The Americanization of France: Searching for Happiness after the Algerian War BarnettSinger. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2013.

Abstract

The Americanization of France: Searching for Happiness after the Algerian War Barnett Singer. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2013.The French Ministry of Culture has formed a General Commission for Terminology to monitor and preserve an authentic French language from American linguistic intrusions. With counsel from the Academie Francaise, the Ministry has introduced five hundred Gallic equivalents to modern American English words that have insinuated themselves into spoken French, for example, supermodel, take-away, low-cost, email, blog and fast-food. While some Americans might smile at this seeming overreaction, Barnett Singer's The Americanization of France: Searching for Happiness after the Algerian War shows the French Ministry of Culture is on to something. Singer tells the story of how the decline of the French colonial empire, and especially the loss of Vietnam and Algeria, was accompanied by a malaise and a looking westward for new American cultural forms to fill a spiritual void.Singer acknowledges Richard F. Kuisel's Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (1993) and Kristin Ross's Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (1995) and seeks to bring the subject up to date with additional sources and more emphasis on the influence of the Algerian a field in which he has published substantial work. He does this by first setting postWorld War II political, economic, military, and diplomatic context, followed by chapters focusing on subsequent French cultural history. Since the days of grappling with the all-consuming Algerian War, he writes, has undergone a remarkable in terms of its relationship with America, and the influences it has succumbed to quite massively from over the Atlantic; and all that really began in the 1960s, a kind of French watershed (4). Singer sees this sea change resulting from a collective loss of will among Frenchmen, who then succumbed to the allure of what he terms a happiness revolution (137) replete with American cultural productions.The Americanization of France is a broad interdisciplinary work devoid of post-structuralist and postcolonialist studies mantra. Singer's method blends political and socio-cultural history by interweaving biographical sketches of scores of Frenchmen who purvey and consume popular culture. Singer is widely read in secondary scholarly monographs and articles written in both French and English, and the book's oral history bibliography includes his own interviews with French Algerian pied noir, Algerian War military commanders (e. …