It is useful to think about the debate and passage of the recent legislation on the PACS in terms of the long run of the history of sexuality in France. Owing in part to a perceived demographic crisis, the French have expressed a strong bias in favor of reproductive sexuality. This has meant that sexual discourse has discouraged non-procreative sexuality, including same sex sexuality, and favored heterosexual relationships, which have been regarded as the only legitimate foundation for family life. Despite the decriminalization of homosexuality, this historic bias continues to shape public debate about marriage and the family, as the recent debate over the PACS reveals.
Robert Nye's elegant essay rightly puts the PaCS, and the debates about it into a historical context of French natalism. At least since the late nineteenth century, reproduction has been the raison d'être of the married couple and the state has often made fertility synonymous with patriotism. From this has followed all manner of representations, many of them contradictory. Although it surely was the case, as Nys shows, that marriage was eroticized and marital love idealized, it was also the case that reproduction and sexual satisfaction were considered separate domains.
The new Mansfield and Winthrop translation of Tocqueville's classic text, notable for the lengthy introduction the translators provide as well as their determined effort to create the most literal word-for-word translation that has ever been published of the work, draws the critical eye of four Tocqueville specialists. Focusing on the introduction, Seymour Drescher points out that the translators' decision to regard the Democracy of 1935 and the one of 1840 as a single work, a decision made against the grain of recent scholarship, leads them into misunderstandings of how Tocqueville came to view the strengths and weaknesses of American democracy by the 1840s. Arthur Goldhammer, at work on his own translation of Democracy, goes beyond the longstanding debates over literal versus interpretive translation to point out a large number of errors in rendering French expressions into English. Melvin Richter explores a number of instances where the pursuit of literalness leads to distortions, and then focuses on the consequences translating l'état social as "social state" rather than "state of society." Cheryl Welch examines how the decision to translate inquiet as "restive" rather than "restless" or "anxious," as she would have preferred, leads the translators to underestimate how much Tocqueville's views of religion and women were informed by his own anxieties about moral disorder in a democratic society. Mansfield and Winthrop respond to their critics with a detailed discussion of several of their most controversial word choices and with a defense of their strategy of literal translation.
Sheldon Wolin propose de Tocqueville une interprétation dont le principe est énoncé dès le titre: «Tocqueville entre deux mondes». Tocqueville est pour Wolin un démocrate réticent, attaché a la démocratie comme à une épreuve inévitable, tant il reste lié à ce que Wolin appelle, d'un mot que Tocqueville n'emploie guère, «l'ancienneté», c'est à dire les valeurs de la société hiérarchique. La thèse n'est pas nouvelle, mais elle fait l'objet ici d'une argumentation extrèmement fouillée.
The MIT Cultura project juxtaposes French/American opinion and expression, in order to involve respondents in a collaborative and ongoing process designed to identify perspectives and values, and so to undermine cross-cultural misconceptions and stereotypes.
Analysis of opinion polls shows that even Americans unfamiliar with France are prepared to hold opinions about the country. Many see France as a non-America, a positive or negative counter-model. Moreover, "Americans" comprise many different perspectives and so "France" does not mean the same thing to everyone.
Francophobia is at base a systematic and recurrent critique of an alleged societal model based on political centralization and cultural elitism, seen as beginning with the monarchy and continuing on into the Republic, and contrasting with American liberalism, democracy, egalitarianism, and anti-statism.
Francophobia, a set of stereotypes, insults, and ready-made judgments designed to prove one's patriotism and score political points, is based primarily in diplomatic and conservative circles. The war in Iraq was a moment of special mobilization of Francophobia by the administration and a large share of the media, and may prove to have been a crystallizing moment for the discourse.
From a highly critical position in the early 1990s, the Washington Post evolved toward move favorable coverage of France in areas even beyond the familiar one of culture, as a function of a perceived tendency on the part of the French to follow at last the American lead. But for how long?
Dane Johnson's Le Divorce and Le Mariage are representative of contemporary novels that use French-American interpersonal relations to reconfigure questions of national identity and cultural specificity, via metaphorical networks that recall the "complex connectivity" that characterizes globalization.