FRANCO/US CULTURE WARS

Since World War II the French have been variously surprised, dismayed, irritated and outraged by the power of American culture and its effect on France and the world. Their only consolation has been the conviction that French culture is superior to anything that Walt Disney or Hollywood can offer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/books/26martel.html?ref=arts

What France’s cultural elites have rarely done, however, is examine how both serious and pop culture actually work in the United States. Rather, in the view of Frédéric Martel, a Frenchman and author of a recently released book on the topic, they have preferred to hide behind “a certain ideological anti-Americanism.”

Now Mr. Martel, 39, a former French cultural attaché in Boston, has set out to change this. In “Culture in America,” a 622-page tome weighty with information, he challenges the conventional view here that (French) culture financed and organized by the government is entirely good and that (American) culture shaped by market forces is necessarily bad.