Over there
Page 2 of 3 -- Consider Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte du Buffon, a leading 18th-century naturalist and man of science whose theories would prove influential on America's other critics in the 1700s. In works like ''Varieties in the Human Species'' (1749) and ''On the Degeneration of Animals'' (1766), Buffon concocted a set of bizarre taxonomies to demonstrate that the species of the New World were invariably shriveled and stunted. Of course, Buffon never actually visited the land he was writing about. Nevertheless, his claims so bothered Thomas Jefferson that he procured the carcass of a 7-foot Vermont moose to deliver to Buffon. Buffon - a petit homme who stood 5 feet tall - remained unimpressed, however, and refused to revise his opinions.
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In the early decades of the 19th century, French anti-Americanism went through something of a dormant phase (even if diplomatic relations had reached a breaking point during the so-called XYZ affair of 1797-98, which kicked off a small shooting war between the two republics). Alexis de Tocqueville undertook his vast, nuanced study ''Democracy in America'' in the 1830s, but it did little to change the minds of France's Americaphobes. After the Civil War (during which the Confederacy had many French sympathizers) they emerged armed with an entirely new set of complaints. America had been transformed from a land of stunted, degenerate species into a menacing industrial colossus.
The specter of the voracious ''Yankee'' who, having conquered the South, now had his eyes set on the rest of the world, stalked late-19th-century French social science and popular fiction. Ethnographers rewrote the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, leaving the Germans out and recasting it as one dominated by American (i.e., WASP) bloodlines. ''The true peril,'' warned Edmond Demolins in his 1897 essay ''Anglo-Saxon Superiority: To What It Is Due,'' is the sturdy American individualist ''who comes alone, with a plow.'' The actual military threat of Germany, which had obliterated France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, was beside the point, for ''social force is one hundred times more powerful than all the armies in the world.'' And the breathless 1899-1900 science-fiction serial ''La Conspiration des milliardaires'' (The Billionaires' Conspiracy), by Gustave Le Rouge - dubbed the ''shop girl's Jules Verne'' by one critic - depicted a plot by a fiendish group of French-hating Yankee plutocrats to invade Europe with an army of automatons.
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By the early 20th century, the template was set: America was an eternal threat to French civilization. Intellectuals of left and right could bicker endlessly over the direction of their country, but it was clear to all that America, tout court, was bad for France.
But the anti-Americanism of the interwar years, Roger argues, was often less about American strength than French weakness. In the 1920s and '30s, anti-Americanism ''fed on a violent self-loathing'' and a strong well of anti-Semitism. Jean-Louis Chastanet, a left-wing member of the French assembly, concluded in ''L'Oncle Shylock'' (1927), that for America ''lending money to others is a way of dominating them.'' Continued...
