French Resistance: The French-American Culture Wars

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 25, 2000 | by Erica Tuttle

An old transatlantic friendship has been sorely tested by conflicts of ideology.

Throughout the 1990s, when the debate over multiculturalism reached a pitch in this country, French commentators and intellectuals watched with rapt attention as the United States struggled to accommodate the demands of minority groups and others who claimed for themselves a larger place on the American stage. Many of these French onlookers reacted with horror and, it is fair to say, a touch of glee at the spectacle of a strong nation giving in to its sectarian forces. In their view, the United States was ceding to individualism and tolerance at the expense of unity, perhaps even of nationhood.

Americans have had their own quarrels with French intellectuals, singling out Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan for their corrosive effect on the quality of American scholarship. Indeed, the French have been blamed for fostering a relativist mindset that laid the groundwork for the "culture wars" that have been fought in humanities departments across the country.

These and other mutual suspicions are examined by Jean-Philippe Mathy in French Resistance: The French-American Culture Wars (University of Minnesota Press, $29.95, 211 pp). Mathy, associate professor of French, comparative literature, criticism and interpretive theory at the University of Illinois, questions why France and America seem ever more divided -- their respective intellectual sectors patently hostile toward each other -- even as their cultures become increasingly homogenized.

To answer this, the author looks back to the philosophical and political roots of both societies. The French attachment to a "one and indivisible nation" gives a distinct tint to their concept of national identity. It has implications in the realm of immigration, assimilation and group rights that are quite different from the looser American "melting pot" method. Multiculturalism, far from being an antidote to racism or disenfranchisement, is seen by many Frenchmen as the unfortunate result of a boundless pluralism. As Mathy states, "multiculturalism was denounced as a consequence of the hardening of tolerance into an absolutist cult of difference for its own sake."

One incident in particular tested France's assurance in the face of ethnic challenge. Called l'affaire du foulard, it pitted three female Muslim middle-school students who had worn religious veils in the classroom against their principal, who made the decision to expel them based on a long-standing tradition of forbidding religious dress or symbols in public schools. The Socialist Party was hamstrung between a commitment to secularism in the schools on the one hand and cultural tolerance on the other. Leading intellectuals feared the Left was on the verge of allowing reactionary forces to undermine the school system. Others saw little harm in allowing the Muslim schoolgirls their "cultural markers."

Mathy speculates that "the increased visibility of Muslim communities cemented by common values, memories and rituals is all the more threatening to `native' French people as they themselves feel deprived of shared values and are often left with a nostalgic yearning for the bygone days of ideological and moral cohesion." Above all, questions such as these test the notion of a French "community," with all the importance and sentimentality that attaches to that idea.

The debate convinced some on the American side that France's insistence on assimilation only thinly disguised a "neoracist consensus" and a slavish adherence to cultural conformity. But as the author points out, this view overstates the accord that exists among the French on ethnic pluralism. The highest court in the land finally declared that "wearing signs by which [students] intend to manifest their belonging to a religion is not in itself incompatible with [secularist] principles."

In addition to rifts over multiculturalism, Mathy devotes a good part of his book to the "theory wars" between French and American academics, again a by-product of differing philosophical traditions and concepts of national identity. The French tendency toward abstraction and relativism long has frustrated those who adhere to what A.N. Wilson calls "the Anglo-Saxon empirical tradition of common sense."

The debate culminated in the Sokal affair in 1996, in which an American physicist succeeded in having a pseudoscientific and jargon-filled article published unquestioningly in a prominent academic journal. He later revealed that the article, calling for an "emancipatory mathematics," was a hoax designed to expose the "empty intellectual fashions" emanating from French sources and now dominating the American academic Left.

The incident was fiercely argued in the United States and abroad. Bruno Latour, one of the French intellectuals under attack, responded in kind: "It is no longer the war against the Soviets, but rather the war against the `postmodern' intellectuals from abroad. France, in their eyes, has become another Colombia, a country of dealers who produce hard drugs -- Derridium and Lacanium -- which American academics cannot resist any more than crack."