xviii, 518 pages ; 24 cm

"Georges-Louis Buffon, an eighteenth-century French scientist, was the first to promote the widespread idea that nature in the New World was deficient. 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, though it flirts with absurdity, has nonetheless been a continuous and powerful current in French intellectual and political life. The American Enemy is Roger's best-selling and universally acclaimed history of French anti-Americanism, presented here in English translation for the first time." "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."--Jacket

Translation of: L'ennemi americain

Includes bibliographical references (pages 455-506) and index

The irresistible rise of the Yankee. The age of contempt ; The divided states of America ; Lady Liberty and the iconoclasts ; From Havana to Manila: an American world? ; Yankees and Anglo-Saxons ; Portraits of races ; "People of enemy blood" ; The empire of trusts: socialism or feudalism? -- A preordained notion. The other Maginot Line ; Facing the decline: Gallic hideout or European buffer zone? ; From debt to dependency: the Perrichon complex ; Metropolis, cosmopolis: in defense of Frenchness ; Defense of man: anti-Americanism is a humanism ; Insurrection of the mind, struggle for culture, defense of the intelligentsia

Translation of: L'ennemi américain

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