The list of French anti-American writers is long: it is its own unique genre, one found nowhere else in such abundance. Already, in 1793, Talleyrand, in exile before he would become French foreign minister, wrote in Philadelphia that Americans possessed “neither conversation nor cuisine.” He also famously observed, “These Americans, they have 32 religions but only one dish, roast beef with potatoes.” The genealogy of contemporary anti-Americanism is traceable to the beginning of the nineteenth century, to a Catholic France arrayed against a Protestant America, and then to the twentieth century, when a socialist France confronted a capitalist America; always just beneath the surface is the idea of a civilized France set against a supposedly uncivilized America. French anti-American literature, which Jean-François Revel analyzed perceptively in Anti-Americanism, is faithful to an eternal code: our civilization versus their lack of culture; our spirituality versus their brutality. Beneath these changing ideological masks, we might perhaps discern a rivalry between two nations that claim to be “universalist.” Americans have seized the torch of human rights from France, or at least the claim to embody them.
Guy Sorman, “French Anti-Americanism, Rebooted”, City Journal, 2017-11-27.
