I think this is interesting, as I think time is a huge component of conflict among many people who work together if they value it differently. The understanding of both cultural values for the individuals who experienced both impacted them and influenced their own behavior, but they did not set out to change their communities behavior. We found that there are cultural differences like you mention in your post but for the most part it was one of the most welcoming places we had ever been.
The people that waited on us or hotel clerks were very inviting and understanding of our lack of the french language… where that would be a huge issue in any city in america if the table were turned. I think we as americans can be a little hypocritical when it comes to openness and cultural differences. I enjoyed your post and found that there were a number of differences between the US and France that I did not initially realize. The difference that stood out to me is regarding work attitudes and time management.
In America, there is this mindset that truly successful people must be willing to sacrifice their free time in order to get the job done. It is common for individuals in an office to constantly claim that they are busy or overworked.
In my mind, this is a way to reiterate their value to those around them and to show that their position is necessary to get through all of the work. In my mind, the ideal employee is able to complete the work allotted to them within the time given.
Oddly enough, I felt that the statistic about coffee illustrated this fact. Rather than enjoy coffee and savor it, Americans see it as a means to end regarding feeling alert. In my personal experience, another difference between America and France is their emphasis on food. On Geography. On Politics. On Work. General Impressions. Make Fun. Thrillist Serves. For France, this history is revolutionary, all-conquering, exceptional, yet nevertheless prostrate—particularly when it comes to the shame of collaboration during World War II.
Also a former empire, the country sees itself as standing for reform over revolt, free-born liberties over abstract rights, and the glory of holding out against Nazism. How both countries see themselves and their place in history continues to shape their instincts to this day. Throughout the show, French spies exhibit a disdain for and an obsession with the CIA, which is portrayed as a borderline enemy.
Perhaps the most telling scene comes early in the series, when a French agent offers to secretly work for the CIA. His American recruiter asks him whether he understands what he is doing, betraying his country. To the British, such a scene is utterly confounding.
Yet the question of defecting is also one of imagination. Paris, however, sees a degree of separation. Although it is part of the West, it is not in the inner core, the English-speaking club. The difference is that whereas Britain emerged from the war heroic but broke, France had the legacy of collaboration to contend with. For France to recover its dignity by telling itself this story was imperative. There is an obvious continuity in its foreign policy, outlook, and strategy.
Its peaks can of course be charted by opinion polls, for instance , but its most important element is elsewhere: in a long, drawn-out stratification of images, legends, jokes, anecdotes, beliefs, and affects. Shedding light on all of these elements takes more than just opinion polls which, rather than plumbing the depths, offer a snapshot of a given moment : you have to root around, dig up old deposits, excavate the matter, clear out the veins, and follow the seams.
I don't even know what the word means," declared Sartre in His logic would have delighted Lewis Carroll—not to mention the Mad Hatter. The same logic still is running the show in current attempts to obstruct the concept of anti-Americanism. In fact, since Sartre's day, the hard line has only gotten harder. Anti-Americanism was an incomprehensible word for him—or comprehensible just long enough to absolve himself of it. As the French essayist Serge Halimi discovered and exposed in Le Monde diplomatique in May , individuals with ulterior motives are hiding behind this empty word, and their mission is to "intimidate the last rebels against a social order whose laboratory is the United States.
Never heard of it. Except as a fabrication, pure and simple. Since Sartre's day, this denial has been the obligatory preamble to any use of anti-American rhetoric.
Halimi's article is only a typical example of a widespread rhetorical device: everything in it works by mirror image, from the accusation of intimidation, introduced to justify censorship of the undesirable word, to the imputation that the opponent uses a "tightly screwed-together binary logic" this masks the Manichean political views of the accusation itself.
The semantic objection is there only to set the polemical machine in motion. Now for a more methodological objection. Even if we admit that anti-Americanism exists and that its manifestations can be pinpointed, does that give us the right to turn it into an analytical category?
Given that "anti-Americanism" is part of the French "logosphere" and might even determine a certain number of attitudes and behaviors, does that mean we can raise it to the level of a concept?
Doesn't that—wrongly—lend credence to the idea that America has an "essence" to which anti-Americans would thus be opposed? We cannot address this objection without quickly examining the link it presupposes between "Americanism" and "anti-Americanism.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Americanism meant, in the United States, a set of values judged to be constituent parts of a national identity, as well as the attitude of those who adopted them and attempted to conform their personal identity to this national ideal. The expression, popularized by Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the twentieth century, was inseparable from notions like being " percent American"—as opposed to "hyphenated American. Its content, however, is vague, as Marie-France Toinet notes, quoting Theodore Roosevelt: "Americanism signifies the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and strength—the virtues that made America.
Americanism's credo, though it kept its nationalist and even chauvinistic overtones, was thus coupled with another self-defining tautology: the American way of life, which was the material facet of the word "Americanism. A narcissistic self-portrait and a slogan for internal use, "Americanism" would seem to be hard to export: yet America's power overflow pushed the term all the way across the ocean to Europe.
The French discovered it in the full upswing of a new polemic interest in the United States in the late s. But their attempts to give it ideological or political substance bumped up against resistant matter: "Americanism" means above all pride in being American; apart from that, it is a catch-all.
So, logically enough, the French took the word over and gave it a meaning, most often negative, that reflected their own view of the United States. But his was a very personal attempt, and it had no effect on the fate of a term decidedly destined for invective in France. After giving a long catalog of its negative connotations, Debray concludes: "Americanism seems to mean a blackened America, stripped of everything positive it has.
Now we can come back and respond to the initial objection about essentializing America. The mistake there was imagining that anti-Americanism was derived from the notion of "Americanism. As Sartre could have put it, in France, anti-Americanism's existence always preceded any essence of America. One last scruple: our investigation covers two centuries. It might seem problematic, then, that the word anti-Americanism is so much more recent.
Can we trace the genealogy of a nameless notion? First we have to clear up the chronology. The word made a late entrance into the French dictionaries for the Petit Robert. But as we all know, dictionaries always lag behind usage. The first use of the term "anti-Americanism" catalogued by lexicographers dates back to ; by the early s, it was a part of ordinary political language. And it would not be going out on a limb to suggest that the term spread as a counterpoint to "anti-Sovietism.
As for the epistemological root of the question, we can look to one of the pioneers of semantics applied to cultural history, Reinhart Koselleck, for help with that one.
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