Download or read book French Anti Americanism 1930 1948 written by Seth D. Armus and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2007-02-09 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: French Anti-Americanism offers a historical exploration of the central role of anti-Americanism in French thought, and the often compromised position of France's intelligentsia during World War II. It was in the years preceding World War II, with its complex fears and uncertainties, that America first took center stage as a target for French anxieties. Dr. Seth D. Armus examines the cultural stability of French anti-Americanism and how it has survived colossal political shifts nearly unchanged. Focusing on the contributions made by inter-war intellectuals, this book demonstrates how some of the most striking elements of contemporary anti-Americanism, including a frequent intersection with anti-Semitism, were fully developed six or seven decades ago. Through a study of characters ranging from Nazi collaborators to Catholic humanists, Dr. Armus provides a sophisticated analysis of French anti-Americanism as a cultural phenomenon-distinct from mere political opposition to American foreign policy. French Anti-Americanism is an engaging read that will appeal to scholars of French and American studies, as well as those interested in international relations.
Download or read book The American Enemy written by Philippe Roger and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006-11 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Georges-Louis Buffon, an eighteenth-century French scientist, was the first to promote the widespread idea that nature in the New World was deficient; in America, which he had never visited, dogs don't bark, birds don't sing, and—by extension—humans are weaker, less intelligent, and less potent. Thomas Jefferson, infuriated by these claims, brought a seven-foot-tall carcass of a moose from America to the entry hall of his Parisian hotel, but the five-foot-tall Buffon remained unimpressed and refused to change his views on America's inferiority. Buffon, as Philippe Roger demonstrates here, was just one of the first in a long line of Frenchmen who have built a history of anti-Americanism in that country, a progressive history that is alternately ludicrous and trenchant. The American Enemy is Roger's bestselling and widely acclaimed history of French anti-Americanism, presented here in English translation for the first time. With elegance and good humor, Roger goes back 200 years to unearth the deep roots of this anti-Americanism and trace its changing nature, from the belittling, as Buffon did, of the "savage American" to France's resigned dependency on America for goods and commerce and finally to the fear of America's global domination in light of France's thwarted imperial ambitions. Roger sees French anti-Americanism as barely acquainted with actual fact; rather, anti-Americanism is a cultural pillar for the French, America an idea that the country and its culture have long defined themselves against. Sharon Bowman's fine translation of this magisterial work brings French anti-Americanism into the broad light of day, offering fascinating reading for Americans who care about our image abroad and how it came about. “Mr. Roger almost single-handedly creates a new field of study, tracing the nuances and imagery of anti-Americanism in France over 250 years. He shows that far from being a specific reaction to recent American policies, it has been knit into the very substance of French intellectual and cultural life. . . . His book stuns with its accumulated detail and analysis.”—Edward Rothstein, New York Times “A brilliant and exhaustive guide to the history of French Ameriphobia.”—Simon Schama, New Yorker
Download or read book French Anti Americanism 1930 1948 written by Seth D. Armus and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: French Anti-Americanism offers a historical exploration of the central role of anti-Americanism in French thought, and the often compromised position of France's intelligentsia during World War II. Dr. Seth D. Armus examines the cultural stability of French anti-Americanism and how it has survived colossal political shifts nearly unchanged.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of Anti Americanism written by Denis Lacorne and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Americanism Media and the Politics of Culture in 1930s France written by David A. Pettersen and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gangsters, aviators, hard-boiled detectives, gunslingers, jazz and images of the American metropolis were all an inextricable part of the cultural landscape of interwar France. While the French 1930s have long been understood as profoundly anti-American, this book shows how a young, up-and-coming generation of 1930s French writers and filmmakers approached American culture with admiration as well as criticism. For some, the imaginary America that circulated through Hollywood films, newspaper reports, radio programming and translated fiction represented the society of the future, while for others it embodied a dire threat to French identity. This book brings an innovative transatlantic perspective to 1930s French culture, focusing on several of the most famous figures from the 1930s – including Marcel Carné, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Julien Duvivier, André Malraux, Jean Renoir and Jean-Paul Sartre – to track the ways in which they sought to reinterpret the political and social dimensions of modernism for mass audiences via an imaginary America.
Download or read book National Regeneration in Vichy France written by Debbie Lackerstein and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The creators of the Vichy regime did not intend merely to shield France from the worst effects of military defeat and occupation; rather the leaders of Vichy were inspired by a will to regenerate France, to establish an authoritarian new order that would repair the degenerative effects of parliamentary democracy and liberal society. Their plan to effect this change took the form of a far-reaching programme they called the National Revolution. This is the first study of the National Revolution as the expression of Vichy's ideology and aims. It reveals the variety and complexity of both right wing and other strands of French thought in the context of the turbulent years of the 1930s - when Vichy's history really begins - and under the Occupation, when internal rivalries and divisions, as well as the pressures of war, doomed Vichy's programme of national regeneration. The book is structured around a consideration of the rhetoric of right-wing ideology and such key catchwords as 'decadence', 'action', 'order', 'realism' and 'new man', and shows how these phrases only served to mask the political and ideological incoherence of the Vichy government.
Download or read book Anticommunism in French Society and Politics 1945 1953 written by Aaron Clift and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-06-20 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anticommunism in French Society and Politics, 1945-1953 evaluates the prevalence of anticommunism among the French population in 1945 to 1953, and examines its causes, character, and consequences through a series of case studies on different segments of French society. These include the scouting movement; family organisations; agricultural associations; middle-class groups; and trade unions and other working-class organisations. Aaron Clift contends that anticommunism was more widespread and deeply rooted than previously believed, and had a substantial impact on national politics and on these social groups and organisations. Furthermore, he argues that the study of anticommunism allows us a deeper understanding of the values they regarded as the most important to defend. Although anticommunism was a diverse phenomenon, this work identifies common discourses, including portrayals of communism as a threat to the nation; the colonial empire; the traditional family; private property; religion; the rural world; and Western civilisation. It also highlights common aims (such as the rehabilitation of wartime collaborators) and tactics (such as the invocation of apoliticism). While acknowledging the importance of the Cold War, it rejects the assumption that anticommunism was an American import or foreign to French society and demonstrates links between anticommunism and anti-Americanism. It concludes that anticommunism drew its strength from the connection or even conflation of communism with perceived negative social changes that were seen to threaten traditional French civilisation, interacting with the postwar international and domestic environment and the personal experiences of individual anticommunists.
Download or read book The French Way written by Richard F. Kuisel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preface -- Note on anti-Americanism -- America à la mode: the 1980s -- Anti-Americanism in retreat: Jack Lang, cultural imperialism, and the anti-anti-Americans -- Reverie and rivalry: Mitterrand and Reagan-Bush -- The adventures of Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola, and McDonalds in the land of the Gauls -- Taming the hyperpower: the 1990s -- The French way: society, economy and culture in the 1990s -- The paradox of the fin de siècle: anti-Americanism and Americanization.
Download or read book Rethinking Anti Americanism written by Max Paul Friedman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-27 with total page 774 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Anti-Americanism' is an unusual expression; although stereotypes and hostility exist toward every nation, we do not hear of 'anti-Italianism' or 'anti-Brazilianism'. Only Americans have elevated such sentiment to the level of a world view, an explanatory factor so significant as to merit a name - an 'ism' - usually reserved for comprehensive ideological systems or ingrained prejudice. This book challenges the scholarly consensus that blames criticism of the United States on foreigners' irrational resistance to democracy and modernity. Tracing 200 years of the concept of anti-Americanism, this book argues that it has constricted political discourse about social reform and US foreign policy, from the War of 1812 and the Mexican War to the Cold War, from Guatemala and Vietnam to Iraq. Research in nine countries in five languages, with attention to diplomacy, culture, migration and the circulation of ideas, shows that the myth of anti-Americanism has often damaged the national interest.
Download or read book The Americanization of France written by Barnett Singer and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This engaging, knowledgeable book traces the American path France has followed since resolving its searing Algerian conflict in 1962. Barnett Singer convincingly demolishes two pervasive clichés about modern France: first, that the country has never been fit to fight wars, including wars on terror; and second, that the French have always been and remain overwhelmingly anti-American. The end of the war led to an important sea change, clearing the way for France to embrace American culture, especially rock 'n' roll, and more generally, an American-style emphasis on personal happiness. The author argues that today's France, wounded by the loss of traditions and stability, is increasingly pro-American, clinging to trends from across the Atlantic as to a lifeline.
Download or read book The Information Nexus written by Steven G. Marks and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-07-25 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Capitalism is central to our understanding of contemporary economic and political life and yet what does it really mean? If, as has now been shown to be the case, capital and property rights existed in pre-modern and pre-capitalist societies, what is left of our understanding of capitalism? Steven G. Marks' provocative new book calls into question everything we thought we knew about capitalism, from the word's very origins and development to the drivers of Western economic growth. Ranging from the Middle Ages to the present, The Information Nexus reveals that the truly distinctive feature of capitalism is business's drive to acquire and analyze information, supported by governments that allow unfettered access to public data. This new interpretation of capitalism helps to explain the rise of the West, puts our current information age into historical perspective, and provides a benchmark for the comparative assessment of economic systems in today's globalized environment.
Download or read book Jazz and Postwar French Identity written by Elizabeth Vihlen McGregor and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-06-23 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the context of a shifting domestic and international status quo that was evolving in the decades following World War II, French audiences used jazz as a means of negotiating a wide range of issues that were pressing to them and to their fellow citizens. Despite the fact that jazz was fundamentally linked to the multicultural through its origins in the hands of African-American musicians, happenings within the French jazz public reflected much about France’s postwar society. In the minds of many, jazz was connected to youth culture, but instead of challenging traditional gender expectations, the music tended to reinforce long-held stereotypes. French critics, musicians, and fans contended with the reality of American superpower strength and often strove to elevate their own country’s stature in relation to the United States by finding fault with American consumer society and foreign policy aims. Jazz audiences used this music to condemn American racism and to support the American civil rights movement, expressing strong reservations about the American way of life. French musicians lobbied to create professional opportunities for themselves, and some went so far as to create a union that endorsed preferential treatment for French nationals. As France became more ethnically and religiously diverse due immigration from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, French jazz critics and fans noted the insidious appearance of racism in their own country and had to contend with how their own citizens would address the changing demographics of the nation, even if they continued to insist that racism was more prevalent in the United States. As independence movements brought an end to the French empire, jazz enthusiasts from both former colonies and France had to reenvision their relationship to jazz and to the music’s international audiences. In these postwar decades, the French were working to preserve a distinct national identity in the face of weakened global authority, most forcefully represented by decolonization and American hegemony. Through this originally African American music, French listeners, commentators, and musicians participated in a process that both challenged and reinforced ideas about their own culture and nation.
Download or read book Crossing the Atlantic written by Thomas Adam and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2011-04-19 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “ . . . travel as an exploration of ‘the other’ which becomes an exploration of the self . . . a confirmation of identity.”—from the Introduction, by Frank Trommler In an age when travel was more difficult but leisure was more available, those who journeyed across the Atlantic from the Old World to America or back created a wonderful literature about the divergent cultures and the fertile interactions among them. In travel diaries, journals, novels, journalistic reports, and guide books, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers recorded impressions and ruminations that not only offer opportunities for comparison and contrast but also shed light on the processes of modernization and the future that would emerge on both sides of the Atlantic. This latest offering from the important Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures series explores themes like urbanization, modernization, education, gender, Jewish identity, nationalism and internationalism, political and cultural values, and the experience of travel itself. Volume editors Thomas Adam and Nils Roemer have assembled a collection of varied studies that permit enlightened reflection on the ways in which travelers from the New and Old Worlds have observed, documented, understood, and negotiated their similarities and differences. The freshness and variety of the previously little-heard voices documented in Crossing the Atlantic will serve as an important reminder that an attentive interaction with “foreignness” has been and will continue to be one of the best paths to a more enlightened engagement with the familiar.
Download or read book Visions and Ideas of Europe during the First World War written by Matthew D'Auria and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-02 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Given the destruction and suffering caused by more than four years of industrialised warfare and economic hardship, scholars have tended to focus on the nationalism and hatred in the belligerent countries, holding that it led to a fundamental rupture of any sense of European commonality and unity. It is the central aim of this volume to correct this view and to highlight that many observers saw the conflict as a ‘European civil war’, and to discuss what this meant for discourses about Europe. Bringing together a remarkable range of compelling and highly original topics, this collection explores notions, images, and ideas of Europe in the midst of catastrophe.
Download or read book Uncouth Nation written by Andrei S. Markovits and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2016-12-13 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No survey can capture the breadth and depth of the anti-Americanism that has swept Europe in recent years. From ultraconservative Bavarian grandmothers to thirty-year-old socialist activists in Greece, from globalization opponents to corporate executives--Europeans are joining in an ever louder chorus of disdain for America. For the first time, anti-Americanism has become a European lingua franca. In this sweeping and provocative look at the history of European aversion to America, Andrei Markovits argues that understanding the ubiquity of anti-Americanism since September 11, 2001, requires an appreciation of such sentiments among European elites going back at least to July 4, 1776. While George W. Bush's policies have catapulted anti-Americanism into overdrive, particularly in Western Europe, Markovits argues that this loathing has long been driven not by what America does, but by what it is. Focusing on seven Western European countries big and small, he shows how antipathies toward things American embrace aspects of everyday life--such as sports, language, work, education, media, health, and law--that remain far from the purview of the Bush administration's policies. Aggravating Europeans' antipathies toward America is their alleged helplessness in the face of an Americanization that they view as inexorably befalling them. More troubling, Markovits argues, is that this anti-Americanism has cultivated a new strain of anti-Semitism. Above all, he shows that while Europeans are far apart in terms of their everyday lives and shared experiences, their not being American provides them with a powerful common identity--one that elites have already begun to harness in their quest to construct a unified Europe to rival America.
Download or read book Political Belief in France 1927 1945 written by Caroline Campbell and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2015-12-09 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the inter war era, the rise of the largest political movement in modern French history, the powerful Croix de Feu (1927–1936), and its successor, the Parti Social Français, or PSF (1936–1945), led to a sharp rightward turn in France’s political culture. Political Belief in France, 1927–1945 traces the central role of women in this shift, arguing that they transformed the Croix de Feu/PSF from a paramilitary league for veterans into a social reform movement that sought to remake the politics, society, and culture of the French Republic. Following the creation of a Women’s Section in 1934, the women of the Croix de Feu/PSF developed a wide array of social programs, including welfare services, youth development, and health-care initiatives. At a time of economic depression and high unemployment, these popular programs tempered the organization’s fearsome reputation as a violent paramilitary group. While the efforts of the Women’s Section had the veneer of moderation, they accentuated the long-standing conservative image of France as a deeply Christian society and sought to assimilate people of different ethnoreligious backgrounds into the dominant national community. Croix de Feu/PSF women promoted their socialagenda as a religious and patriotic duty, a reflection of the individual’s responsibility to make personal sacrifices on behalf of their vision for France’s Christian civilization. The Croix de Feu/PSF’s ethnoreligious nationalism circulated throughout the French imperial nation-state, making the movement the premier defender of an empire at the height of its power. But women in North African branches faced substantial marginalization, and the movement remained dangerously sectarian in the Maghreb, driving indigenous activists from reformism to anticolonialism. The Croix de Feu/PSF thus set the stage for both the authoritarian, anti-Semitic Vichy regime and the decolonization that followed the war. The first book on women of the French far right in the age of fascism, Political Belief in France, 1927–1945 contributes to the fields of French history, gender studies, the history of fascism, and the history of empire.
Download or read book France in the World written by Sean M. Kennedy and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2023-01-15 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: André Siegfried (1875–1959) was a leading figure in French academic and cultural life for over five decades. A world traveller who trained as a geographer, Siegfried became a leading political scientist and prominent newspaper columnist. As a long-time professor at Sciences Po, he shaped generations of his country’s elite. France in the World explores the life and career of André Siegfried. An innovator in the field of political science, he established himself as France’s leading interpreter of the English-speaking world. Often likened to Alexis de Tocqueville, Siegfried published influential studies of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and New Zealand, striving to understand France’s place in a changing global context. Siegfried was a cosmopolitan promoter of liberalism and individual freedom. But at the same time he perceived France to be the core of a Western civilization whose leadership and values were threatened by Americanization, anti-imperial nationalism, and non-white immigration. By following Siegfried’s long career and examining the breadth of his writings, Sean Kennedy shows how his racial and ethnic essentialism was a unifying aspect of his life’s work. That these ideas were considered unremarkable for most of his lifetime offers a powerful illustration of how racist thinking permeated mainstream French republicanism. Exploring the many facets of Siegfried’s career, France in the World examines the entanglement of liberal and racist thinking during an era that witnessed political extremism and a rapidly changing international order.
