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The French added an American accent to how they lived during the 20th century. American consumer society and mass culture modified how they shopped, dined, entertained, enjoyed leisure, conducted business, pursued economic modernity, and defined the good life. Richard F. Kuisel offers an engaging historical survey of French Americanization, exploring jazz, Hollywood, Ford’s assembly line, G.I.s, supermarkets, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, world wars, the Marshall Plan, Disney, and globalization. Americanization inspired emulation, but also provoked anti-Americanism and anti-globalism. The French confronted the American model and used it as a foil to chart their own way to modernity, reworking American offerings to make them more “French.”
‘Richard Kuisel is the leading authority, on both sides of the Atlantic, on how the French responded to the rapid expansion of American economic and cultural power in Europe after World War II. ... He has accomplished that rare feat of making his subject accessible to a much broader audience than a scholarly monograph can reach, while producing a book that specialists will need and want to read.’
Herrick Chapman, New York University
Richard F. Kuisel began conducting research as a doctoral student in France when Charles de Gaulle was president. He has since held professorial appointments at UC Berkely, the University of Illinois, Stony Brook, and Georgetown, and has taught at Stanford, NYU, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. His work blends economic, political, and cultural history. His publications include Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization and scores of articles on economic planning, Vichy, modernization, and the Marshall Plan. He has been awarded several book prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Woodrow Wilson Center, and German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Chapter 1. Distant Cousins, 1880-1914
Chapter 2. War, Peace, and Americans in Paris
Chapter 3. The Twenties and an American Future: Dream or Nightmare?
Chapter 4. America Retreats: The Depression and the Second World War
Chapter 5. America Comes Ashore: Liberation, the Marshall Plan, and Coca-Colonization
Chapter 6. De Gaulle, the American Challenge, and Consumer Society
Chapter 7. Cold War Cultural Encounters
Chapter 8. Cinema, Television, Disney, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola
Chapter 9. Hyperpower and Counterpower
Chapter 10. Americanization, Globalization and the Discontents
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index