When Coca-Cola was introduced in France in the late 1940s, the country's most prestigious newspaper warned that Coke threatened France's cultural landscape. This is one of the examples cited in Richard Kuisel's engaging exploration of France's response to American influence after World War II. In analyzing early French resistance and then the gradual adaptation to all things American that evolved by the mid-1980s, he offers an intriguing study of national identity and the protection of cultural boundaries.

The French have historically struggled against Americanization in order to safeguard "Frenchness." What would happen to the French way of life if gaining American prosperity brought vulgar materialism and social conformity? A clash between American consumerism and French civilisation seemed inevitable.

Cold War anti-Communism, the Marshall Plan, the Coca-Cola controversy, and de Gaulle's efforts to curb American investment illustrate ways that anti-Americanization was played out. Kuisel also raises issues that extend beyond France, including the economic, social, and cultural effects of the Americanized consumer society that have become a global phenomenon.

Kuisel's lively account reaches across French society to include politicians, businessmen, trade unionists, Parisian intelligentsia, and ordinary citizens. The result reveals much about the French—and about Americans. As Euro Disney welcomes travellers to its Parisian fantasyland, and with French recently declared the official language of France (to defend it from the encroachments of English), Kuisel's book is especially relevant.

Richard F. Kuisel is Professor of History at the State University of New York, Stonybrook and the author of Capitalism and the State in Modern France (1981).

"[Kuisel provides] a guided tour of the fancies and banalities that many intelligent and not-so-intelligent people rehearsed over half a century; but he also considers their motives, their sensibilities, injured national pride, and threatened interests."—Eugen Weber, London Review of Books

"A compelling intellectual history of French perceptions of American influence in the postwar period, emphasizing the ways in which America has served as a mirror in which the French have contemplated their own society and expressed their ambivalence toward modernity."—Rick Fantasia, Contemporary Sociology

“A unique and pioneering fusion of political, economic, and mass cultural analysis. . . . [Kuisel’s] book should be required reading at the Federal Trade Commission.”—David Elwood, Diplomatic History

“[Kuisel] is that rare creature, an American intellectual who loves the French without loathing America.”—Modern Review

“A subtle yet lucid account of the Americanisation of the French cultural and political landscape, and of the French reaction to it.”—The Economist

Winner, the Gilbert Chinard Prize for the best scholarly work on the history of France and the Americas, awarded jointly by the Society for French Historical Studies and the Institut Français de Washington
Winner, best book in European History published between 1991 and 1994, New York State Association of European Historians