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Book Review
| French Anti-Americanism, 1930–1948: Critical Moments in a Complex History. By Seth D. Armus. (Lanham: Lexington, 2007. x, 179 pp. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-7391-1268-7.)
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| The United States represents a historical dead end. Its slavish obedience to technology and materialism promises a bleak future. Its democratic ethos promotes demagoguery and even fascism. Worse, the American president is essentially a conspiring Jew. The only cure for this cancer is spiritual revolution, led by the great French nation. Those beliefs, in a nutshell, marked the world view of a cohort of French conservative intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s. Known to French historians as the "nonconformists," they provide the subject for Seth D. Armus's book. Despite some interpretive overreach, Armus's work delivers a set of engaging intellectual biographies that illuminate a fascinating and disturbing chapter in France's past. |
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Armus's book joins a well-established field. Histories of U.S.-French relations, most influentially, Richard F. Kuisel's Seducing the French (1993), have placed Gallic ambivalence toward the United States in the context of French concerns over modernization and national identity. Thanks also to books such as David Strauss's Menace in the West (1978) and Philippe Roger's L'ennemi américain (2002) (published in English as The American Enemy [2005]), we have extensive catalogues of French anti-American thinkers. Roger's study already stands out as a new essential text, relatively balanced in tone and almost encyclopedic in coverage. |
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