would not gladly suffer the slightest word of criticism about their country to 2 3 emerge from even a well-intentioned foreigner's lips. American cultural insularity, he felt, was at least equal to the nation's geographical isolation.
A number of the French traveller's ideas would assume their full importance only after the passage of a century or more. En Amerique, c'est un ennemi du genre humain, et il a contre lui l'humanite tout entiere" De la democratie en Amerique. The history of the U. TV "cop show," both fictional and reality-based, amply bears out this statement.
Still, despite his atypical willingness to see others as others saw themselves what other privileged Frenchman was as unreservedly appreciative of the American myth of the self-made man? When he wrote, for instance, "J'aimerais mieux qu'on herissat la langue de mots chinois, tartares ou hurons, que de rendre incertain des mots francais," he was speaking from the pulpit of linguistic purity epitomized by the Academie Francaise.
At bottom open-minded, de Tocqueville's cultural inheritance did not allow him to feel fully at ease in a semi-barbaric land that he otherwise very much admired: If America was the hope of the future, it was 24 also a threat to the glories of the past; as a land of universal liberty, it was paradoxically a threat to the higher form of individualism that Europe's collapsing class system had once bestowed on its appointed thinkers and artists. That the United States could fill this cultural void with the same dexterity with which it expanded the gains of the industrial revolution was something the author obviously doubted.
By the late s, at least half of French pre-conceptions about America had already been formed. In his private journals Victor Hugo wrote, "L'Americain republicain est libre, vend, achete, revend et marchande et brocante des vieillards, des femmes, des vierges, et des enfants. II punit de prison qui apprend. II est marchand d'esclaves et citoyen. II est democrate et negrier" Choses vues Tome 11 American women were in some ways freer than their continental counterparts, but also colder and more sexually inhibited.
American democratic theory seemed as much a menace to be feared as it did a model to be followed by well-educated French deputies. For the most part, this image would remain fixed until shortly after the First World War. In Extreme Occident, a history of French literary attitudes towards the United States, Franco-American scholar Jean Philippe Mathy wrote, "The main assumption of this study is that many French intellectuals' perceptions of America, from Tocqueville to Beauvoir, are rooted in a humanistic and aristocratic ethos derived from the models of intellectual excellence and critical practice born in the Renaissance and refined in the age of French classicism" Mathy 7.
One finds this point of view expressed in its most extreme form in the following decription of Chactas, the "good" Indian hero of Atala, a classical Frenchman in all but name. A national as well as a religious chauvinist, for Chateaubriand the qualities of culture and human worth were clearly determined by each individual's proximity to the apogee of human civilization, an apex which was unequivocally, univocally French. His position could not be further removed from the more tolerant prejudices of cultural relativism.
Nevertheless, it is probably fair to claim that, at least in a watered-down version, his attitudes remained in place until the beginning of the twentieth century. During this literary interregnum, the two French writers who most radically expanded Gallic perceptions of the U. According to one American critic, the author of Les Fleurs du mal added the word "americaniser" to the French lexicon in Mathy Since Baudelaire was such a pivotal figure in the evolution of the crime story, his role as a cultural cross-pollinator can more fruitfully be discussed in Chapter Two than it can here.
Jules Verne's contributions, on the other hand, deserve to be considered post-haste.
What most strikes contemporary readers about the proto-science fiction stories that Verne situated in the United States is their alternately banal and prophetic realism. Les Forceurs de blocus, for instance, a work largely unknown in the English-speaking world, describes the efforts of a hard-headed Scottish capitalist to steer a high speed steamship 17 knots-per-hour past the Union gunboats blockading Charleston harbour.
The ironically named Playfairs have nothing but scorn for abolitionists, dismissing them as " With their eyes set on the main prize of profits, the Playfairs are notably reluctant to admit " Even today, it is hard to find fictional writings that discuss the U. C i v i l War in less romantic, more pragmatic terms. The War Between the States is also one of the narrative engines propelling one of Verne's more famous speculative fictions, De la Terre a la Lune. Even more than Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, this novel is replete with Verne's eerie powers of pre-cognition.
The decision to send a vessel to the moon is determined by a group of retired C i v i l War artillerymen and industrialists, the nineteenth century forebears of what Dwight D. Eisenhower was to dub "the mil i tary-industrial complex," the matrix out of which N A S A emerged.
That Americans should be the first to invent space travel seemed perfectly logical to Verne: One of the more formidable of these ex-Union Army gunners is " In those passages, the author makes enormous leaps of historical fabulation. At a time when the steam-driven power of England's industrial revolution still gave the United Kingdom pride of place as the workship of the world, Jules Verne was already passing on the world-controlling economic torch to the still-wet-behind-the-ears United States.
What's more, he attributed that 28 triumph to America's inheritance of the most aggressive, puritan streak in British culture, the Round Head ferocity that led to the rise of Cromwell and the fall of the Stuarts. Here, in embryo, we see the origins of the modern French usage of the phrase "les anglo-saxonnes" a description that implicitly fuses England and the United States into one seamless socio-historical entity, a body politic implicitly hostile to the interests of France, and one which is seemingly entirely detached from Canada, Australia, and the many other small nations comprising anglophonia.
In this phrase we see admiration and realism locked in an eternal battle with paranoia, fear and hate. Despite this theoretical projection, however, Verne's account reflects immense familiarity with the quotidian realities of contemporary American life. The trip to the moon is facilitated by the calculations of the observatory in Cambridge, Massachussetts, "Cette ville ou fut fondee la premiere Universite des Etats-Unis, est justement celebre par son bureau astronomique" De la Terre a la Lune Hans Pfaal, Edgar Allan Poe's fictional visitor to the Moon, is wittily treated as an historical personage much of this book was conceived as satire.
Most presciently of all, Verne describes the struggle between the states of Florida and Texas for the honour of being the lunar-directed launch site. Less than a hundred years later, when Apollo IX did indeed speed to the Moon, the rocket was of course fired from Cape Canaveral, Florida, while its pilots listened to commands from Mission Control in Houston, Texas!
What's more, the journey was completed in only slightly less time than the 11 days stipulated by Verne. The American passages in Le tour du monde en 80 jours might have been less imbued with prophecy, but they were no less 29 keen on logistical accuracy: Within Verne's broad, "trunklike" descriptions lurk many lesser, "rootlike" details: What Phileas Fogg and his fellow passengers see from moving train windows is a country in the process of creating itself. Only when describing encounters with Mormons and skirmishes with Sioux does Verne depart from the generally realistic tone of his text.
This unique mixture— fantastic plot coupled to extremely plausible detail—would lay the groundwork for the infant genre of science fiction, a genre that the French would shortly abandon, a popular form that would subsequently be perfected by les anglo-saxonnes in general and les Americains in particular.
It is one of the abiding ironies of Franco-American relations that certain Gallic cultural innovations are subsequently regarded as quintessentially American—especially by the French. Where would the so-called Hollywood musical be, for instance, if not for the early sound films of Rene Clair? For a variety of reasons, not all of them modest high culture est fait chez nous; popular culture est importe d'outre-mer , this situation appeals to Parisian intellectuals.
In a strange sort of way, it draws another seductive veil over cultivated French eyes whenever they focus on the alternately brash and admirable United States. On a per capita basis, the French Army suffered heavier casualties than any other major participant in that sanguinary conflict. What's more, most of the battles were fought on French soil, a circumstance which resulted in as much damage to the nation's environment and physical plant as it did to its reserves of able-bodied cannon fodder.
The factor that eventually tilted the balance in favour of the Allied Cause was the commitment of ever greater numbers of American troops to the trenches following Washington's declaration of war in While America's actual military role in the defeat of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires was relatively minor, its logistical contribution proved to be decisive.
Thus, America emerged from the Great War with the prestige of a major military power, the certainty that it had replaced Great Britain as the workshop of the world, and a foreign policy that had finally emerged from the carapace of isolation. These advantages had been won at very little cost to themselves.
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American casualties were relatively minor, and its landscape was completely undamaged. With the possible exception of Canada and the other dominions, the United States was the only nation to emerge from the First World War in better shape than it went in. Inevitably, this historical turn-around produced conflicting emotions in France. For the first time, Americans in Paris were counted not by the hundred, but by the hundred thousand.
Gone were the days when the few brash New Worlders lucky enough to worm their way into the pages of French literature generally fell into the category of rich potential marriage partners, such as the "richissime Americain" to 3 1 whom Albertine was briefly betrothed in a suppressed passage of A la recherche du temps perdu Albertine disparue In the immediate post-war period, following demobilization, American writers and artists congregated in the City of Light because the views were pretty, the costs were low, sex was easy and Prohibition non-existent. Around the same time, American movies started to inundate French screens.
Since the same chemicals that went into the manufacture of celluloid were also used in the production of high explosives, French cinema lost its commercial edge to Hollywood during the Great War, an advantage. Less grudgingly, the French also began to listen to American popular music, particularly jazz. In a French context, the cult of negritude served a double purpose.
France's acceptance of Black American artists and of Antillean and African writers such as Aime Cesaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor was a way of affirming moral superiority over the New World giant that so aggressively challenged France's post claim to be acknowledged as the homeland of secular freedom. How could America truly be the land of liberty if that liberty only extended to whites? At the same time, it allowed French intellectuals to put the harsher realities of the nation's "off-stage" colonial practice on the back burner.
Only in very recent years have Gallic authors belatedly acknowledged the skin colour of most Parisian street sweepers. To admit that racisme ordinaire was as prevalent in Marseille as it was in Memphis was to subtly undermine 32 France's claim to being regarded as the only true, the only legitimate, the only universal republic. Thanks to these circumstances, French reaction to American advances on all fronts could not help but be mixed. Gallic gratitude for U. The thought that la Belle France might now owe more to General Pershing and his "doughboys" than American patriots once did to the eighteenth-century assistance of Admiral de Suffren's warships and Lafayette's volunteers was totally unacceptable to the national amour propre.
Love of American popular culture could not entirely disguise the fact that its progress was often made at French culture's expense. Even worse, expatriate American authors in love with Paris were singularly indifferent to Parisians, eschewing personal contact even when they knew the local language well. Paris, - , quoting art critic Clive Bell to the effect that "Some of [these expatriates] had French mistresses—kept mistresses; but very few of them had French friends" Allan 9.
A coming-of-age memoir, this brief narrative describes the author's journey across America as he left the battlefields of World War One to participate in the Allied Powers' ill-fated attempt to overthrow the newly-founded Bolshevik regime in Kessel and his comrades were cheered by American crowds as their train puffed its way across the U. For once the reader is not faced with "doughboys" being feted by adoring Frenchmen, but by "poilus" being hailed by grateful groups of Yanks.
Being young and military, Kessel's communication skills were obviously not aided by the presence of large numbers of bilingual academics, the balm bestowed on most later French writers of substance. Although he had by this time forgotten most of his high school English, his linguistic facility was still considerably greater than that of his fellow volunteers: Mais je crois que j'en savais encore plus done de la majorite de mes camarades. Je devais done, bon gre mal gre, leur servir d'interprete" Kessel Although Kessel was much cheered by the reception he received from the women of America, the omnipresence of puritan strictures continuously rankled: On nous offrait du cafe au lait comme boisson de table" Kessel Later, in San Francisco, he would frustratedly discover that "On sait qu'il est interdit par la loi Like most period French tourists, the author was impressed by everything from skyscrapers to New Year's Eve parties, by the things that were quintessentially non-French.
On the other hand, he is delighted when one of his women friends from Saint Louis a town he seems to assume is as francophone as New Orleans " For Kessel, America was clearly a land as wonderful as it was incomprehensible, as pleasurable as it was irritating; it was a paradise whose perfection was spoiled by the buzzing of bluenosed flies. Behind this mixture of envy and admiration lurks a single unspoken assumption: Americans might have produced this opulence, but they don't know how to enjoy it.
Just as youth is proverbially wasted upon the young, so, it would seem, is America upon the Americans. In any event, Joseph Kessel did not see the United States as being in any way inimical to the health and well-being of his own country. Ahead of his time in this as in so many other things, the early nineteenth-century novelist and travel writer Stendhal was perhaps the first prominent literary Frenchman to worry about U.
Shortly after the Napoleonic Wars, he wrote, "En , l'Europe n'aura qu'un moyen de resister a l'enorme population et a la raison profonde de l'Amerique: To survive America, in other words, Europe would have to become more like its de facto enemy, to incorporate more of the interloper's good points into its own modus vivendi. For French authors after Joseph Kessel, helas, the political pre-emptive strike option had already passed.
European autocracy did not end until , and then as the feather-that-broke-the-Triple-Entente's-back hands of the U. America was now the dominant socio-political force on the planet, an unavoidable current that pulled all others in its wake. The only nations to resist this pull successfully were those that slipped into some form of 35 totalitarian structure.
Of these new political styles, Soviet-style Leninism could uniquely afford to pose as a true polar opposite to U. For all practical purposes, Europe no longer controlled the world, as it had since about In true Hegelian fashion, power had travelled westwards once again.
If this changed reality could be felt on some level everywhere in non-Soviet Europe, it was still possible to soften its impact in a number of tactical ways. Most schools of European thought between the wars were singularly free of U. Outside of literature and jazz, American culture did not command a dominant place in the international avant garde. On the level of high culture in particular, European intellectuals continued to feel like top planetary dogs. Adorno was famously dismissive of both Hollywood and syncopated music; Andre Gide wrote as if U.
In A la recherche du temps perdu, unquestionably the greatest triumph of twentieth century French fiction, the most significant mention of the U. America might have been mighty, but in most matters it seemed both far away and of much less important than Germany, Russia, or England, the nation's traditional rivals in political brinkmanship. In retrospect, this attitude seems very much like wishful thinking; at the time, however, it was entirely sincere.
These factors should be borne in mind when considering between-war French literary impressions of the United States. That this cultural scene was largely dominated by Catholic conservatives is a defining constraint largely lost on non-French literary scholars. While French, like English and German, is one of the world's privileged "international" languages, it is its left-wing, experimental and secular literature which has been most successfully exported.
The vast quantity of non-fiction produced by the likes of Paul Claudel, Paul Valery, Francois Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, and a hundred lesser figures—many of whom were both viciously anti-Semitic and rabidly fascist—has passed largely unnoticed by the outside world. This unfortunate imbalance inevitably skews virtually all outside attempts to obtain an objective image of the time, a portrait in which foreground and background were judiciously balanced. It is a limitation which must constantly be borne in mind when dealing with the literature's better-known but less representative texts.
Following the events of , meanwhile, the Gallic tone generally changed to one of postmodernist praise. These generalities are useful tools so long as 37 one bears in mind the perennial tendency of French intellectuals to change steeds in mid-stream. At various times in his career, Andre Gide, for instance, was an anti-Semitic reactionary, a Protestant polemicist, a Catholic semi-convert, a pagan philosopher, a thorough-going atheist, a homosexual apologist, a militant Communist, a much-reviled anti-Communist, an anti-colonialist, a Vichy accommodator, and a vocal critic of France's Second World War collaboration with the occupying Third Reich.
To define Gide by any one of those labels would be misleading; he was all of them and then some. Georges Duhamel was probably the most lucid and articulate of between-war French commentators on the American scene. A now largely forgotten member of the Academie Francaise, Duhamel was once an important literary personage.
Even today, Scenes de la vie future can stand as one of the least sympathetic studies of the United States ever written. Duhamel crossed the Atlantic with a chip on his shoulder, and he missed no opportunity to coax his hosts into knocking it off. Even his port of arrival reflects this unfailingly antagonistic attitude. Unlike most French writers, who disembarked from plane or ship in New York, Duhamel decided to start his journey in New Orleans, la plus francaise des villes americaines In this way he could acclimatize himself to the local customs, just as Borgia princes once accustomed themselves to poison by consuming ever larger quantities of arsenic at dinner.
Before jumping into the American melting pot, Duhamel pointedly held his nose. The author's suspicions were deeply rooted in his circular mistrust of both technicians and machines: Following this line of reasoning, America, being ineptly run, must be considered as some sort of giant torture chamber. It is also a supremely dangerous dystopia-in-embroyo: Without the slightest hint of irony, Duhamel turns "the normal, cultivated Western adult" into "the normal, cultivated Frenchman.
Kipling gave the Indians more benefit of the doubt than Duhamel would give the Americans. Everything about the country seems to irritate him. He bridles when his ship is fumigated in Havana; he smoulders when alcohol is removed from the ship's stores the moment its prow passes Prohibition's nautical limit.