Volume 36, Number 9 · June 1, 1989
The Patron Saint of Neo-Pop
By Robert Hughes
America
by Jean Baudrillard, translated by Chris Turner
Verso, 129 pp., $24.95
For seventy years after its revolution, since French writers viewed America with hope and English ones with disgruntlement, some of the best observations on America were made by the French and most of the worst by the English. Eighteenth-century French visitors to America saw a self-emancipated people united in the world's first sizable republic: the forerunner of their own revolution. They noted the humiliation of Albion perfide, their own ancient enemy. What America was, in the eyes of Condorcet, Crèvecoeur, and Volney, France might become: the natural home of democracy, if not of Hesiodic simplicity. France embraced Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington as ideals of Republican Man long before the demolition of the Bastille, and with Chateaubriand's Voyage en Amérique (1827) the passion for seeking the meanings of democracy on the stage of the New World, within its epic spaces, moved into high rhetorical gear. The climax of French scrutiny was provoked after 1830 by the prospect of another French republic, and became by far the most perceptive book a foreigner ever wrote on American society and politics: Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835).
Review, 5474 words
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